Let us examine whether and how it is possible to solve this . . . fundamental infirmity of man. Let us see how he may free himself from this enslavement and achieve an harmonious inner integration, true Self-realization, and right relationships with others.
—Roberto Assagioli
Once Assagioli (1965a) presents the model of the person outlined in the previous chapter, he immediately moves into an elaboration of the stage model of psychosynthesis. The first two stages outline the process whereby “I” emerges from various identifications to express the functions of consciousness and will; the second two stages describe how we may then become conscious of, and respond to, the deeper motivations and meanings in our lives, the source of which is termed Self.
Curiously enough, although other stage models have been offered within psychosynthesis in the intervening years (e.g., Brown 1983; Ferrucci 1982), Assagioli’s original stages apparently have not been further developed in the English-language literature. We here seek to elaborate, update, and expand an understanding of Assagioli’s basic stages of psychosynthesis. But before outlining the stages themselves, we would like to make two points that seem important to an understanding of the stages as a whole.
The first point is that the stages of psychosynthesis are not steps in some invariant, sequential process. Assagioli says of them:
But it should be made clear that all the various stages and methods mentioned above are closely interrelated and need not be followed in a strict succession of distinct periods or phases. A living human being is not a building, for which the foundations must be laid, then the walls erected and, finally, the roof added. (Assagioli 1965a, 29)
The stages do, of course, follow a logical progression in which early stages lead naturally to the later stages. However, any particular individual at any specific time may be experiencing the stages well outside of this sequence—we are not “buildings.” At one point we may be conscious of stage four, then of stage one, then stage three, and so on. The stages are not hierarchical levels in which earlier stages are subsumed by the later ones; they are sides or facets of the process of psychosynthesis that reveal themselves at different times as our unique journey unfolds. Indeed, we can think of psychosynthesis as manifesting as a whole—all stages simultaneously—while our awareness continually shifts from one facet or stage of psychosynthesis to another.
Quite practically, this means that the stages cannot be used as some sort of yardstick to measure our progress in psychospiritual development. They are not a ladder up which we climb; they are integral aspects of a single process, aspects that will each continue to expand and deepen as the process itself continues to expand and deepen. We never leave any stage behind, but rather we find each one continually becoming foreground and then background as our journey proceeds.
The second thing to be said of the stages as a whole is that Assagioli did not present them as natural stages in human development. For example, they do not represent a development sequence unfolding from birth to old age and, in fact, in theory all of the stages of psychosynthesis can be present at any age along the human life span.1
Rather than a natural pattern of growth, the stages respond to what Assagioli called “the fundamental infirmity of man [and woman].” In other words, they are a response to a dis-ease, a malady, a brokenness within the human condition. His powerful description of that fundamental infirmity deserves to be quoted in full (he is using “man” in the generic sense, of course):
In our ordinary life we are limited and bound in a thousand ways—the prey of illusions and phantasms, the slaves of unrecognized complexes, tossed hither and thither by external influences, blinded and hypnotized by deceiving appearances. No wonder then that man, in such a state, is often discontented, insecure and changeable in his moods, thoughts and actions. Feeling intuitively that he is “one,” and yet finding that he is “divided unto himself,” he is bewildered and fails to understand either himself or others. No wonder that he, not knowing or understanding himself, has no self-control and is continually involved in his own mistakes and weaknesses; that so many lives are failures, or are at least limited and saddened by diseases of mind and body, or tormented by doubt, discouragement and despair. No wonder that man, in his blind passionate search for liberty and satisfaction, rebels violently at times, and at times tries to still his inner torment by throwing himself headlong into a life of feverish activity, constant excitement, tempestuous emotion, and reckless adventure. (Assagioli 1965a, 20–21)
While the above is an accurate, empathic description of the normal human condition, it is not for Assagioli a description of the natural human condition. He here describes a basic brokenness in the natural condition and, accordingly, his four stages outline a process by which “to heal this fundamental infirmity of man” (21).
As we turn to the stages of psychosynthesis, then, it seems important to understand something about this fundamental infirmity that the stages address. What is the source of this infirmity, and what, precisely, are its effects? The need for answering this question has led to our developing Assagioli’s concept of infirmity into a stage that precedes the original four. This stage, stage zero, can be called the stage of survival of wounding or the survival stage. It describes the state for which the process of psychosynthesis offers a response. Our exploration of the stages of psychosynthesis will therefore begin with a discussion of this survival stage.
If we look carefully at the fundamental infirmity described by Assagioli above, we see a state characterized by:
As has been described at length elsewhere (Firman and Gila 1997), all of the above are characteristic effects of what we have called primal wounding, that wounding caused when we are not seen as who we truly are:
In this violation, we are treated not as individual, unique human beings, but as objects; our supportive milieu—whether early caregivers, peers, institutions, or society at large—does not see us as we truly are, and instead forces us to become the objects of its own purposes. (1)
In the previous chapter, we saw that these empathic failures in our lives create experiences such as shame, helplessness, fragmentation, abandonment, isolation, and anxiety, which we then separate from our consciousness to form the lower unconscious. We also separate the positive aspects of our experience such as love, joy, creativity, humor, trust, and connection to the Divine, aspects that were threatened by the wounding, forming the higher unconscious.
By hiding the fact that we are being wounded by the environment, and hiding as well the gifts threatened by it, we are able to manage the wounding and adapt to the nonempathic environment. No longer aware of these areas of experience that are rejected by the environment, we are free to shape our personality into a way of being that allows us to survive in spite of primal wounding.
