Developpment stage

1. THE PRIMITIVE ROOTS OF AWARENESS

1 – THE PLEROMATIC SELF

By almost all accounts, neither the fetus in the womb nor the infant at birth possesses a developed self-sense. For the neonate there is no real separation whatsoever between inside and outside, sub-ject and object, body and environment. It is not exactly that the baby is born into a world of mate-rial objects which he cannot recognize, but that—from the infant’s view—there literally are as yet no objects whatsoever. Events, yes; objective events, no. That is, the infant is indeed aware of certain events, but not as “objective,” not as separate from himself. The objective world and the infant’s subjective awareness are largely undifferentiated—the neonate cannot differentiate the material world from his actions on it. And thus, in a special sense, his self and his physical environment are one and the same.

“The baby at birth,” concludes Loevinger, “cannot be said to have an ego.

That is, since there is no real conception of space, time, and objects, there are no perceived limitations.

Notice that this is a prepersonal perfection, not a trans-personal one.

THE ALIMENTARY UROBOROS

The uroboros is collective, archaic, still mostly oceanic: the word “uroboros” itself is taken from the mythical serpent that, eating its own tail, forms a self-contained, predifferentiated mass, “in the round,” ignorant unto itself.

“The initial stage symbolized by the uroboros,” writes Neumann, “corresponds to a pre-ego stage; the stage of earliest childhood when an ego germ is just beginning to be. . , . Naturally, then, the first phases of man’s evolving ego consciousness are under the dominance of the uroboros. They are the phases of an infantile ego consciousness which, although no longer entirely embryonic [that is, no longer entirely pleromatic] and already possessing an existence of its own, still lives in the round [the uroboros], not yet detached from it and only just beginning to differentiate itself from it.”

At this point, then, the infant’s self no longer is the material chaos, for he is beginning to recognize something outside of himself, something other than his self, and this global, undifferentiated, prepersonal environ we call the uroboric other.

Because this stage occurs towards the beginning of the extended oral phase of infancy—where the infant’s major connection with the world is an oral connection—Neumann also calls the self at this point the “alimentary uroboros,” and, in some few ways, this corresponds with the preambivalent (prepersonal) oral stage of psychoanalysis. It is also called “alimentary” because the entire uroboros is dominated by “vis-ceral psychology”—by unconscious nature, by physiology, by instincts, by reptilian perception and the most rudimentary emotional discharges.

According to psychoanalysis, this is the stage of “magical hallucinatory om-nipotence,” which is the “period immediately after birth when the infant feels that all he has to do is wish for something and it will appear.”

Of course, to agree that the uroboros “slumbers in paradise” is not to say that it is without its fears, or rudimentary tensions, or “unpleasures.” As blissfully ignorant as some researchers maintain this stage to be, we must not overlook the fact that here also exist the roots of a primordial fear. The Upaníshads put it, “Wherever there is other, there is fear.” The uroboric self of the infant begins to sense the oppressive and primal mood of fear for the simple reason that it now recognizes an other—the uroboric other. We might note that the Jungians, the Freudians, and the Kleinians all agree that this primal fear is best interpreted as an oral one—that is, the primal fear is a fear of being swallowed, engulfed, and annihilated by the uroboric other (often in the form of the “bad breast”). Since the uroboros can “swallow” the other, it likewise fears the same fate.

The alimentary uroboros itself, however, remains strictly prepersonal, collective, archaic, reptilian. It is surely one of the most primitive structures of the human psy-che, and, together with the base pleroma, might reach back through lower life forms to the very beginning of the cosmos itself.

2- THE TYPHONIC SELF

As the infant’s sense of self begins to shift from the prepersonal uroboros to the individual organ-ism, we see the emergence and creation of the organic or bodyego self. The bodyself or bodyego is, in a sense, the transition from the serpent stage of the uroboros to the truly human stage of the mental-ego, and therefore we often refer to this entire realm (with all its stages and substages) as the realm of the “typhon”—the typhon, in mythology, is half human, half serpent.

THE AXIAL-BODY AND PRANIC-BODY

By “axial-body” I mean essentially the physical body felt as distinct from the physical environment. The infant from birth has a physical body, but the infant does not recognize an axial-body until around age 4 to 6 months (and does not finally differentiate self and not-self until around age 15 to 18 months).

His world is still largely (but not totally) axial—it is limited to the simple, the immediate, and the still rather vague present. At any rate, under the influence of systems of axial-images, the infant constructs both a type of external reality as well as a physical or bodily sense of inward self.

As authors such as Werner393 and Arieti7 have pointed out, the cogni-tive constructs of this early level (that is, the axial-images) are so elementary and skeletal in nature that they cannot elicit or sustain any of the higher or more complex emotions. Rather, the basic emotions present at this stage are what Arieti, in a careful survey of the literature, calls elementary emotions or ”proto-emotions,” such as rage, fear, tension, appetite, and satisfaction or simple pleasure.

The second of the two broad motivational atmospheres of this level is the pleasure-unpleasure principle. I use this phrase, as Freud not always did, in both its positive and negative senses: the search for bodily pleasure and satisfaction as well as the avoidance of tension, unplea-sure, and discomfort. For at this stage—the axial-pranic, or physical-emotional—”motivation as a tendency to search for pleasure and avoid unpleasure, thus becomes a fundamental psychological force.”

So where “oceanic blissfulness” rules over the pleromatic and uroboric states, the pleasure principle reigns over the bodily.

THE IMAGE-BODY

As the first significant axial-image is said to be of the breast, the first significant concrete image is of the “mothering one” (Sullivan), for “the first object of every individual is the mother.”

We may further note that this whole stage of development (reaching back to the axial/pranic level and forward to the anal and even phallic stage) has been intensely studied by Jung and his followers as the “realm of maternal symbolism,” and by Freudians as the stages of the pre-Oedipal mother.

Just as the infant creates and organizes a nexus of images and impressions of the mothering one, as well as other significant environmental objects, he likewise begins the correlative construction of nonre-flexive self-images, commonly called, at this stage, “‘body-images.” Body-images are simply “image pic-tures” of the physical or axial-body, and the “closer” the body-image is to the physical or axial-body the more “accurate” it is said to be.

Due to the simultaneous occurrence of both outer tactile and inner sen-sory data, one’s own body [the axial-body] becomes something apart from the rest of the world and thus the discerning of self from nonself is made possible. The sum of the mental representations of the [axial] body and its organs, the so-called body-image [the image-body], constitutes the idea of I [at this stage] and is of basic importance for the further formation of the ego.”

