As we now leave the centaur level and move toward the transpersonal bands, we leave behind familiarity and common sense orientations to ourselves and our worlds. For we are entering the world of beyond and above, where we begin to touch an awareness that transcends the individual and discloses to a person something which passes far beyond himself. Any sort of legitimate discipline on this level sooner or later opens the individual to an awareness in himself that is so deep and profound that it may lift him out of himself into the vast and subtle world of the transpersonal.
But, alas, such talk as this engenders little more than bewilderment in most modern, well-educated Westerners, for with the general anemia of present-day religion, we have largely lost any direct and socially accessible means to transcendence. The average person will therefore probably listen in disbelief if it is pointed out that she has, nestled in the deepest recesses of her being, a transpersonal self, a self that transcends her individuality and connects her to a world beyond conventional space and time.
It is unfortunate that we in the West, over the past few centuries, have increasingly tended to repress the transcendent. This repression, extensive as it is subtle, is undoubtedly more responsible for the discontents of our present unhappy civilization than any amount of repression of sexuality, hostility, aggression, or other superficial repressions operating on the upper levels of the spectrum. Repressions on the persona, ego, or centaur levels, frantic and dramatic as they may be, are not encom passing enough to set the tone of a whole society, the roots of which are always, knowingly or unknowingly, set in the soil of transcendence. This fact we have somehow managed to collectively deny. However, because the repressed is never really banished, but merely lies dormant gathering strength or seeps to the surface in disguised forms, we see today an increasing eruption of repressed transcendence. It is taking the form of an interest in meditation, psychic phenomena, yoga, Oriental religions, altered states of consciousness, biofeedback, out-of-body experiences, near-death states. And because it has been generally repressed for so long, this urge to transcendence occasionally takes on bizarre or exaggerated forms, such as black magic, occultism, misuse of psychedelic drugs, and cultic guru worship.
Yet, with all this outbreak of transcendence, most Westerners still have a great deal of difficulty comprehending how it could be that something deep within them actually transcends space and time, how there could be an awareness within them which, because it transcends the individual, is free of personal problems, tensions, and anxieties. So instead of jumping directly into the middle of a discussion of this transpersonal self, I would like by way of introduction to briefly discuss the work of Carl Jung, Freud’s most distinguished student. This will supply some necessary background information—information that, in many other cultures, would have been supplied in one form or another to a person from the time of his birth.
Jung began studying with Freud at the beginning of this century, and although Freud had designated Jung as his sole “successor and crown prince,” within a decade Jung had broken with Freud over doctrinal disagreements. After that celebrated parting of the ways, the two great men never again spoke to one another. The basis of their mutual incompatibilities stemmed from the fact (mentioned in the first chapter) that any psychological researcher, investigating a particular level of the spectrum, will generally acknowledge as real all levels on and above his own, but will often deny reality to any level deeper than his own. He will proclaim these deeper levels to be pathological, illusory, or nonexistent.
Freud ended up confining his remarkable and courageous investigations to the ego, persona, and shadow. But Jung, while fully acknowledging these upper levels, managed to push his explorations all the way down to the transpersonal bands. Jung was the first major European psychologist to discover and explore significant aspects of the transpersonal realm of human awareness. Freud could not comprehend this, confined as he was to the upper levels, and thus the two men traveled their separate paths.
But what specifically did Jung stumble onto? What did he discover in the very depths of the human soul that pointed unmistakably to a transpersonal realm? What in a person could possibly be beyond a person? To begin with, Jung had spent a great deal of time studying world mythology—the whole pantheons of Chinese, Egyptian, Amerindian, Greek, Roman, African, and Indian gods and goddesses and demons and divinities, totems and animisms, ancient symbols, images and mythological motifs. What amazed Jung was that these primitive mythological images also appeared regularly and unmistakably in the dreams and fantasies of modern, civilized Europeans, the vast majority of whom had never been exposed to these myths (at least, they did not possess the formidable and astonishingly accurate knowledge of mythology displayed in their dreams). This information was not acquired during their lifetimes, and thus, Jung reasoned, in some sense or another, these basic mythological motifs must be innate structures inherited by every member of the human race. These primordial images or archetypes, as Jung called them, are thus common to all people. They belong to no single individual, but are instead transindividual, collective, transcendent.