In other words, we form a personality that is not an expression of our natural, authentic sense of self—not what we have termed authentic personality (Firman and Gila 1997)—but rather form a personality that is designed to survive the primal wounding, a formation called survival personality (Firman and Gila 1997). Survival personality exists to the extent that our personality is conditioned by survival mechanisms or so-called defense mechanisms, oriented to surviving within a nonempathic environment.2
SURVIVAL PERSONALITY AND SURVIVAL UNIFYING CENTER
Survival personality may take a wide variety of different forms depending on the individual and the environment, from a habitually withdrawn and passive personality to an extroverted, high-functioning personality. In fact, most any type of personal expression may be authentic or survival, depending on whether or not it is controlled by primal wounding. Furthermore, given that we have all suffered some amount of primal wounding, we all express some amount of survival personality. It is most accurate to think of authentic and survival personality as describing conditions of the personality that manifest in different and fluctuating amounts within us all.
An essential aspect of survival personality is an actual alteration in our experience of reality, as if we are now habitually and unconsciously wearing eyeglasses that filter out certain heights and depths of our true experience. Identified with survival personality, we are in a trance—we do not experience the inner and outer worlds in all of their richness but only in a truncated way, only from the point of view of surviving our primal wounding. Instead of living from the reality of our own unfolding experience, we live from an experience dictated by the demands of the early wounding environment.
In our ordinary life we are . . . blinded and hypnotized by deceiving appearances.
—Roberto Assagioli
This nonempathic environment and, later, its internalized pattern within us function as a survival unifying center (Firman and Gila 1997). That is, our experience of self and other is unified around the learnings, injunctions, and myths by which we survive within the wounding environment, for example,” Don’t feel,” “Don’t voice your needs,” and “Be perfect.” Conditioned by the survival unifying center, we are largely out of touch with ourselves, other people, and Self. (Authentic personality and survival personality, and their respective unifying centers, are discussed more fully in Chapter 6.)
Through our experience with nonempathic environments, we gradually develop survival personality into an addiction. That is, we become addicted to, or identified with, this mode of functioning, and we seem to forget completely any other possible way of being. We cling to survival personality to not feel the wounding that underpins it.
It is then understandable that the maintenance of survival personality often gives rise to compulsions, attachments, and addictions that serve to maintain this constricted way of functioning. Addictions to behaviors, people, places, and substances are all ways of altering our experience in such a way that our consciousness is insulated from the pain of our wounding. For example, if you imagine that you are about to indulge a strong compulsion of your own, and then imagine that you do not so indulge, you may begin to feel the edge of the underlying primal wounding—you might perhaps feel uncomfortable, lost, alone, anxious, depressed, or worthless.3
In seeking this escape from our painful wounds, we may become addicted to food, sex, alcohol, drugs, relationships, power, money, work, service, higher states of consciousness, spiritual practices—virtually anything that will prevent the underlying wounding from emerging. Any failure in these survival strategies will touch the hidden tip of the primal wound “ice berg,” and feelings such as anxiety, shame, and abandonment will begin to emerge.
Survival personality is fundamentally a broken empathy with ourselves, a truncation of our authentic experience of ourselves, the world, and the Divine. This broken self-empathy, caused by empathic failures in the environment, is the source of the fundamental infirmity addressed by Assagioli’s stages, and the core of the survival stage.
This concept of the survival stage is quite similar to and, in part, inspired by Charles Whitfield’s notion of what he calls Stage Zero:
Stage Zero is manifested by the presence of an active illness or disorder, such as an addiction, compulsion or another disorder. This active illness may be acute, recurring or chronic. Without recovery, it may continue indefinitely. At Stage Zero, recovery has not yet started. (Whitfield 1991, 37)
Whitfield sees human being as originally in union with “Source” (“Higher Power, God/Goddess, All-That-Is”—quite similar to the psychosynthesis “Self”), but this state is broken by a wounding environment. For Whitfield, this wounding forces the True Self into hiding and plunges the person into Stage Zero, which may lead to the following conditions:
But what can lead a person out of the survival stage? What can disrupt survival personality and begin to reveal the heights and depths surrounding our normal, everyday lives? Often this occurs through what we call a crisis of transformation.
CRISES OF TRANSFORMATION
Ellen grew up to be self-effacing, avoidant of conflict, and driven to please and produce. She had been brought up in a family in which to assert herself or her own needs was unacceptable. The family carried an injunction along the lines of: “It is selfish and self-centered to have your own needs. Good girls aren’t concerned with themselves but with others.” For her to express herself, to claim her own needs and passions, she had to face guilt, shame, and the threat of isolation and abandonment by the family—primal wounding.
As an adult, Ellen was moderately happy with her life and gained respect at work for her willingness to put in long, conscientious hours. Although she functioned very well at her job, showing talent and skill as well, she also was continually taken for granted and endured tremendous pressures and a crushing workload. She also habitually chose romantic partners who turned out to be emotionally abusive.
However, a transformation began when she was passed over for promotion. Shortly thereafter she found herself making uncharacteristically rude and cynical remarks to her coworkers, and she found her work suffering from a certain lack of energy and commitment.