But let us now turn to the image itself, for it is most significant that at this stage of development many objects which are not immediately at hand can, by virtue of the image, be imagined. That is, the infant can begin to imagine or picture the existence of those objects not immediately present (this differentiates the image proper from the axial-image; the axial-image can picture only present objects, the image proper can picture nonpresent objects). Thus the infant’s present matrix of experience is to some extent expanded through time in a symbolic and representative fashion. The infant begins to enter the world of an ex-tended, but as yet random, series of moments. He moves in an extended present through which float the un-organized images of past events and the random images of future possibilities.

Thus, to give a simple example, the primary process cannot easily distinguish between a cave, a box, a womb, and a cup, because all share the predicate “hollowness” and the part “opening.” All of these objects belong to the class of “hol-low objects with one opening,” and thus each object is viewed as identical with each other object, and one object can be the whole of the class and the whole of the class can be entirely in one object alone.

The image proper does not emerge until around the third stage of sensorimotor development; prior to that time, the infant has only uroboric forms, axial-images, motor schemes, etc. “It is only toward the seventh month that the child starts to experience images. For instance, if he is able to look for a rattle when the rattle has been hidden under a pillow, presumably he can carry in his mind the image of the rat-tle.” But from that period onward, images begin to enter decisively in awareness, and by the sixth stage of sensorimotor development (toward the end of the second year), the child can so accurately imagine absent objects that he can form a correct “picture” of object-permanence, “the knowledge that the world is com-posed of substantial, permanently existing objects which can be manipulated and transformed in diverse ways while still maintaining their identity.” And he does this essentially through the power of ”picturing” absent objects, however otherwise feeble this imagining process is at this stage.

The presence of the image also greatly extends the infant’s emotional and motivational life, for now he can respond not only to present events, persons, and objects, but also to the mere image of these entities, which themselves may or may not be present. For the image can evoke the same types of emotions and feelings as the actual object or person. Further, the infant can for the first time experience prolonged emo-tions, for not only can the image evoke feeling tones, it can sustain and prolong them. Thus, as Arieti so clearly shows, the infant can experience anxiety, which is nothing but imagined, and thus sustained, fear. Likewise, he can wish, since a wish is simply an imagined pleasure.

THE NATURE OF THE TYPHON: A SUMMARY

I would like to conclude this section by emphasizing that it is generally agreed, by Eastern and Western psychology alike, that the lowest levels of development involve simple biological functions and processes. That is, the lowest levels involve somatic processes, instincts, simple sensations and perceptions, and emotional-sexual impulses. We have seen the Western evidence: in Piaget’s system, this is the sensori-motor realms; Arieti refers to them as instinctual, exoceptual, and protoemotional; Loevinger calls them presocial, impulsive, and symbiotic; this is the id-realms of Freud and the uroboric realms of Neumann; and it is Maslow’s lowest two needs, the physiological and the safety.

Eastern psychology agrees perfectly with that assessment. To Vedanta Hinduism, this is the realm of the anna- and prana-mayakosa, the levels of hunger and emotional-sexuality (those are precise transla-tions). The Buddhist calls them the lower five vijnanas, or the realm of the five senses. The chakra psy-chology (of Yoga) refers to them as the lower three chakras: the muladhara, or root material and pleromatic level; svadhisthana, or emotional-sexual level; and manipura, or aggressive-power level.

And all in all, this simply points up one of Freud’s major ideas: “The ego,” he said, “is first and foremost a body-ego.”

We saw that the bodyego—the typhon or bodyself—tends to develop in the following way: It is generally agreed that the infant initially cannot distinguish self from not-self, subject from object, body from environment. That is, the self at this earliest of stages is literally one with the physical world. “During the early stages,” we heard Piaget say, “the world and the self are one—the self is still material, so to speak.” That initial stage of material oneness, which Piaget calls “protoplasmic,” we have been calling plero-matic and uroboric (if I may, by way of summary, lump these two stages together). “Pleromatic” is an old gnostic term meaning the material universe—the materia prima and virgo mater. “Uroboros” is the mythic image of the serpent eating its own tail, and signifies “wholly self-contained” (autistic) and “not able to rec-ognize an other” (narcissistic).

It is out of this primordial fusion state (or rather, out of what we will eventually introduce as the “ground-unconscious”) that the separate self emerges and, as Freud said, the self emerges first and foremost as a body, a bodyself. That is, the mind—itself very fledgling and undeveloped—is almost totally undif-ferentiated from the body, so that the self’s approach to the world is almost totally through bodily categories and schemes (biting, sucking, chewing, hitting, pushing, pulling, pleasure, sensory, feeling, oral, anal, phallic, etc.). The self, then, is one of an undeveloped mind—operating only with images—which is undifferenti-ated from the body: thus, the body-self. It is, in Neumann’s words, a rudimentary self “still identified with the functioning of the body as a whole and with the unity of its organs.”

The infant identifies with the newly emergent body, with its sensations and emotions, and gradually learns to differentiate them from the material cosmos at large.

Notice that the bodyego, by differentiating itself from the material environment, actually transcends that primitive state of fusion and embeddedness. The bodyego transcends the material environment, and thus can perform physical operations upon that environment. Towards the end of the sensorimotor period (around age 2), the child has differentiated the self and the not-self to such a degree that he has a fairly sta-ble image of “object constancy” and so he can muscularly coordinate physical operations on those objects. He can coordinate a physical movement of various objects in the environment, something he could not easily do as long as he could not differentiate himself from those objects.

This is why we also call the bodyego the “typhonic self”—the typhon, in mythology, is half human, half serpent (uroboros). In physiological terms, the reptilian complex and the limbic system dominate the self at this stage.

3 – THE MEMBERSHIP SELF

The emergence and acquisition of language is very likely the single most significant process on the Outward Arc of the individual’s life cycle. It brings in its broad wake a complex of interrelated and intermeshed phenomena, not the least of which are new and higher cognitive styles, an extended notion of time, a new and more unified mode of self, a vastly extended emotional life, elementary forms of reflexive self-control, and the beginnings of memberships Now the deep structure of any given language embodies a particular syntax of perception, and to the extent an individual develops the deep structure of his native language, he simultaneously learns to construct, and thus perceive, a particular type of descriptive reality, embedded, as it were, in the language structure itself. From that momentous point on, as far as that Outward Arc goes, the structure of his language is the structure of his self and the “limits of his world.”

And so, shortly after the acquisition of language, and rarely before, every child goes through an ex-tended period of nightmares— awakened from sleep screaming bloody murder, alive to the inherent terror of being a separate self, shaken by that primal mood of terror which always lurks beneath the surface of the separate self.