This is a plausible hypothesis, especially if one carefully examines the reams of meticulously detailed data reported by Jung. Just as, for example, each person possesses one heart, two kidneys, ten fingers, four limbs, and so on, so each person’s brain might contain universal symbolic forms essentially identical to those of all other normal human brains. The human brain itself is millions of years old, and over that vast expanse of time it necessarily evolved certain basic (and in this sense “mythological”) ways of perceiving and grasping reality, just as our hands evolved in special ways to grasp physical objects. These basic imaginative mythological ways of grasping reality are the archetypes, and because every person’s basic brain structure is similar, every person may house within him the same basic mythological archetypes. Since they are common to all people by simple virtue of a shared membership in the human race, Jung called this deep layer of the psyche the “collective unconscious.” It is, in other words, not individual nor personal, but supra-individual, transpersonal, transcendent. Buried deep in every person’s being is the mythology of transcendence, and ignoring this powerful layer can only have the most regrettable consequences.
Parts of the unconscious (corresponding with the persona, ego, and centaur levels) contain personal memories, personal wishes and ideas and experiences and potentials. But the deeper realms, the collective unconscious within you contains nothing strictly personal whatsoever. Rather, it houses the collective motifs of the entire human race—all the gods and goddesses, divinities and demons, heroes and villains portrayed outwardly by the world’s ancient mythologies are contained, in condensed form, in the depths of your own being. Whether we know it or not, according to Jung, they live on and continue to move us deeply in ways both creative and destructive.
The aim of some types of transpersonal band therapy, such as Jung’s, is therefore to help us consciously acknowledge, befriend, and utilize these powerful forces instead of being moved by them unconsciously and against our wills. You might, for example, have a “key dream” where the central image is a sphinx, a gorgon, a great serpent, a winged horse, or some other mythological material. Through a little study of ancient mythology, you can easily learn what these mythological images have meant to the human race on the whole, and thereby discover what these images mean to your own collective unconscious. By integrating this meaning into your conscious awareness, you are no longer forcibly controlled by it. The depth of your soul thus begins to loosen, and the crusty topsoil of normal egoic or centauric awareness begins to gently break apart to allow a growth of the transcendent, a growth of those processes which transcend your personal life, but which are nevertheless aspects of a deeper self.
Let us examine, in this context of archetypal awareness, just how this shift to a deeper self, a transpersonal self, might occur. As the individual begins to reflect on her life through the eyes of the archetypes and mythological images common to humankind, her awareness may begin to shift to a more universal perspective. She is looking at herself not through her own eyes, which are in some ways prejudiced, but through the eyes of the collective human spirit—a different view indeed! She is no longer exclusively preoccupied with her own personal vantage point. In fact, if this process quickens correctly, her identity, her very self, expands qualitatively to these more or less global dimensions, and her soul becomes saturated with depth. She is no longer exclusively identified with just her ego or centaur, and thus she is no longer suffocated by purely personal problems and dramas. In a sense she can let go of her individual concerns and view them with a creative detachment, realizing that whatever problems her personal self faces, her deeper self transcends them to remain untouched, free, and open. She finds, haltingly at first but then with an ever-increasing certainty, a quiet source of inner strength that persists unperturbed, like the depths of the ocean, even though the surface waves of consciousness are swept with torrents of pain, anxiety, or despair.
The discovery, in one form or another, of this transcendent self is the major aim of all transpersonal band therapies and disciplines. However, the mythological approach we have been discussing thus far is by no means the only path to the transcendent self. To every level of the spectrum there exist numerous different approaches, and individuals may have to experiment somewhat to determine which is best for them. I have dwelt on the mythological as a convenient introduction to the realm of the transpersonal, but the strictly mythological route is a difficult one and usually demands a professional assistant to help guide you through the vast maze of the world’s mythologies and your own archetypal layer.
There are simpler approaches to the transcendent self; not necessarily shorter or easier, but much less delicate and complicated. Individuals can undertake these on their own and pursue them under their own initiative. These are the approaches we will now explore.