Then one day, after a tense meeting with her manager, she closed her office door, sat down at her desk, and was suddenly overwhelmed by a flood of tears. She was startled by this, but she let the feelings come. She felt hurt, helpless, and hopeless. Then, to her growing surprise, she began to feel violated, betrayed, and finally furious. To her alarm, she felt like smashing up her office and physically hitting her manager.
At first this flood of feelings was upsetting to Ellen, because this was completely opposed to her normal way of being, her well-functioning survival personality. As she said later, “It just wasn’t me, like I was going crazy.” She even spoke of this event as “my breakdown,” and indeed it was in a way—this was the breakdown of her self-effacing, people-pleasing identification and an opening to more of her authentic experience.
This was the beginning of a crisis of transformation for Ellen, a disconcerting time in which all of her beliefs about herself and the world were called into question. She moved into a period in which she encountered a vast range of experiences well beyond the constraints of her survival personality, from grief at having lived her life for others, to feeling like her life was a lie, to continually doubting her motives, to feeling the loss and abandonment that were masked by her habitual identification.
Mental health professionals presented with crises of transformation may refer to them as psychological disorder, regression, or mental illness. However, attempting to treat this disturbance by bolstering up the old survival personality will work to derail the transformational process; it is like attempting to keep a cocoon intact when the butterfly is emerging. Although alarming, a crisis of transformation is neither a breakdown nor a regression in some pathological sense. It is merely the disruption of the chronic and limiting survival personality and an entry into a wider range of human experience; it is a deeper encounter with the truth of our lives—an encounter that will always shake up the status quo.
A crisis of transformation can happen in many ways. It may simply dawn on us one day that we are trapped in repetitive life patterns, chronically addicted to self-destructive or self-distancing behaviors. Or we may suffer the loss of a loved one, a career, or a marriage, or face our own mortality in a serious illness or accident. Whatever the trigger, our old way of being begins to destabilize, and we may feel overwhelmed, helpless, lost, and abandoned—the surfacing of the wounding defended against since childhood. In the parlance of the chemical dependency field, we hit bottom.
On the other hand, we may hit top in the survival stage. That is, instead of being surprised by pain in contact with lower unconscious material, we may be surprised by joy as higher unconscious potentials break into our lives via peak experiences, creative inspiration, or spiritual awakening. We might suddenly become aware of a profound capacity for love, or we may be deeply touched by the beauty of the natural world or sense a connection with the Divine. Here we see the wondrous ways we might be in our lives. Just as in hitting bottom, here there is the realization that our normal, everyday lives are far from satisfactory, and that there must be a change in our way of living.
Experiences of spontaneous illumination have been reported by many.
—Roberto Assagioli
There also may be an interplay of higher and lower unconscious experience. Shaken by the death of a friend or a memory of childhood abuse, we may be plunged into a time of inconsolable despair, only to find in the depths of the pain a profound sense of a Divine presence holding all things. Or we may have a wondrous experience of union with the Universe, producing an ecstatic sense of the beauty, joy, and mystery of life, only to have this experience unaccountably fade, leaving feelings of isolation and worthlessness in its wake.
This type of interplay can be seen in less dramatic ways as well. Deciding to face our feelings of boredom and meaninglessness rather than distracting ourselves from them may lead to a gradual awakening to our authentic wants. Or feeling sad about a lost relationship might spark a renewed appreciation for and commitment to a current relationship. Or a movie with a heartwarming family ending might activate despair in us as we become aware, in contrast, of broken aspects of our own family.
Whether dramatic or subtle, these positive and negative aspects of our experience are just two sides of the same primal split in our being, so we need not be surprised if an emergence of one sector triggers the emergence of the other. They are, in effect, the two ends of our experiential range, split off by wounding.
It is important to remember here that we are not necessarily talking about a single experience, nor about only a single lifetime event. We may have many crises of transformation—dramatic and subtle, large and small—as we, at various points in our lives, outgrow forms that have become too constricting.
SURRENDER
Whether surprised by the lower unconscious, the higher unconscious, or both, these events demand that we recognize and accept a greater reality, that we realize that our lives, up until this point, have been very limited compared to what they might be. The realization dawns that we, other people, and life itself are far more wonderful and painful than we had ever imagined. We have entered a crisis of transformation, and if we can accept this expanded view and surrender to it, we will be led out of the survival stage.
In order for this surrender to take place, there needs to be a connection to a new context that can help us hold and integrate the newly discovered heights and depths of life—an authentic unifying center (Firman and Gila 1997). We need empathic others who are not threatened by this process, who understand it, and who can walk with us in it. Such a new unifying center(s) might be a self-help group, family and friends, counseling or therapy, spiritual direction, a religion, or even literature that maps out these uncharted regions and encourages their exploration. Whatever these unifying centers, they hold and nurture the seed of a more authentic life, one that transcends the limits of our wounding and opens the door leading out of the survival stage and into the next stage of psychosynthesis.
It is important for such a unifying center to be able to mirror not only our emerging wounding but our strengths as well. In a crisis of transformation, we might worry that we will simply become our wounds, fall into a “victim role,” and completely lose the gifts and talents developed over the years. However, an authentic unifying center holds the whole person, wounds and gifts, weaknesses and strengths. Such an empathic connection is precisely what is needed as we attempt to hold both our brokenness and our wholeness without attaching to one and denying the other.