All in all, the self-sense at this stage is still somewhat typhonic, but less so; that is, the self is start-ing—but only starting—to differentiate from the body. The fleeting images of the “good me” and “bad me” of the previous stage are organized into a rudimentary, linguistic self-sense—a membership self, a tensed self, a name-and-word self.

THE VERBAL MIND: SUMMARY

By the same token, then, language is the means of transcending the simply present world. (Language, in the higher realms of consciousness, is itself transcended, but one must go from the preverbal to the ver-bal in order to get to the trans-verbal; here we are talking of the transcendence of the preverbal by the ver-bal, which, although only half the story, is an extraordinary achievement). Through language, one can an-ticipate the future, plan for it, and gear one’s present activities in accordance with tomorrow. That is, one can delay or control one’s present bodily desires and activities.

Notice again that triad which we introduced in the last chapter: as the mental self emerges and dif-ferentiates from the body (with the help of language), it transcends the body and thus can operate upon it us-ing its own mental structures as tools (it can delay the body’s immediate discharges and postpone its in-stinctual gratifications using verbal insertions). At the same time, this allows the beginning of the sublimation of the body’s emotional-sexual energies into more subtle, complex, and evolved activities. This triad of dif-ferentiation, transcendence, and operation is, as we will see, the single most basic form of development, re-peated at every stage of growth, and leading—for all we know—right to the Ultimate itself.

4 – MENTAL-EGOIC REALMS

For a variety of reasons, the child’s self-sense gradually centers around syntaxical-membership cog-nition and the affects, motivations, and phantasies intimately associated with membership cogni-tion. The child switches its central identity from the typhonic realms to the verbal and mental realms. Paratax dies down, and the syntaxical or secondary process burgeons—linear, conceptual, abstract, consensus-verbal thinking decisively enters every element of awareness. As a final result, the self is no longer just a fleeting, amorphous self-image or constellation of self-images, nor merely a word or name, but a higher-order unity of auditory, verbal, dialoging, and syntaxical self-concepts, very rudimentary and tenu-ous at first, but rapidly consolidated.

The ego—although differentiated from the body—is rooted in the voluntary musculature of the body, so that pathological ego states tend to show a corresponding muscular dysfunction.

Thus there comes about that decisive “internal differentiation of ego structure”—basically into a Parent and Child, a superego and infraego, a topdog and underdog (along with other subpersonalities too various to detail). Further, the internalized Parent-and-Child is a relationship rooted in specific retroflec-tions. This is so because the child takes the role of the Parent towards himself by retroflecting, or turning back on himself, those concept affects not permissible to the Parent. For example, when the parent repeat-edly scolds the child for getting angry, eventually the child will identify with the role of the Parent and scold himself for his outbursts. Thus, instead of the parent physically controlling which impulses are per-missible, the child begins to control himself. He can both praise himself, which results in feelings of pride, or he can condemn himself, which results in feelings of guilt. The point is that by taking the role of the Parent towards himself, he is able to differentiate his ego into various segments, all of which are ini-tially (but only initially) based on the original interpersonal relations of the child with the parent. The exter-nal relation between parent and child thus becomes an internal relation between two different subperson-alities of the ego. Interpersonal has become intrapersonal, so that the Parent and Child ego states are net-works of crisscrossed retroflections and internalized dialogues.
The superego or Parent may be subdivided into the Nuturing Parent or ego ideal, and the Control-ling Parent or conscience; and the Child ego state into the Adapted Child, the Rebellious Child, and the Natural Child. All of these, however, are—as I see them—intraegoic thought structures, of one degree of con-ceptual complexity or another. That is, they all possess dominant syntaxical-dialogue elements, along with the corresponding affects, images, and feeling-tones. So it is not that affects and phantasies and images do not occur on this conceptual-egoic level—indeed they do, but they are largely related or bound to concep-tual forms of membership reality.

To the extent the individual is identified with his ego (conceptual-dialogue self) he will then be “script-bound,” or programmed by the internalized directives. And it is to Berne’s credit, follow-ing Perl’s discovery, to detail how almost every aspect of ego states can be discovered as “internal dia-logue”—syntaxical trains of auditory signs with accompanying affects and images, so that even the ty-phonic id, on this level, is experienced as a “living voice.”
Very few individuals survive childhood with an ego intact in consciousness, or even largely intact, for “after the superego is established, it decides which drives or needs will be permitted and which sup-pressed.” , That is to say, under the influence of the superego, and dependent upon the whole history of the prior developmental levels of the self, certain concept affects are split off, or alienated (May), remain undifferentiated or forgotten (Jung), are projected (Perls), repressed (Freud), or selectively screened out of awareness (Sullivan). The individual is left with, not a realistic or reasonably accurate and flexible self-concept, but a fraudulent self-concept, an idealized self (Horney), a weak ego (Freud), a persona (Jung).

For simple convenience, I divide the overall ego realm into three major chronological stages: the early ego (ages 4 to 7), the middle ego (7 to 12), and the late ego (age 12 to the beginning of the Inward Arc, when and if the individual begins it—rarely earlier than age 21). At any point of the ego’s develop-ment, any aspect of the self that, if represented in consciousness would be perceived as overthreatening, can be suppressed. These suppressed aspects we call the “shadow,” and the resultant fraudulent self we call the “persona” (after Jung). For us, the shadow represents aspects of the personal self which could just as well be in consciousness, but are not for dynamic reasons (described by Freud and Jung). This can occur at any point of the ego’s emergence (although the decisive points occur during the early egoic period), so in general we sometimes refer to all the ego stages as the ego/persona realm.

But let us note that persona per se is not necessarily a pathological structure, but something of a “good face” or “social mask” that one can don to facilitate social interaction. It is a particular role engi-neered to help facilitate different tasks, so that one may, and should, possess several different personae—a father persona, a doctor persona, a husband persona, a wife persona, and so on. The sum of all one’s pos-sible personae is the total ego (in my definition), and the ego itself is built and constructed by the learning and combining of various personae into an integrated self-concept. Just as the “particularized other” pre-cedes the “generalized other,” the persona precedes the ego.