Notice first of all the broad, distinguishing marks of the transcendent self: it is a center and expanse of awareness which is creatively detached from one’s personal mind, body, emotions, thoughts, and feelings. So if you would like to begin to work at intuiting this transcendent self within you that goes beyond you, the you that is not you, then proceed as follows:
Begin with two or three minutes of centaur awareness as described in the last chapter (for the simple reason that you will then be more or less in touch with the centaur level, and that much “closer” to the transpersonal bands beneath it). Then, slowly begin to silently recite the following to yourself, trying to realize as vividly as possible the import of each statement:
I have a body, but I am not my body. I can see and feel my body, and what can be seen and felt is not the true Seer. My body may be tired or excited, sick or healthy, heavy or light, but that has nothing to do with my inward I. I have a body, but I am not my body.
I have desires, but I am not my desires. I can know my desires, and what can be known is not the true Knower. Desires come and go, floating through my awareness, but they do not affect my inward I. I have desires but I am not desires.
I have emotions, but I am not my emotions. I can feel and sense my emotions, and what can be felt and sensed is not the true Feeler. Emotions pass through me, but they do not affect my inward I. I have emotions but I am not emotions.
I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts. I can know and intuit my thoughts, and what can be known is not the true Knower. Thoughts come to me and thoughts leave me, but they do not affect my inward I. I have thoughts but I am not my thoughts.
This done—perhaps several times—one then affirms as concretely as possible: I am what remains, a pure center of awareness, an unmoved witness of all these thoughts, emotions, feelings, and desires.
If you persist at such an exercise, the understanding contained in it will quicken and you might begin to notice fundamental changes in your sense of “self.” For example, you might begin intuiting a deep inward sense of freedom, lightness, release, stability. This source, this “center of the cyclone,” will retain its lucid stillness even amid the raging winds of anxiety and suffering that might swirl around its center. The discovery of this witnessing center is very much like diving from the calamitous waves on the surface of a stormy ocean to the quiet and secure depths of the bottom. At first you might not get more than a few feet beneath the agitated waves of emotion, but with persistence you may gain the ability to dive fathoms into the quiet depths of your soul, and lying outstreteched at the bottom, gaze up in alert but detached fashion at the turmoil that once held you transfixed.
Here we are talking of the transpersonal self or witness—we are not yet discussing pure unity consciousness. In unity consciousness, the transpersonal witness itself collapses into everything witnessed. Before that can occur, however, one must first discover that transpersonal witness, which then acts as an easier “jumping-off point” for unity consciousness. This chapter is devoted to the witness; the next chapter to its “collapse” into Unity. And we find this transpersonal witness by dis-identifying with all particular objects, mental, emotional, or physical, thereby transcending them.
To the extent that you actually realize that you are not, for example, your anxieties, then your anxieties no longer threaten you. Even if anxiety is present, it no longer overwhelms you because you are no longer exclusively tied to it. You are no longer courting it, fighting it, resisting it, or running from it. In the most radical fashion, anxiety is thoroughly accepted as it is and allowed to move as it will. You have nothing to lose, nothing to gain, by its presence or absence, for you are simply watching it pass by.
Thus, any emotion, sensation, thought, memory, or experience that disturbs you is simply one with which you have exclusively identified yourself, and the ultimate resolution of the disturbance is simply to dis-identify with it. You cleanly let all of them drop away by realizing that they are not you—since you can see them, they cannot be the true Seer and Subject. Since they are not your real self, there is no reason whatsoever for you to identify with them, hold on to them, or allow your self to be bound by them.
Slowly, gently, as you pursue this dis-identification “therapy,” you may find that your entire individual self (persona, ego, centaur), which heretofore you have fought to defend and protect, begins to go transparent and drop away. Not that it literally falls off and you find yourself floating, disembodied, through space. Rather, you begin to feel that what happens to your personal self—your wishes, hopes, desires, hurts—is not a matter of life-or-death seriousness, because there is within you a deeper and more basic self which is not touched by these peripheral fluctuations, these surface waves of grand commotion but feeble substance.
Thus, your personal mind-and-body may be in pain, or humiliation, or fear, but as long as you abide as the witness of these affairs, as if from on high, they no longer threaten you, and thus you are no longer moved to manipulate them, wrestle with them, or subdue them. Because you are willing to witness them, to look at them impartially, you are able to transcend them. As St. Thomas put it, “Whatever knows certain things cannot have any of them in its own nature.” Thus, if the eye were colored red, it wouldn’t be able to perceive red objects. It can see red because it is clear, or “redless.” Likewise, if we can but watch or witness our distresses, we prove ourselves thereby to be “distress-less,” free of the witnessed turmoil. That within which feels pain is itself pain-less; that which feels fear is fear-less; that which perceives tension is tensionless. To witness these states is to transcend them. They no longer seize you from behind because you look at them up front.