As the journey of transformation continues, we find that we do not lose our gifts; it is simply that they are no longer pressed into service in order to survive primal wounding, and become instead authentic expressions of our essential selves. For example, our love might be liberated from the survival need to control our partner, becoming more selfless and unconditional, or our creativity might be freed from a pattern of compulsive achievement, set up to avoid underlying feelings of worthlessness, to become the spontaneous expression of our true feelings and thoughts.
Furthermore, there are hitherto unknown gifts that may emerge as we reach to the wounded parts of ourselves. There are bright seeds of our potential, still viable and awaiting nurture, lying hidden in even the most bleak and despairing places within us. We might discover that as a repressed aspect of our adolescence is reclaimed, a sense of adventure and courage emerges that we have never experienced before; or, as we accept the wounds and dependence of a wounded child in us, we might discover that the child carries a profound wisdom born of a particularly close relationship with the Divine.
Journeying through a crisis of transformation, whether minor or cataclysmic, and held by empathic others in our lives, we can begin to find our way out of survival into the subsequent four stages of psychosynthesis. In stages one and two, we will recover that authentic expression of personal identity—“I”—lost to primal wounding, and in stages three and four we will discover our relationship to a deeper sense of meaning and purpose—Self.
Again, a key factor in the movement into the exploration of the personality or the exploration stage is the breakdown of our old way of being and a shift toward more authentic relationships that can nurture the emergence of “I.” Rather than relating to a context that says, in effect, “Don’t trust your own experience but think, feel, and act only in these prescribed ways,” we begin relating to contexts that say, “Trust your own experience, listen to it, heed it. There is far more to you than you have ever known, and you are free to explore this new terrain.” Such authentic unifying centers—both external and later internal—encourage an empathic openness to the broad range of our natural experience, thus facilitating the emergence of the consciousness aspect of our authentic personal identity, of “I.”
If Ellen had reached out in her crisis to her old conditioning—her survival unifying center—she would have received messages such as: “Stop your fuss! Get hold of yourself. You’re a good girl, and good girls don’t have feelings like this. You’re not being yourself. Quit acting like a victim.”
She did, of course, hear these messages within her, as the voices from her family system inwardly berated her, but her immediate environment can carry these messages too. The common denominator is a nonempathic response to her experience. For example, even the well-intentioned comments of a coworker, “Hey, buck up, you’ll get over it, it’s not the end of the world,” would push her toward “getting over it” and reestablishing her old way of being, once again ignoring these depths within her. However, Ellen chose to explore what was happening to her by entering psychosynthesis therapy.
ELLEN IN EXPLORATION
As she began her exploration, Ellen discovered a deep rage that at first scared her. Going further, however, she discovered feelings hidden beneath the rage: feelings of helplessness and terror in the face of the mildest conflict with others. Here feelings that had been largely unconscious for many years were now more free to move into and out of her awareness.
Ellen chose to pay attention to these new feelings throughout her day. As she got to know them better, she explored many childhood moments in which she stood frozen with fear as her father, in an alcoholic rage, punished her older brother with a physical beating. Clearly it was dangerous to be anything but a self-effacing, quiet person in that environment, and her fear and anger needed to be repressed if she were to survive emotionally. This type of material is characteristic of the lower unconscious—here are the traumatic wounds, most deeply buried, which underpin her seemingly pleasant and sunny survival mode of being.
Then, too, higher unconscious material became evident in Ellen’s exploration. As Ellen began taking responsibility for her authentic experience, she began to discover hitherto repressed higher unconscious qualities of self-confidence and personal power. Here was precisely the type of self-assertive energy that Ellen needed in her life. Furthermore, as she began to treat herself with empathy and compassion, she also began to contact higher unconscious qualities of sensitivity, wonder, and creativity—again, qualities largely absent in Ellen’s life, but now finally being recovered from their safe hiding place.
At different points Ellen also encountered the larger, shared dimension of her themes of self-exploration. She saw and felt the insidious oppression of women in the workplace and her solidarity with the struggle against this; the historical acceptance of corporal punishment in her family, coming from her grandparents, great-grandparents, and from aspects of her cultural heritage itself; the denial of alcoholism in her family, again coming down through the generations and, again, supported by cultural myths; and, finally, she became very sensitive to the issue of child abuse and the growing societal awareness of this. In all of these insights she was moving beyond her own personal unconscious to see into the shared historical patterns of the collective unconscious.4
As we can see in Ellen’s story, in the exploration stage our consciousness expands and allows both a disidentification from older, chronic ways of being and an empathic connection with the many split-off sectors of our personal universe. This includes an engagement with the higher and lower unconscious as well as aspects of the collective unconscious. As Assagioli points out, this stage can include an exploration of personal history, family of origin, intergenerational history, ethnic, class, and national background, and even “the present collective psyche of humanity as a whole” (Assagioli 1965a, 72).
It cannot be emphasized enough that this exploration is not simply an intrapsychic phenomenon but amounts to what poet William Blake would call a cleansing of the “doors of perception.” The exploration of these dimensions of our experience amounts to an expansion of our experiential bandwidth; our doors of perception become more clear, and we become more aware of the joy and wonder, the pain and suffering, of human existence.
Stated most broadly, the exploration stage involves an increased openness to the middle, higher, and lower sectors of the unconscious, amounting to a far more lucid consciousness of ourselves, other people, and the world at large. This is a stage in which serious self-exploration takes place, as one addresses the question “Who am I?”