The difficulty arises “when one particular persona (such as the “nonaggressive good boy”) capital-izes and dominates the field of awareness, so that other legitimate personae (such as the “healthy aggres-sion” or “assertiveness” persona) cannot enter consciousness. These split-off facets of the ego self thus become shadow, or submerged personae. Our general and somewhat simplistic formula is thus: persona + shadow = ego. Note that all of the shadow is unconscious, but not all of the unconscious is shadow. That is, there are all sorts of levels to the unconscious, only a few of which are “personal”, or “submerged per-sonae-shadow”; large tracts of the unconscious are prepersonal (uroboric, archaic, collective and low-archetypal); large tracts are transpersonal (the subtle, the casual, the transcendent, the high-archetypal—as we will see).
Finally, I see the late ego/persona period (ages 12-21), as being crucial in regard to all forms of per-sonae. That is, the individual up to that point has been learning to create and identify with several appropriate personae, and at this point, the late ego stage, not only does he normally master his various personae (Erik-son’s “identity vs. role confusion” stage), he starts to transcend them, to disidentify with them. Now by “disidentify” I do not mean “dissociate” or “alienate”—I use it in the most positive sense of letting go of an exclusive and restrictive identification, so as to create a higher-order identification. The infant disidentified with the pleroma, or differentiated itself from that restrictive identity. Likewise, the ego disidentifies with the typhonic body, which means that it is no longer exclusively attached to or identified with the pranic realm. There can be no higher identifications unless the lower-order identities are broken in their exclusivity—and that is how I use “disidentification.” Once the self disidentifies with the lower-order structures, it can then integrate them with the newly emergent higher-order structures.

We were saying that during the late ego period, not only does an individual normally master his various personae, he starts to transcend them, to disidentify with them. He thus tends to integrate all his possible personae into a “mature and integrated ego,” and then he starts to disidentify with the ego alto-gether. This, as we will see, marks the beginning of the Inward Arc, and all the stages from that point on are strictly transegoic

THE EGOIC REALMS: SUMMARY

We see at this stage the same form of development that we mentioned in the two previous chap-ters—the triadic form of differentiation, transcendence, and operation. But if we look at that developmen-tal triad in slightly more detail, here is what we find—at each major stage of development, there is: the emergence of a higher-order structure; the identification with that higher structure; the differentiation or disidentifi-cation with the lower structure; which amounts to a transcendence of the lower structure; such that the higher structure can both operate upon and integrate the lower structures.

Thus, a fairly coherent mental-ego eventually emerges (usually between ages 4 and 7), differentiates itself from the body, transcends the simple biological world, and therefore can to a certain degree operate upon the biological world (and the earlier physical world) using the tools of simple representational think-ing. This whole trend is consolidated with the emergence (usually around age 7) of what Piaget calls “con-crete operational thinking”—thinking that can operate on the concrete world and the body using concepts. This cognitive mode dominates the middle ego/persona stage.

By the time of adolescence—the late ego/persona stage— another extraordinary differentiation begins to occur. In essence, the self simply starts to differentiate from the concrete thought process. And because the self starts to differentiate itself from the concrete thought process, it can to a certain degree transcend that thought process and therefore operate upon it. It is not surprising, then, that Piaget calls this—his highest stage—”formal operational,” because one can operate upon one’s own concrete thought (i.e., “work with formal or linguistic objects as well as physical or concrete ones), a detailed operation which, among other things, results in the sixteen binary propositions of formal logic. But the only point I want to emphasize here is that this can occur because consciousness differentiates itself from syntaxical thought, thus transcends it, and hence can operate upon it (something that it could not do when it was it. Actually, this process is just beginning at this stage— it intensifies at higher stages—but the overall point seems fairly clear: consciousness, or the self, is starting to transcend the verbal ego-mind. It is starting to go trans-verbal, transegoic.

This brings us to the end of the Outward Arc, but not to the end of our story.

5 – SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION

“The path of evolution,” says Jungian psychologist Neumann, “leading mankind from uncon-sciousness to consciousness, is the path traced by the transformations and ascent of libido [which in Jungian psychology is not sexual energy but neutral psychic energy in general].” And, as Jung so straight-forwardly demonstrated, the ” mechanism that tranforms energy is the symbol.” Hence the (later) title of Jung’s first pioneering book: Symbols of Transformation.

Let me now give a few examples of this symbolic transformation in order to make the idea as evi-dent as possible. We have already noted the particular mode of time which is characteristic of each major Outward Arc stage: the timelessness of the pleromatic and uroboric stages; the immediate present tense of the axial-body; the extended present of the image-body; the rudimentary temporal sequences of the mem-bership stage; and the extended linear time of the egoic stage. But how is it possible for the individual, in the course of his early evolution, to pass from one of these temporal forms to the next? How, or by what means, does one form of time give way to the next?
A large part of the general answer is: through and from the various symbolic structures which emerge at each stage in the growth of consciousness. Let us see:
The temporal mode of the pleromatic-uroboric stage (if I may take them together), is properly de-fined as timeless in the sense of pretemporal, beginningless and endless, prior to and ignorant of sequence and seriality. Although the infant is definitely aware of certain events, he cannot grasp them in temporal relation, nor, in fact, even separate himself from them. That, of course, was the pleromatic state— embeddedness in the material universe.

TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSLATION

There is a difference between transformation and translation, and it can be explained as follows:
Modifying the terms of linguistics, we can say that each level of consciousness consists of a deep structure and a surface structure. The deep structure consists of all the basic limiting principles embedded as that level. The deep structure is the defining form of a level, which embodies all of the potentials and limi-tations of that level. Surface structure is simply a particular manifestation of the deep structure. The surface structure is constrained by the form of the deep structure, but within that form it is free to select various contents (e.g., within the form of the physical body, one may select to walk, run, play baseball, etc. What all of those forms have in common is the deep structure of the human body).
A deep structure is like a paradigm, and contains within it all the basic limiting principles in terms of which all surface structures are realized. To use a simple example, take a ten-storey building: each of the floors is a deep structure, whereas the various rooms and objects on each floor are surface structures. The pleroma is on the first floor, the uroboros is on the second, the typhon is on the third, verbal on fourth and ego on fifth (we will later suggest that parapsychology is on the seventh floor, transcendence is on the ninth, and the building itself is Consciousness as Such). The point is that, for example, although all egos are quite different, they are all on the fifth floor: they all share the same deep structure.
The movement of surface structures we call translation; the movement of deep structures we call transformation. Thus, if we move the furniture around on the fourth floor, that is translation; but if we move up to the seventh floor, that is transformation. To give but a simple example, we can apply this to Jung’s work on archetype elaboration (and it is not necessary that one believe in the existence of Jung’s archetypes for this example to be effective. Keep in mind, too, that I am confining this whole discussion to examples from the Outward Arc—we have yet to examine the structures of the Inward Arc). The archetype of the magna mater—the prima materia of pleromatic chaos— may be transformed at the body level into a con-crete image of the Great Mother, which may in turn be transformed at the egoic-conceptual level into the idea of a loving wife. These are genuine transformations. But at each of these stages, and for a variety of reasons, a specific translation may occur. Thus, if the uroboric archetype of the magna mater is transformed into an image of a cave (on the body level), that image may undergo translation or displacement to the im-age of a cup, basket, house, womb, or box—as we saw with the magical primary process of this level. This translative process is not a gross change in levels, but merely a change in the “language” or form of the given level. The uroboric magna mater is transformed into a cave; the cave is translated into a cup—the for-mer process is vertical, the latter horizontal.