Thus, we can understand why Patanjali, the codifier of yoga in India, said that ignorance is the identification of the Seer with the instruments of seeing. Every time we become exclusively identified with or attached to the persona, ego, or centaur, then anything which threatens their existence or standards seems to threaten our very Self. Thus, every attachment to thoughts, sensations, feelings, or experiences is merely another link in the chain of our own self-enslavement.
In all previous chapters we have spoken of “therapy” as an “expanding” of identity, but now, rather abruptly, we are speaking of dis-identifying. Isn’t this contradictory? Actually, these are but two ways of speaking about a single process. Look again at figure 1 and notice, for example, the descent from the persona to the ego level. Two things have happened in this particular descent. One, the individual identifies with his shadow. But two, he dis-identifies with, or breaks his exclusive attachment to, his persona. His “new” identity, the ego, is thus a synergistic combination of both persona and shadow. Likewise, to descend to the centaur level, a person extends his identity to the body while dis-identifying with the ego alone. In each case, not only do we expand to a new and broader identity, we also break an old and narrowed one. In the same way, we “expand” to the broader identity of the transcendent self by gently breaking or letting-go of our narrower identity with the centaur alone. We dis-identify with the centaur, but in the direction of depth and expanse.
Thus, as we begin to touch the transpersonal witness, we begin to let go of our purely personal problems, worries, and concerns. In fact (and this is the entire key to most transpersonal band therapies), we don’t even try to solve our problems or distresses, as we surely would and should on the persona, ego, or centaur levels. For our only concern here is to watch our particular distresses, to simply and innocently be aware of them, without judging them, avoiding them, dramatizing them, working on them, or justifying them. As a feeling or tendency arises, we witness it. If hatred of that feeling arises, we witness that. If hatred of the hatred arises, then we witness that. Nothing is to be done, but if a doing arises, we witness that. Abide as “choiceless awareness” in the midst of all distresses. This is possible only when we understand that none of them constitute our real self. As long as we are attached to them, there will be an effort, however subtle, to manipulate them. Understanding that they are not the center or self, we don’t call our distresses names, yell at them, resent them, try to reject them or indulge them. Every move we make to solve a distress simply reinforces the illusion that we are that particular distress. Thus, ultimately to try to escape a distress merely perpetuates that distress. What is so upsetting is not the distress itself, but our attachment to that distress. We identify with it, and that alone is the real difficulty.
Instead of fighting a distress, we simply assume the innocence of a detached impartiality toward it. The mystics and sages are fond of likening this state of witnessing to a mirror. We simply reflect any sensations or thoughts that arise without clinging to them or pushing them away, just as a mirror perfectly and impartially reflects whatever passes in front of it. Says Chuang Tzu, “The perfect person employs the mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing; it refuses nothing; it receives, but does not keep.”
If you are at all successful in developing this type of detached witnessing (it does take time), you will be able to look upon the events occurring in your mind-and-body with the very same impartiality that you would look upon clouds floating through the sky, water rushing in a stream, rain cascading on a roof, or any other objects in your field of awareness. In other words, your relationship to your mind-and-body becomes the same as your relationship to all other objects. Heretofore, you have been using your mind-and-body as something with which to look at the world. Thus, you became intimately attached to them and bound to their limited perspective. You became identified exclusively with them and thus you were tied and bound to their problems, pains, and distresses. But by persistently looking at them, you realize they are merely objects of awareness—in fact, objects of the transpersonal witness. “I have a mind and body and emotions, but I am not a mind and body and emotions.”
It is important to affirm that just because a person begins to contact, or even totally shift to, the transpersonal bands, she does not lose access to or control over any of the upper levels of the spectrum. Remember that as an individual descends from an exclusive identity with the persona to a fuller and more accurate identity with her total ego, she does not lose access to the persona—she is just no longer stuck to it. She can still don her persona, if, for instance, she chooses to put on a “good show” or a temporary social facade for practical or decorous purposes. But she is no longer chronically anchored in that role. Formerly, she could not drop this facade, either for others or—and here is the problem—herself. Now, however, she can simply use it or not, depending upon circumstances and her own discretion. If she decides to put on her “good face,” her persona, then she consciously and temporarily checks her shadow, not showing her negative aspects. She is still capable of being aware of them, however, and thus she doesn’t project them. So the persona in itself is not maladaptive or problem-generating—unless it’s the only self you have. Thus, what is dissolved when one descends from the persona level to the ego level is not the shadow or the persona, but the boundary and the battle between them.