FRACTIONAL ANALYSIS
The expansion of consciousness in the exploration stage can be facilitated by any of the many growth methods now so widely available. The current culture is filled with techniques to alter consciousness, to get more in touch with feelings, to become aware of our bodies, to contact collective and archetypal material, to explore our family and cultural history, to gain more serenity and peace, to uncover the sublime states of consciousness in the higher unconscious, and to uncover the woundings from the past in the lower unconscious. So many are our options in this regard that it is frequently more difficult to choose among methods than it is to find them.
Given the ease with which we may today expand our consciousness in so many different directions, caution is in order. It is important to remember that this expansion is only the first stage in psychosynthesis and not an end in itself. That is, it is possible to become enthralled and distracted with discovering our heights and depths, seeking greater and greater insights, attaining higher states of consciousness, or exploring the vast array of growth methods available. What can then happen is that we forget the overall purpose of self-knowledge: to learn to respond well to the deeper meanings and directions in our lives.
. . . the exploration of the unconscious is carried out “by installments,” so to speak.
—Roberto Assagioli
So it is important to undertake exploration within this larger context, keeping in mind the subsequent stages of psychosynthesis as we go. Assagioli (1965a) referred to this principle as fractional analysis, by which the exploration of the unconscious is to take place only when needed, and then only in “installments,” with plenty of time for the integration and expression of the material uncovered, all the while maintaining a broader perspective.
After developing some knowledge of our personality, there is a natural progression toward an increased experience of being distinct from all of these multiple dimensions of personhood. This new sense of self, of “I,” is one from which we can take responsibility for and act in relationship to the knowledge gained in the exploration stage. This leads to stage two of psychosynthesis, the emergence of “I.”
Stage two is the emergence of “I,” or the emergence stage. Assagioli calls this stage “control of the various elements of the personality.” Although the word “control” can be misunderstood, what he is pointing to here is that gentle and subtle second function of “I”—the will. As we have said, “I” does not only possess the function of consciousness but has a directive and guiding capacity as well, an ability to cause effects in both the inner and outer worlds. This directive function of “I” is will.
Further, since “I” is distinct-but-not-separate from the contents of the personality, the will of “I” can operate distinct-but-not-separate from any contents as well. Thus will is the source of our potential freedom, not to be controlled by but to interact with the many aspects of the personality. Assagioli’s phrase “control of the various elements of the personality” can be understood in this light; it is the emergence of the human spirit, our true essence—“I”—with the functions of consciousness and will.
The will . . . balances and constructively utilizes all the other activities and energies of the human being without repressing any of them.
—Roberto Assagioli
While in the exploration stage we become conscious of the different levels of ourselves, in the emergence stage we realize that we are distinct from all of these levels and can take responsibility for them. We realize we can assist in the nurturance and growth of these different aspects, and finally that we can guide them into a more authentic expression of ourselves in the world. This fuller emergence of “I” involves, then, an active relationship with the material that has been uncovered in the exploration stage.
ELLEN IN EMERGENCE
Becoming increasingly open to her heights and depths, Ellen began relating to herself in an empathic, compassionate way. If she felt too stressed at work, she would take an extended lunch and go for a walk; if a man was hurtful, she would address that and/or remove herself; if she sensed that she needed time for herself in nature, she might take a trip to the beach.
This self-empathy and self-care went strongly against her family conditioning, from whom inwardly she heard the accusations, “You’re being selfish. All you care about is yourself, old number one.” These inner criticisms were echoed outwardly by subtle messages from the workplace: “You’re not committed to your work, not pulling your weight. Who do you think you are?” But Ellen persevered in connecting to herself and making her life a place in which she could exist in an authentic way.
As she continued to make concrete decisions and carry out actions that were empathic toward herself, the seeds that had been buried and silent in her since childhood began to germinate. On the one hand, she began expressing integrity, strength, and personal power in standing up for herself; on the other hand, this self-care led to a flowering of her softer qualities of sensitivity, wonder, and creativity. Having broken the bounds of her old way of being, becoming open to her authentic pain, and empathically relating to the wounded parts of herself, she uncovered the treasure hidden there as well.
At work she was able to sit down and talk to her manager about the injustices and pressures that she had suffered. In this situation she actually could feel her burgeoning strength and clarity, although also aware of the nervousness emanating from her early wounds. This showed the power of her self-empathy—to hold both her strength and vulnerability.
But it was her relationships with men that produced some of the most striking results in this stage. Over time she found herself able to be sensitive and vulnerable as well as assertive and self-expressive. Respectful and caring men found this appealing, while the ones prone to domination and abuse seemed to stay away.
As we actively respond to ourselves empathically in this stage, we frequently will be at odds with our early, nonempathic conditioning, as Ellen’s case demonstrates. If we persevere, however, we will find a healing of past wounds (lower unconscious) and a blossoming of hidden gifts (higher unconscious). We attain a stronger sense of personal essence and also find that we can contact and express transpersonal or universal qualities such as joy, wonder, creativity, and love; our essential I-amness, formerly bound in survival personality, begins to emerge.
As with the exploration stage, the emergence stage is supported by any number of authentic unifying centers, contexts and environments that mirror our authentic self-expression. For Ellen, this authentic mirroring was provided in her psychosynthesis therapy, but she also found empathic holding in her relationships with several good friends, a support group, her spiritual practice, and her reading in recovery literature.