Once a particular level of self-sense comes into being, it maintains itself by a series of more or less constant translations. The particular mode of self translates both its internal milieu and its external envi-ronment according to the major symbolic deep structures and paradigms characteristic of that level. Thus, for instance, as the individual reaches the egoic-syntaxical level, he is committed to an almost perpetual “talking to himself,” a constant subvocal chatter which unceasingly translates and edits his reality according to the symbolic structures of his language and thought as well as the major syntaxical rules and premises of his membership reality (and secondarily, his own philosophic bands).
In other words, his mode of self, now transformed to the egoic level, is maintained by an almost end-less stream of specific translations. A given transformation, then, always helps create the possibility of new types of translations, and these translations help support and maintain that transformation. And thus, as we will see in the next sections, any time a series of translations fails its purpose and breaks down—either in the Outward or Inward Arc—the individual is precipitated into a major transformation. Wherever translation fails, transformation ensues—and it can be regressive transformation or progressive transformation, depending on factors we will later discuss.

We make one more important distinction: we define a sign as that form which points to, or repre-sents, or is involved with any element within a given level; whereas a symbol points to, or represents, or is involved with an element of a different level (either higher or lower). This is in line with the traditional view of symbolism, explained by Huston Smith: “Symbolism is the science of the relationship between dif-ferent levels of reality and cannot be precisely understood without reference thereto.” Anything I can point to on my present level of consciousness is only a sign; anything higher can only be discussed or thought about using symbols, and these symbols can only be finally understood upon transformation to that higher level itself. Therefore, we also say that translation operates with signs, whereas transformation operates with symbols. And we have just traced out several transformations, from pleroma to ego, which were medi-ated by symbols.

With all of that in mind, we can say that each transformation upward marks the emergence in con-sciousness of a new and higher level, with a new deep structure (symbol matrix), within which new transla-tions or surface structures can unfold and operate (sign matrix). And we can say that development or evo-lution is a series of such transformations, or changes in deep structure, mediated by symbols, or vertical forms in consciousness.

And most importantly, we say that all deep structures are remembered, in the precise Platonic sense of anamnesis, whereas all surface structures are learned, in the sense studied by Western psychologists. It is gen-erally agreed that one does not learn to become a Buddha, one simply discovers or remembers that one is already Buddha. That is an incontrovertible fact of the perennial philosophy. Just so, no one learns any deep structure, but simply discovers or remembers it prior to (or concomitant with) the course of learning its surface structures. You don’t learn to have a body, but you do learn to play baseball with it— you dis-cover deep structures and learn surface structures. Among other things, this fundamental theorem (which we will explore later) relieves us of the tedium of trying to derive the existence of higher structures out of lower ones (e.g., trying to get the ego out of the id).

TRANSLATION, TRANSFORMATION, AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

To end this brief discussion of translation and transformation, we might point out that these two basic processes also play significant roles in psychopathology, for a particular type of transformation sets the stage for a particular type of dis-ease, while translation itself governs the nature of the specific symp-toms which eventually surface.
Let me give a small example. But to begin with, note that repression is not transformation. We might say that repression is one type of failure to cleanly transform (there are also arrest, fixation, dissocia-tion, and regression). Should the self, in the process of transforming from, say, the typhonic realm to the egoic, encounter severe repression of, for example, aggression, then the ascent of consciousness is halted with regard to that facet of self. Or rather, from that stage on, the anger impulse will be raw-translated with regard to any deep structure which subsequently refuses the impulse. Thus transformation upward is dis-torted because, at every stage past the repression, the impulse is mistranslated. And this mistranslation means that the individual cannot represent these impulses to himself with appropriate signs, but only with symbols, and these symbols represent the hidden aspects of self which now remain lodged in the lower levels of his own being. We might say that these symbols represent those aspects of the self which originate at a differ-ent level of consciousness (in this case, the typhonic) and cannot make it up to the present level. Without the repression, the anger would simply transform easily to the ego level, enter awareness as a sign, and the individual would correctly translate his situation as, “I’m madder’n hell!” With repression, however, an as-pect of the self remains at a lower level, cannot properly transform, and therefore enters awareness only as a symbol (since symbols, not signs, represent different levels)—and hence the individual mistranslates the true form of his present reality. And this mistranslation circles compulsively around a symbol lodged uncom-fortably in his translative process, generating mystery in his awareness.
The anger is thus transformed into a symbol. . . and a symptom. A symptom is basically a symbol of some aspect of the self which has become dissociated from consciousness, remains or regresses to a lower level of self, therefore cannot enter translation as a sign and thus shows up only as a sym-bol/symptom. (I am not now speaking of certain symptoms which are generated on one level alone, and involve only crossed signs, such as cognitive dissonance. Nor am I speaking of what are, in fact, some of the most important symptoms of all: those which are symbols of higher levels trying to emerge in conscious-ness, symptoms which point not to the id but to God. We will deal with some of these later.)

Without repression, the angry impulse would be simply and easily discharged, or at least would be easily recognized and correctly translated. With the defenses, however, that impulse may be transformed and translated into any number of distorted languages or forms. It can be directly mistranslated or dis-placed onto other individuals or objects. The original anger can also be retroflected, or translated back onto the self, so that the person no longer feels angry but depressed (the classic psychoanalytic theory of depression). Or the anger may be projected entirely, or translated in origin onto another person, leaving the projector with feelings of fearful anxiety, since not he but the other person now seems hostile and angry at him. (Incidentally, the type of mistranslation is generally determined by the deep structure of the stage at which the original repression or defense occurred.)

Thus, at this level, the symptom of depression is but a symbol (or metaphor in Lacan’s sense) of the now unconscious or shadow-impulse of anger. To the individual himself, his symptom seems a foreign language altogether, and one which he cannot understand because he has, among other things, forgotten how to translate his symptom. The symptom of depression completely baffles him—he doesn’t know why he is depressed, what causes it, how to control it. It’s all Greek, all foreign language, to him

Yet moment to moment his shadow anger is being transformed and translated into the symp-tom/symbol of depression. He is doing the translating and the transforming, but he has forgotten, first, how he’s doing it, and second, that he’s doing it. He thus lives not as an “accurate” ego-concept, but as a persona dissociated from his shadow-anger. And the persona actually maintains its existence through the mistranslation (conversely, once the mistranslation is cleared up, the exclusive identification with this per-sona dissolves).