Likewise, when you descend to the centaur level from the ego level, you don’t destroy the ego or the body, but simply the boundary between them. On the centaur level, you still have access to the ego, the body, the persona, and the shadow; but because you are no longer exclusively identified with one as against the others, all of these elements work in harmony. You have befriended them all and touched each with acceptance. There are no intractable boundaries between them and so no major battles.
In the same way, as you contact the transpersonal self, you still have access to all the levels above it. No longer, however, will you be tied to those levels, bound to them, or limited by them. They become instrumental, not essential. Thus, as a person begins this creative detachment from the exclusive identification with the isolated organism, he in no way ceases caring for his organism. He doesn’t stop eating, living, etc. Actually the reverse is the case. One becomes more caring and accepting of the mind-and-body. Since one is no longer bound by them, they no longer appear as a freedom-robbing prison. Thus the person’s energies are not frozen in a suppressed rage and hatred for his own organism. The organism as a whole becomes a perfectly accepted expression of the transpersonal self.
As we mentioned earlier, from the position of the transcendent witness one begins to view the mind-and-body in the same way one would view any other object of awareness, be it a table, a tree, a dog, a car. This might sound as though we would treat our organism with the disdain that we occasionally show the environment. But it actually works to the other side: we begin to treat all environmental objects as if they were our own self. In fact, this attitude represents the intuition that the world is really one’s body and is to be treated as such. It is from this type of transpersonal intuition that the universal compassion so emphasized by the mystics springs. This is a different order of compassion or love than one finds on the persona, ego, or centaur level. At the transpersonal level, we begin to love others not because they love us, affirm us, reflect us, or secure us in our illusions, but because they are us. Christ’s primary teaching does not mean, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself,” but “Love your neighbor as your Self.” And not just your neighbor, but your whole environment. You begin to care for your surroundings just as you would your own arms and legs. At this level, remember, your relationship to your environment is the same as your relationship to your very own organism.
At the level of the transpersonal witness, the archetypal self, you might also begin to regain a fundamental intuition, an intuition you probably possessed as a child. Namely, that since consciousness fundamentally transcends the separate organism, then (1) it is single, and (2) it is immortal.
Almost every child wonders, at some time or another, “What would I be like if I had different parents?” In other words, the child realizes, in a very innocent and inarticulate fashion, that consciousness itself (that inner Witness or I-ness) is not solely limited by the particular outer forms of mind and body that it animates. Every child seems to sense that he would still be “I” even if he had different parents and a different body. The child knows he would look different and act different, but he would still be an “I” (“I have a mind and body and emotions, but I am not the mind and body and emotions.”) The child asks this question—“Would I still be me if I had different parents?”—because he wants the parents to explain his transcendence, the fact that he would still seem to be and feel the same “inner-I-ness” even though he had different parents. The parents have probably long ago forgotten their own transpersonal self, and so cannot give an answer acceptable to the child. But for a moment, most parents are taken aback, and sense that there is something of immense importance here that somehow they just can’t quite remember. . . .
Anyone who fundamentally begins to intuit the transpersonal self might realize that there is but one Self taking on these different outward forms, for every person has the identical intuition of this same I-ness transcending the body. This single Self cleanly transcends the mind and body, and thus is essentially one and the same in all conscious beings. Just as a person can walk out of one room and into another, without fundamentally changing his inward feeling of I-ness, so also he would not be fundamentally different if he possessed a different body, with different memories, and different sensations. He is the witness of these objects, but he is not tied to them.
The insight that the transcendent self passes beyond the individual organism also carries with it an intuition of immortality. Most people harbor the inward feeling that they are immortal. They cannot imagine their own nonexistence. Nobody can! But the average person, because he exists only as the centaur, ego, or persona, falsely imagines, and deeply wishes, that his individual self will live forever. It is not true that the mind, ego, or body is immortal. They, like all composites, will die. They are dying now, and not one of them will survive eternally. Reincarnation does not mean that your ego moves through successive existences, but that the transcendent self is the “one and only transmigrant,” as Shankara himself put it.