BEYOND THE EMERGENCE OF “I”
This burgeoning of authenticity does not find its limit in the emergence stage. True, this stage often is rich with creativity and spontaneity, with self-expression over a wide dynamic range, and with an increasingly empowered way of being in the world. But there are other questions: “What is my life about?” “What am I here for?”
Such questions point beyond the exploration of the personality and the emergence of “I,” beyond any integration of the lower unconscious and higher unconscious, and beyond personal psychosynthesis and transpersonal psychosynthesis (see Chapter 8). Here the issue becomes our lived relationship with our deepest values, meanings, and life direction—issues of Self-realization.
Clearly the earlier stages lead naturally toward the ability to hear the call or invitations of Self. Trapped in the thrall of survival personality, we were in no position to hear much of anything beyond the imperative of managing our wounding in any way we could; as we have seen, it is often only through crisis that we become open to hearing anything deeper.
Then, in the exploration stage, we most likely will have our hands full with the vast new territory of experience revealing itself to us; here it may be hard to distinguish the voice of Self while our consciousness is inundated with new insights and experiences.
With the emergence of “I,” however, a more stable inner order begins to form as the newly discovered aspects of ourselves begin to find their places. A sense of self burgeons from which it is possible to enter into conscious communion with the very deepest in our lives. Of course, the deeper Self has been there all along, inviting us through even the earlier stages. It is simply that, often, to the extent that the earlier stages have been worked through, we can be more conscious and intentional in contacting and then responding to Self.
As we have an increasingly clear sense of the many levels of ourselves and assume the responsibility of actualizing these levels, we naturally are led to questions of direction. Now that we can express ourselves authentically, what is important to express? Now that we have the wherewithal to create, what is important to create? What seems to be my call in life, my path, my direction? In psychosynthesis terms, this is asking for a more intimate, conscious relationship with Self, or what is called Self-realization. Assagioli called this stage “Realization of One’s True Self,” and here we call this the stage of contact with Self, or the contact stage.
Again it seems clear that the prior progression from the stage of survival to exploration to emergence is a logical prelude to contact with deeper levels of our being. But this logical progression is not quite as neat and orderly as all that. The invitations from Self—the transpersonal will—can be discerned even in these earlier stages. As we have said, the I-Self relationship exists throughout all life experiences, in all spheres of life, and in every stage of life. Since “I” and Self are distinct-but-not-separate from all content and process, the I-Self relationship is ever-present, conscious or not.
In looking back, Ellen saw her “breakdown” as a moment of Self-realization. Not that Self caused the tense moment with her manager or even the upwelling of feelings, but in that moment she was invited to feel and accept unconscious aspects of herself that she had habitually cut out of her life. In this crisis of transformation was the opening of a path leading out of survival and into exploration. And, too, she followed that same sense of invitation as she chose to remain conscious of these depths of her soul, to plumb their depths and act upon what she found—the emergence of “I.” All of this also is Self-realization, the I-Self relationship in manifestation; it is simply more in the background during these earlier stages and more in the foreground in the latter two stages. Again, as Assagioli said, we are not “buildings.”
ELLEN IN CONTACT
Ellen began her more formal or obvious transition to the contact stage as she encountered continuing difficulties at work. Formerly, in the stages of exploration and emergence, she had become much more of a force to be reckoned with in the workplace. She no longer could be easily ignored, was more vocal about the injustices she saw, and frequently found herself in conflict with the oppressive culture present there. So what to do now?
Simply to revert to silent acquiescence felt like a betrayal of herself, so she began to entertain the idea of quitting her job. She longed to work with people who could see her potential, respect her as a person, and support her creativity.
But then she began to struggle with her need for financial security, the fear and uncertainty of finding a new job, and a reluctance to leave the friends she had made in the company. Perhaps she was meant to stay in order to learn a difficult lesson, to work against the unjust system, and quitting was simply running away from this.
Obviously there were no clear right or wrong answers to these questions—a completely logical case could be made for each and every choice she faced—and she agonized long over them. The questions demanded that she go deeper, to search for her own sense of truth, personal destiny, or call.
As in earlier stages, the transition to the contact stage involves finding authentic unifying centers that will support and encourage our need for a relationship with the Truth as we ourselves understand this. Since psychosynthesis therapy supports such an experiential relationship, Ellen found it helpful to continue with this. But she also joined a prayer group at her church, continued her daily meditation practice, sought out spiritual books, lectures, and workshops, and spent time talking with friends who could hear and support her.
Then one night Ellen had a frightening dream. She dreamed that she woke up to the smell of smoke, heard shouting outside, and rushed to the window to see a massive fire rapidly approaching her house. Whipped by the wind, smoke was billowing through her house. She rushed frantically through the house in an attempt to gather up her most important belongings, but she realized that she would be risking her life if she did not get out immediately. After a moment of agonizing hesitation, she ran out of the house, turned, and watched helplessly as her home was engulfed in flames. She awoke quite shaken, feeling loss, grief, and loneliness.
This dream brought Ellen back into the stages of exploration and emergence. She did feel that this dream was a call to leave the security of the known in order to save her soul, but this also made her face her loss, grief, and loneliness that had been silently underpinning such a choice. In exploring these feelings, she connected to a younger part of herself that had been rejected and abandoned by her parents. This was confusing to her at first, because her parents had never physically rejected or abandoned her.