Therapy, on this level, thus proceeds in two basic steps: 1) The therapist helps the individual re-translate the symptom/symbol back to its original form. This is called “the interpretation,” and a good therapist is a good interpreter. The therapist might say, for example, “Your feelings of depression are masked feelings of anger and rage”—he translates the foreign language of the symptom back to the original form. He “tells” the individual the “meaning” of his depression (or helps him to discover it for himself), and thus helps him retranslate it in terms more consonant with the deep structure from which the symbols and symptoms originate. 2) The therapeutic translation continues in that fashion (“the working through”) until a genuine and more or less complete transformation of consciousness from the lower to the upper level occurs, so that the symbol becomes sign, and the anger can enter awareness in its original form—which, as it were, dissolves the symptom.

---

Thus far we have examined some of the prominent characteristics of the major stages in the Out-ward Arc of the life cycle, as well as the major symbolic structures which help mediate the transformations upward from stage to stage. At each major stage we have seen a broad but very strong agreement among Eastern and Western psychologists, and we have also seen a general form of development start to become apparent: each stage of development is marked by differentiation, transcendence, operation and integra-tion. It is time now to turn to the Inward Arc—the nivritti marga, the path of understanding, the ascent to Source, the psychology of eternity. We have witnessed the growth from subconsciousness to self-consciousness; we witness now the growth from self-consciousness to superconsciousness.

6 – CENTAURIC REALMS

At the late ego stage (ages 12-21), not only does an individual normally master his various personae, he tends to differentiate from them, disidentify with them, transcend them. He thus tends to inte-grate all his possible personae into the mature ego—and then he starts to differentiate or disidentify with the ego altogether, so as to discover, via transformation, an even higher-order unity than the alto-gether egoic self. And that brings us, right off, to the centaur.

A HIGHER-ORDER UNITY

As consciousness begins to transcend the verbal ego-mind, it can—more or less for the first time—integrate the ego-mind with all the lower levels. That is, because consciousness is no longer identified with any of these elements to the exclusion of any others, all of them can be integrated: the body, the persona, the shadow, the ego—all can be brought into a higher-order integration.

This stage is variously referred to as the “integration of all lower levels” (Sullivan, Grant, and Grant), “integrated” (Loevinger), “self-actualized” (Maslow)). This integrated self, wherein mind and body are harmoniously one, we call the “centaur.”410 The centaur: the great mythological being with animal body and human mind existing in a perfect state of at-one-ment.

AUTONOMY, SELF-ACTUALIZATION, AND INTENTIONALITY

Now many of these existential-humanistic writers have gone to great lengths to explain, explore, and describe the potentials of the total bodymind or centaur. A prime concept in this regard is “self-actualization,” a concept introduced by Goldstein and Karen Horney, and made popular by Maslow and Rogers and Perls and the whole human potentials movement. Rogers’ whole theory, for instance, “focuses renewed attention on the importance of actualizing the full potential of each individual and on the meaning of concepts such as experiencing, organismic valuing, and organismic sensing which the theory holds to be of crucial importance in fulfilling that unique potential” [my ital.]. The implication is that one’s full potential springs from what Rogers calls the “total, ongoing psychophysiological flow” or “total organismic experi-encing,” and not from any aspect or fragment of that flow—ego, body, superego, self-concept, and so on. In our terms, self-actualization is intimately related to the centaur level, and is not directly available to the ego or persona levels.

Rollo May, for instance, states that ”neither the ego nor the body nor the unconscious can be ‘autonomous,’ but can only exist as parts of a totality. And it is in this totality [the centaur] that will and freedom must have their base.” Presumably, then, actual autonomy (and self-actualization) would result, and could only result by definition, with the conscious emergence of this totality—a type of shift of identity from any of the fragments (ego, persona, body) to their prior and higher integration. According to general exis-tential thought, when an individual’s self is felt or prehended as the prior, total being, he assumes—can as-sume—responsibility for his entire being-in-the world. He can, as Sartre put it, choose himself. From that higher, existential centaur, there is no reluctance to the present—no hidden corner of a self that balks at this existence. As such, the individual can start to move on the whole, as a whole—and that is what Leslie Farber has called the “spontaneous will.”

Now I would like to point out that May equates in general terms the spontaneous will of the total self with what is called inten-tionality by the existentialists, which is why he says that intentionality “is the missing link between mind and body.” As I see it, the connection is fairly simple, and is pointed out by May himself: the body tends to be “involuntary” or ”spontaneous,” in the sense that—aside from voluntary muscles—we do not normally and consciously control its processes of circulation, growth, digestion, feel-ing, and all the millions of spontaneous variables that add up to the “natural wisdom of the body.” The ego, on the other hand, we generally assume to be the home of many voluntary, controlled, and purposive activities. The total self, then, as the higher ego-and-body union, is a type of conjunction of both of these experiential realms—the voluntary and the involuntary. Thus, the “spontaneous will”—the “missing link between mind and body”— intentionality.

Intentionality is the spontaneous will of the bodymind centaur, and vision-image or high-phantasy is its language. Rollo May himself says as much: “Imagination is the home of intentionality and fantasy one of its languages. I use fantasy here not meaning something unreal to which we escape, but in its original meaning of phantasitikous, ‘able to represent,’ ‘to make visible.’ Fantasy is the language of the total self.”

Jung, too, was quick to spot the unifying role of the high-phantasy process. “The inner image,” he says, “is a complex factor, compounded of the most varied material from the most varied sources. It is no conglomerate, however, but an integral product, with its own autonomous purpose. The image is a concen-trated expression of the total psychic situation, not merely, nor even preeminently, of unconscious contents pure and simple” [his ital.]. For Jung, then, the complex-image—what I am calling the high-phantasy or vi-sion-image—is an expression of the total being, including both conscious and unconscious aspects (remember that Rollo May said that intentionality is the “dimension which cuts across and includes both conscious and un-conscious”). In Jung’s own words, “the image is equally an expression of the unconscious as of the con-scious situation of the moment. The interpretation of its meaning, therefore, can proceed exclusively neither from the unconscious nor from the conscious, but only from their reciprocal relation.”

THE PRIMARY PROCESS: PREVERBAL

To understand this distinction, let us start with the pre-verbal primary process: On the infantile bodyego or typhon, which is incapable of real language structure and membership cognition, the phantasy process Cor “phantasmic world” as Arieti calls it) is indeed pre-verbal and pre-conceptual, as psychiatrists have pointed out for over half a century. The preverbal primary process is a primitive wish which flour-ishes without any checks, without consensual validation, without any secondary channeling and binding by logic, will, and language— because none of these yet exist. This is the preverbal primary process, rife with wish fulfillment, adualism, and magical-distorted cognitions.