In a certain sense, therefore, we have to “die” to our false, separate self in order to awaken to our immortal and transcendent self. Thus the famous paradox, “If you die before you die, then when you die, you won’t die.” And the sayings of the mystics that “No one gets as much of God as the one who is thoroughly dead.” This is why so many people who consistently practice some form of transpersonal “therapy” report that they no longer really fear death.
Perhaps we can approach this fundamental insight of the mystics and sages—that there is but one immortal Self common in and to us all—in yet another way. Perhaps you, like most people, feel that you are basically the same person you were yesterday. You probably also feel that you are fundamentally the same person you were a year ago. Indeed, you still seem to be the same you as far back as you can remember. Put it another way: you never remember a time when you weren’t you. In other words, something in you seems to remain untouched by the passage of time. But surely your body is not the same as it was even a year ago. Surely also your sensations are different today than in the past. Surely, too, your memories are on the whole different today than a decade ago. Your mind, your body, your feelings—all have changed with time. But something has not changed, and you know that something has not changed. Something feels the same. What is that?
This time a year ago you had different concerns and basically different problems. Your immediate experiences were different, and so were your thoughts. All of these have vanished, but something in you remains. Go one step further. What if you moved to a completely different country, with new friends, new surroundings, new experiences, new thoughts. You would still have that basic inner feeling of I-ness. Further yet, what if you right now forgot the first ten years, or fifteen years, or twenty years of your life? You would still feel that same inner I-ness, would you not? If right now you just temporarily forget everything that happened in your past, and just feel that pure inner I-ness—has anything really changed?
There is, in short, something within you—that deep inward sense of I-ness—that is not memory, thoughts, mind, body, experience, surroundings, feelings, conflicts, sensations, or moods. For all of these have changed and can change without substantially affecting that inner I-ness. That is what remains untouched by the flight of time—and that is the transpersonal witness and self.
Is it then so very difficult to realize that every conscious being has that same inner I-ness? And that, therefore, the overall number of transcendent I’s is but one? We have already surmised that if you had a different body you would still basically feel the same I-ness—but that is already the very same way every other person feels right now. Isn’t it just as easy to say there is but one single I-ness or Self taking on different views, different memories, different feelings and sensations?
And not just at this time, but at all times, past and future. Since you undoubtedly feel (even though your memory, mind, and body are different) that you are the same person of twenty years ago (not the same ego or body, but the same I-ness), couldn’t you also be the same I-ness of two-hundred years ago? If I-ness isn’t dependent upon memories and mind and body, what difference would it make? In the words of physicist Schroedinger, “It is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light on the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself?”
Ah, we say, that couldn’t have been me, because I can’t remember what happened then. But that is to make the mistake of identifying I-ness with memories, and we just saw that I-ness is not memory but the witness of memory. Besides, you probably can’t even remember what happened to you last month, but you are still I-ness. So what if you can’t remember what happened last century? You are still that transcendent I-ness, and that I—there is only one in the whole cosmos—is the same I which awakens in every newborn being, the same I which looked out from our ancestors and will look out from our descendants—one and the same I. We feel they are different only because we make the error of identifying the inward and transpersonal I-ness with the outward and individual memory, mind, and body, which indeed are different.
But as for that inward I . . . indeed, what is that? It was not born with your body, nor will it perish upon death. It does not recognize time nor cater to its distresses. It is without color, without shape, without form, without size, and yet it beholds the entire majesty before your own eyes. It sees the sun, clouds, stars and moon, but cannot itself be seen. It hears the birds, the crickets, the singing waterfall, but cannot itself be heard. It grasps the fallen leaf, the crusted rock, the knotted branch, but cannot itself be grasped.
You needn’t try to see your transcendent self, which is not possible anyway. Can your eye see itself? You need only begin by persistently dropping your false identifications with your memories, mind, body, emotions, and thoughts. And this dropping entails nothing by way of superhuman effort or theoretical comprehension. All that is required, primarily, is but one understanding: whatever you can see cannot be the Seer. Everything you know about yourself is precisely not your Self, the Knower, the inner I-ness that can neither be perceived, defined, or made an object of any sort. Bondage is nothing but the mis-identification of the Seer with all these things which can be seen. And liberation begins with the simple reversal of this mistake.