But in relating to the young one, she gradually realized that her parents’ continual demeaning of her childhood efforts at self-expression meant that any time she moved to express herself she was emotionally abandoned; in other words, to be true to herself as a child meant placing herself beyond the security of parental concern, outside of the family, in nonexistence, abandoned, grieving, terrified—primal wounding.
Ellen saw that her self-effacing personality, secure job, and driven work ethic had been ways that she had been managing the feelings from this early wounding. As she connected empathically to this level of herself, she created a communion with this younger part that markedly reduced her desperation and anxiety around her career questions. Increasingly, she was able to sit more peacefully with these questions and to listen mindfully for answers.
Over several months, Ellen experienced other events that seemed to speak to her. She was struck one Sunday by the Scripture reading “And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin” (Matthew 6:28). She heard from several old friends who had successfully made major life transitions. In her reading she stumbled upon teachings about nonattachment and surrender as avenues to Spirit.
But most compelling to her was reading and hearing of several unexpected deaths of people near her own age. This put her in a frame of mind to do what was most meaningful now and to not put things off.
Through listening to all of these experiences, the conviction grew stronger and stronger that she absolutely had to quit her job, no matter what might happen. It was still scary for her to do this, but she felt that it would be “the death of my spirit” to stay.
Ellen’s process of discernment is characteristic of the contact stage. Here there is a willingness to enter into a dialogue with whatever we feel to be the ultimate truth of our lives, an openness to hear from the most profound levels of our being.
Enacting this openness can take many forms, but invariably it will involve being in relationships with people, places, and things that support asking ultimate questions. These might include entering into a dialogue with different systems of morality and ethics; praying and meditating regularly; listening carefully to messages from nocturnal dreams; learning about different religions and theologies; frequenting places considered sacred; taking time in retreat and solitude; undertaking a vision quest or pilgrimage; and finding a mentor, an intimate friend, or a community who supports our relationship to Self. All such authentic unifying centers work to expand a sense of relationship to Self and to refine the ability to hear the call of Self.
OPENING TO CONTACT
As it did with Ellen, entering the contact stage can bring up many issues that again necessitate the stages of exploration and emergence. Here it is as if we “up the ante” in our psychospiritual growth; we become willing not to simply feel connected to or unified with the Divine but to make specific choices and perform concrete actions that we feel are in line with a larger direction in our lives. In psychosynthesis terms, it is the intention to align our personal will with the transpersonal will.
Ask yourself how you would feel if you were face-to-face with Ultimate Truth, the Divine, the Absolute, or whatever you think is an ultimate principle in your life. Then ask yourself how you would feel if you could hear from this Ultimate about the direction of your life in specific terms. In doing such an exercise, it is possible to sense the nature of the difficulties that may emerge in the contact stage. Here we might fear that something will be taken away from us, or that we will find out that we have been wasting our lives, or that we will no longer have any fun, or even that we will lose our identity. All of these reactions may have childhood antecedents that can be explored.
Let the will of the Self guide and direct my life.
—Roberto Assagioli
It also is common to encounter parts of ourselves that have become mixed up with our notion of the Ultimate. One man was scared of listening to God, because for him God was a punishing, vengeful deity. In working with this inner image, however, he discovered a critical part of himself in effect masquerading as God, a part of him conditioned by childhood religious abuse.
Many different types of uncomfortable reactions—often presenting as subpersonalities—can be triggered by the potential of facing the Ultimate. The point in this stage is to hear these parts of us, to empathically connect with them, to listen to the hopes and fears that they embody, to care for them, and to invite them into the larger community of the personality. As this occurs, we become more able to hear the call of Self.
The last stage of psychosynthesis Assagioli represents as a period in which we are concretely responding to the invitations of Self and working with our psychospiritual development within this context. We call this stage response to Self, or simply, the response stage.
Many stories could be told to illustrate this stage. Perhaps we immediately think of famous people who throughout history responded to a powerful call and were led to great tasks. While such famous men and women are vivid examples of response to Self, there are far more examples from the lives of the less famous.
There are responses that lead to holy orders as a priest or shaman, to marriage and parenthood, to different forms of social activism, or to simply a more healthy way of being with ourselves and others. We have seen Laura (Chapter 2) and her growth via her work with a child subpersonality invited to expand her sense of self beyond that single part; and now we see Ellen called into a journey toward personal transformation, new relationships, and a new job. As Ellen learned, however, the response stage may involve yet another return to earlier stages.
When Ellen finally made the decision to leave her job, she began sending out resumes, talking to friends in the business, and making contact with a professional job broker or “headhunter.” She was aware of a profound sense of rightness about her direction now, and she felt the self-confidence and peace of mind that that had brought.
But after a promising phone call with a prospective employer, she suddenly began to feel terrible. She was filled with doubt, fear, and a strong sense of being a bad person. Returning to the exploration stage, she followed these feelings and discovered a part of her that felt the job search was a betrayal of the company: “How could you leave, after all they’ve done for you? You’re being ungrateful.”
Empathically connecting to this level within, Ellen found a younger part of her for whom leaving the job felt like a betrayal of her family, a betrayal for which the family would shame and reject her as a person. The threat of these feelings had kept her within her limiting role within the family: for her to in any way move beyond her limiting role meant betraying the family and facing shame and rejection.
After awhile, Ellen found that her reaction was another level of the one in her who felt abandoned by the family, and who had emerged in the dream about the fire (above). These wounded feelings drove a desperate attachment to the status quo and her role within it, an attachment by which she sought never to suffer that abandonment again. This deeper level of wounding was being energized by the very concrete possibility of leaving the company.