The problem, however, is that psychoanalysis then tends to reduce all symbolism and even all higher modes of thought and being to the body mode of the infantile primary process. A derisive remark was once made against psychoanalysis that, “according to this doctrine, the unconscious sees a penis in every convex object and a vagina or anus in every concave one.” Upon hearing that, the great analyst Fer-enczi replied with straight face: “I find that this sentence well characterizes the facts.”
With that type of approach, no wonder psychoanalysis has such awful difficulties with higher and transcendent modes of being— God Himself is just that great big Breast in the Sky. Actually, Ferenczi had a good point—it just wasn’t the whole point. As he explains, “The child’s mind (and the tendency of the unconscious in adults that survives from it) is at first concerned exclusively with his own body, and later on chiefly with the satisfying of his instincts, with the pleasurable satisfactions that sucking, eating, contact with the genital regions, and the functions of excretion procure for him; what wonder, then, if also his at-tention is arrested above all by those objects and processes of the outer world that on the ground of ever so distant a resemblance remind him of his dearest experiences.”

VISION-IMAGE: TRANSVERBAL

Almost from the very beginning of the scientific approach to psychology/therapy, there has been a continuous but subtle argument over the status of imaginative activity and phantasy: is it all just neurotic daydreaming? or is it a superintuitive mode of knowing that reveals higher levels of reality? Is it archaic? or highly evolved? Is it valuable? or simply escapist and maladjusted?

For my own part, I think both—hence the terms “higher” and “lower” phantasy. Lower-phantasy, as epitomized by the primary process, is probably not much more than a rather sophisticated mode of im-agery shared by numerous other primates—apes can form “paleo-symbols.”7 Being more or less body-bound, even as it images other objects, it tends to hold consciousness in a short-circuited pattern around the bodyself, and tends, in fact, to actually drag consciousness back into the narcissistic body-being. All of that has been very extensively covered, explained, and documented by psychoanalysis, and I mean for all of that to be evoked when we speak of the lower-phantasy, the id-phantasy, the typhonic cognition.
But I am saying that that is true only of the infantile preverbal phantasy, and that the mature and high-phantasy process does not point backwards to instincts but upwards to higher modes of being and awareness which transcend the gross-body orientation.

None of the problems of the preverbal phantasy process that we just listed inhere at the mature centaur. The individual has completed the formation of language and conceptual thought; he has transformed the infantile wishes of the typhon to more social and consensual forms; he has moved out of the infantile embeddedness structures (pleromatic and uroboric)—all of that is now more or less behind him (excluding, of course, fixations). The phantasy process is not now a way to regress to preverbal phantasies, but a way to contact transverbal realities. It serves as a transition (and a symbol of transformation) from the existential realm into the transpersonal. It is an extremely important cognitive mode, not just for the centaur level but for higher levels as well, which is ‘why deep imagery and visualization, but never abstract conceptualization, are used in many forms of transpersonal meditation. For this is the trans-verbal phantasy, and not only can it be pressed to entirely different ends than the preverbal primary process, it is of an entirely different realm.

“Symbolic thinking,” writes Mircea Eliade (in response to the psychoanalytic position), “is not the exclusive privilege of the child, of the poet or of the unbalanced mind: it is consubstantial with human exis-tence, and it comes before language and discursive reason. The symbol reveals certain aspects of reality—the deepest aspects—which defy any other means of knowledge. Images, symbols, and myths are not irre-sponsible creations of the psyche; they respond to a need and fulfill a function, that of bringing to light the most hidden modalities of being.”

Now of course there can be fixation at and regression to the preverbal primary process, with pathological phantasies of infantile uroboric or maternal incest/castration and a heavy accent on instinctual urges and biological relations, sexual and aggressive and cannibalistic. And there can be progressive evolution to the transverbal phantasy process of the mature centaur level. This is not a return to infancy but a rediscovery of that portion of one’s being that begins to go trans-personal and transhistorical, not prehistorical.

And that lost paradise is not prior in time, but prior in depth. In the chapters on the subtle realms, we will explore just this nonhistorical portion of awareness.
What we have seen in the last few sections is that the entire existential/humanistic force—along with the Jungians, the Eastern tradition, Mircea Eliade, etc.—sees vision-image and high-phantasy and in-tentionality as being not a lower but a higher mode of cognition, reaching beyond both the infantile primary process and the secondary process of verbal reasoning. And now, even the most respected of orthodox psychiatrists are starting to say precisely the same thing. S. Arieti, for instance, recently wrote a highly influ-ential book called Creativity: the Magic Synthesis, wherein he cogently argues that creativity—one of the high-est and most valued cognitive processes in humans—is a synthesis of the primary process and the secondary process, and therefore reaches beyond the limitations of both.8 And that, it seems to me, is precisely what we have been talking about with intentionality and vision-image: the magic synthesis, the higher-order synthe-sis and integration of the centaur itself. Thus, all in all I think it will soon be commonplace knowledge that there is preverbal (primary process), and there is verbal (secondary process)—and above and beyond both, as a magic synthesis, there is transverbal: intentionality, high-phantasy, and the vision-image.

PRECONSENSUS AND TRANSCONSENSUS

The infantile bodyego was, recall, a stage wherein body and self or body and ego were undifferenti-ated. The mature centaur or total bodymind is the point where body and ego begin to go into trans-differentiation and high-order integration—that is to say, body and ego-mind, once having been differenti-ated, are now integrated. There are superficial similarities between the predifferentiated bodyego and the transdifferentiated bodymind (or centaur), but the two are entirely different in structure. We have just ex-amined briefly the cognitive processes of each level—but that, in a sense, is just the beginning.

THE IMMEDIATE PRESENT

To continue the general discussion: we saw that the infant bodyego was only aware of—and was lit-erally confined to—the immediate here and now. Temporal sequences completely escape it, events just “seem to happen” (Sullivan—the parataxic mode). Most humanistic therapies place extreme stress on the “immediate here and now,”292 and this has lead almost all orthodox psychologists and psychiatrists to the conclusion that these humanistic therapies are really throwbacks to the infantile typhon, that they are re-gressive and represent nothing more than “acting out.” No doubt some of the more “pop therapies” are just that; but the psychiatric conclusion in general misses the entire point. At the mature centaur level, the immediate and vivid present is indeed the dominant mode of time, but the individual now has complete access to the entire conventional world of extended temporal realities as well. He is not confined to the present (like the child bodyego), he is simply grounded in it; and he is not ignorant of historical time, he is just no longer bound to it (like the ego). The typhon is presequential time; the centaur is transsequential time. The former is ignorant of the world of linear time; the latter is beginning to transcend it. Naturally, then, they appear similar—but how different in fact they are, and how disastrous it is to equate them. Once linear time has been created (again, a necessary and utterly desirable step), then it can be transcended, and this is not regression but evolution.