Any time you identify with a problem, an anxiety, a mental state, a memory, a desire, a bodily sensation or emotion—you are throwing yourself into bondage, limitation, fear, constriction, and ultimately death. These all can be seen and thus are not the Seer. On the other hand, to continuously abide as the Seer, the Witness, the Self, is to step aside from limitations and problems, and then finally to step out of them.
This is a simple but arduous practice, yet its results constitute nothing less than liberation in this life, for the transcendent self is everywhere acknowledged as a ray of the Divine. In principle, your transcendent self is of one nature with God (however you might wish to conceive it). For it is finally, ultimately, profoundly, God alone who looks through your eyes, listens with your ears, and speaks with your tongue. How else could St. Clement maintain that he who knows himself knows God?
This, then, is the message of Jung; and more, of the saints, sages, and mystics, whether Amerindian, Taoist, Hindu, Islamic, Buddhist, or Christian: At the bottom of your soul is the soul of humanity itself, but a divine, transcendent soul, leading from bondage to liberation, from enchantment to awakening, from time to eternity, from death to immortality.
There are so many aspects of the transpersonal bands, and so many different approaches, we will take them in groups.
For the works of C. G. Jung, Joseph Campbell’s The Portable Jung (New York: Viking, 1972) is an excellent anthology of Jung’s own writings, and is highly recommended. For an overall introduction to Jung’s analytical psychology, see Bennet, E. A., What Jung Really Said (New York: Dutton, 1966). The serious student is directed to an outstanding comparison of Freud’s and Jung’s systems: Lilliane Frey-Rohn, From Freud to Jung (New York: Delta, 1974). For a practical, do-it-yourself, but extremely effective approach to a Jungian-type therapy, I highly recommend Ira Progoff’s At a Journal Workshop (New York: Dialogue House, 1975).
For Maslow’s groundbreaking studies of the transpersonal, see his Toward a Psychology of Being (New York: Van Nostrand, 1968) and The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 1971). For those interested in traditional psychologies, see C. Tart (ed.), Transpersonal Psychologies (New York: Harpers, 1975). Well-rounded anthologies include J. White, The Highest State of Consciousness (New York: Anchor, 1972); J. Welwood, Meeting of the Ways (New York: Schocken, 1979); R. Walsh and F. Vaughan, Beyond Ego (Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1979). Frances Vaughan has also written a valuable book, Awakening Intuition (New York: Anchor, 1979), about just that. My own books, The Spectrum of Consciousness (Wheaton: Quest, 1977), and The Atman Project (Wheaton: Quest, 1980) try to put much of this material in perspective. If you are a psychiatrist, and would appreciate a more cautious approach, try S. Dean (ed.), Psychiatry and Mysticism (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1975).
Psychosynthesis represents a sound and effective approach to the transcendent self in no uncertain terms; the book Psychosynthesis (New York: Viking, 1965), by its founder Roberto Assagioli, is an encompassing introduction. The exercise in dis-identification given in this chapter was adapted from that book. For important data from psychedelic research, see S. Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious (New York: Viking, 1975).
For the transcendent unity of religions and the perennial philosophy in general—see F. Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions (New York: Harper, 1975). Huston Smith’s The Forgotten Truth (New York: Harper, 1976) is the best introduction to the field for the general reader.
As for the meditation and the transpersonal, a useful anthology is J. White, What Is Meditation? (New York: Anchor, 1972). But I should say here that many approaches to the transpersonal bands also aim through these bands to the level of unity consciousness, and so I am rather arbitrarily dividing my recommendations between those to list here and those to include in the next chapter. In general, those listed here usually establish, as a type of “halfway” house, a base of awareness in the transpersonal bands, and then proceed to the level of unity consciousness from there (if they proceed at all).
The transpersonal bands are actually composed of several sublevels, and different types of meditation seem to address these different sublevels. For the kundalini division, see J. White (ed.), Kundalini, Evolution, and Enlightenment (New York: Anchor, 1979). For the subtler aspects (known as nada or shabd), the reader is directed to any of the works of Kirpal Singh.
Because Transcendental Meditation is simple, effective, and, most important, readily accessible, it would be one of my first recommendations for an introduction to this type of meditation. My final recommendations for meditation in general are reserved for the next chapter.