As before, Ellen established an ongoing relationship with this vulnerable part of herself, thereby in effect giving the part a new home. Ellen’s feelings of doubt, anxiety, and shame did not simply disappear but were now held in compassion, and she was able to find a new job, quit her old one, and make the move to a new life.
Here we can see Ellen walking her path of Self-realization. She actively opened herself to whatever might be revealed by Self, responded to that sense of call, and then engaged the reaction that her response triggered. Self-realization is clearly not limited to only one moment or one experience, but rather it is an ongoing, lived relationship with our deepest sense of truth.
Thus psychosynthesis understands Self not simply as a passive presence but as continuously acting through the transpersonal will, to which we may respond with the freedom of our own personal will. Our contact and response to the invitations of Self may involve sweeping changes, as in discovering an overall life direction, or it may involve smaller changes, as in increased authenticity, deeper compassion, greater wholeness, and right relationships. Again, this ongoing interplay between “I” and Self is called Self-realization, and later we will devote an entire chapter to it.
RESPONSE AS DIALOGUE
It is important to emphasize that this relationship with Self is indeed a true relationship, characterized by respect, empathy, dialogue, and mutual response. Assagioli wrote of this dynamic interplay between “I” and Self as “a ‘dialogue’ between the man [or woman] and his [or her] ‘Higher Source,’ in which each alternately invokes and evokes the other” (Assagioli 1973a, 114). This empathic relationship with Self can be seen in one of Ellen’s psychosyn-thesis therapy sessions. She was working with the abandoned child who emerged after her dream but then moved into a relationship with an inner figure of wisdom:
Therapist: How is it to be with the little girl?
Ellen: It’s okay, actually. She’s letting me hold her. She doesn’t feel so alone anymore. I feel very motherly towards her, but I worry.
T: About what?
E: Well, whether I can be a good mother to her. I’m afraid I’ll forget to be with her. I’ll probably screw this up like everything else.
T: Try something, Ellen. Imagine that with you now is a very wise person, a person who knows and loves you. (Pause.) Who do you see?
E: It’s a wise old woman . . . looks like a crone . . . or Goddess even. She’s hard to see clearly. She’s got light around her. Just a presence.
T: How do you feel towards her?
E: I love her. She loves me. I just feel very peaceful with her.
T: Stay with that a bit. How is that? (Pause.)
E: Just very peaceful, like there’s nothing to fear.
T: If you want, tell the wise woman about your worry about being a good mother.
E: She just laughs. In a nice way. She says not to worry, that she’s here to help me. In fact, she’s always been here.
T: How does that make you feel?
E: It makes me want to cry. I know she’s speaking the truth. I’ve never really been alone.
This dialogue between Ellen and the wise woman is an example of the I-Self relationship emerging. Here there is a mutual love and respect, a shared sense of being heard and responded to, and even good-hearted humor. Also, as often may happen when this relationship becomes conscious, Ellen realized that this is an intimate relationship that has been present throughout her whole life, though not recognized. We can understand that even through the worst traumas in life, we were held and protected by a deeper Spirit.
So Self-realization is not simply a matter of hearing the call and then obediently carrying this out. The essence of the I-Self relationship is an empathic resonance, an intimate communion in which individuality and free will—“I”—are respected and supported. Indeed, individuality and free will arise from this relationship.
In sum, then, the stages of psychosynthesis outline the various facets of a journey in which initially there emerges an expression of essential I-amness, which is then followed by a sense of relationship between “I” and a deeper source, Self. We have traced this journey from (0) being controlled by the addictive repression of higher and lower unconscious dynamics (survival stage); to (1) the discovery of, and empathic connection with, these levels (exploration stage); to (2) the expression of a more authentic sense of personal essence or “I” (emergence stage); to (3) making contact with a more profound sense of meaning and purpose (contact stage); and, finally, (4) to doing what is needed to respond to the specific call or vocation from this deeper sense of meaning and purpose (response stage).
Again, remember that while the linearity of this progression does make sense, these stages may not in fact be experienced in this sequence. Each stage may be in the foreground at different times, independent of the linear progression. Further, we never outgrow these stages; any one of them can be present at any time in our lives, no matter how long we have trod the way of Self-realization. In fact, it is safe to say that each of us at this very moment has a level of our experience in each of these five stages. So the stage model of psychosynthesis is not a ladder we climb rung by rung, nor one we climb once and for all time; the stages are different windows on a single process, windows whereby we participate in this process in different ways.
It has been clear in this outline of the stages of psychosynthesis, and in the earlier discussion of the model of the person, that we have many different aspects, levels, and dimensions within us. While our normal experience of ourselves may be that we are single, whole individuals, even cursory self-exploration will reveal that we are in fact inwardly complex, diverse, and multiple. We all fit the definition of the Renaissance person, “A person of many parts.” As we have seen also, the process of human growth usually entails an encounter with this inner multiplicity and an ability to know, understand, and guide the various aspects of ourselves; this is a major theme in the journey of psychosynthesis.
One quite effective way to facilitate this growth is to work with subpersonalities, those semi-independent identities within us that act as virtual “people inside us” (Rowan 1990). Like Laura working with her child subpersonality, or Ellen with her childhood levels of experience, we can learn to recognize and work with this rich multiplicity within us. The next chapter will describe this type of work as an important tool in our Self-realization.