Since the mode of time of the existential level is the immediate, vivid, and living present, many cen-taur therapists use this as one of the new translations given to the client. That is (in addition to some of the other centaur translations we have discussed, such as vision-image and intentionality), the translation of “seeing all reality as present” is commonly used (as in Gestalt Therapy—”only the now is real”). The individ-ual learns to see thoughts of yesterday as present occurrences, and anticipations of tomorrow as present activi-ties (incidentally, this was St. Augustine’s theory of time; that the past was only memory and the future only anticipation, both being present facts). To the extent that the individual succeeds globally in this translation, he then transforms to existential time; the whole abstract and ghostly world of linear time—now that it has served its purpose—collapses into the intensity of the present. The individual simply continues this transla-tion (the “working through”) until the transformation is more or less complete and he is generally grounded in, but not confined to, the living present.

The ability to live fully in the present is a prime characteristic of the centaur as I have described it, and so it is not surprising that almost every developmental psychologist who has studied “highly devel-oped” personalities—and the centaur is a highly developed being— has reported that “toleration for ambi-guity and ability to live intensely in the present are aspects of the highest stages [of growth].”

Is this then regression? I don’t see how that conclusion can be soberly maintained. Rather, whereas the bodyego’s present was a presequence present, the centaur’s present is a transsequence one: from above and beyond the temporal sequence, the self surveys the flow of linear events. It can see the past and the future as present thoughts from the present. It can still see the past and future, still. remember yesterday and plan for tomorrow, but it can see them as movements of the present, a perception fantastically beyond the capacities of the typhon. The infantile bodyego can only see the present; the centaur can see all time from the present. Whatever else might be said, these are two entirely different modes of present-centered aware-ness.

SPONTANEITY

We also saw that the bodyego is dominated by its “impulsiveness” or its “uncontrolled spontaneity” or its “immediate discharge.” In the mature centaur, this “immediate discharge” appears as spontaneity and impulse expression—precisely what we have seen as the “spontaneous will” or intentionality. And again, studies of impulse expression and spontaneity show that the child and the most developed adults share these traits, whereas the individuals in the intermediate stages (the average ego/persona realms) do not. Every-one agrees that the child (as bodyego) is spontaneous and impulsive, but “the increase in spontaneity, in being at home with one’s impulses, is [also] a mark of the highest stages of. . . development, as many expo-sitions agree.” Now this means one of two things; either the most highly developed adults are regressing to infancy and the preegoic-control stages, or the most developed adults are progressing beyond the rigid controls of the ego to the transegoic-control stages. Naturally, my own opinion is that the infant bodyego has a pre-verbal, precontrol, preinhibition spontaneity, whereas the mature centaur evidences a transverbal, trans-control, transinhibition freedom. But let us finish this discussion by noting, with Loevinger, that this fact “does not justify the conclusion that intermediate stages of [membership and egoic] rigid controls can be bypassed.”

SUMMARY: THE CENTAUR

There are a few final things that I would like to say about the peculiar role and nature of the exis-tential or centauric level in the overall context of the spectrum of consciousness. As we have seen, al-though this level has access to language, membership-cognition, egoic logic and will, it can and does reach beyond them, to a pristine sensory awareness and ongoing psychophysiological flow, as well as to the high-phantasy process of intuition and intentionality. This level is above language, logic, and culture—yet it is not preverbal and precultural but transverbal and transcultural.
And here is the point I want to emphasize: while this level is trans-verbal, it is not trans-personal. That is, while it transcends language, gross concepts, and the gross ego, it does not transcend existence, personal orientation, or waking psychophysiological awareness (see Fig. 3). It is the last stage dominated by normal forms of space and time—but those forms are still there.

The existential centaur, then, is not only the higher-order integration of ego, body, persona, and shadow, it is also the major transition towards the higher subtle and transpersonal realms of being. (Notice that Stan Grof’s research seems to support this thesis very strongly). This is so in both the centaur’s “supersensory” modality, and in its cognitive process of intuition, intentionality, and vision-image. They are all intimations of the higher realms of transcendence and integration.

7 – SUBTLE REALMS

THE NIRMANAKAYA: THE GROSS REALMS

So far, we have seen these major levels of increasing differentiation, integration, and transcendence: the simple and primitive fusion-unity of the pleroma and uroboros; the next higher-order unity of the biological bodyself; then the mental-persona, which, if integrated with the shadow, yields the higher-order unity of the total ego; and finally the centaur, which is a higher-order integration of the total ego with all preceding and lower levels—uroboros, body, persona, and shadow.

The gross realm, the Nirmanakaya—the realm of ordinary waking consciousness—is simply composed of all those levels which are based on, or centered around, or take as their final referent the gross physical body and its constructs of ordinary space and time. The physical or axial body itself is called the “gross level,” and all aspects of the psyche that reflect this level are called the “gross-reflecting mind” (or just the “gross mind” for short). Taken together, they constitute the overall gross realm—the gross bodymind of ego, body, persona, shadow, and centaur.

But is there “any further”? According to the mystics—whom we agreed at the very beginning of this book to adopt as models of higher evolution—indeed there is. “The ordinary man,” says Aurobindo, “lives in his mind and senses [the gross bodymind] as they are touched by a world which is outside him, outside his consciousness. When the consciousness subtilises, it begins to come into contact with things in a much more direct way, not only with their forms and outer impacts but with what is inside them, but still the range may be small. But the consciousness can also widen and begin to be first in direct contact with a universe of range of things in the world, then to contain them as it were—as it is said to see the world in oneself—and to be in a way identified with it. To see all things in the self and the self in all things . . . that is universalization.” That is, there are higher and higher orders of unity and identity and integration, lead-ing finally to universal unity itself and the Supreme Identity.

And the first stage of the beyond-mind, the realms beyond the gross, is simply the world of the subtle sphere.

THE SAMBHOGAKAYA: THE SUBTLE REALM

For indications as to the nature of any higher levels of consciousness, beyond the ego and centaur, we have to turn to the great mystic-sages, Eastern and Western, Hindu and Buddhist, Christian and Is-lamic. It is somewhat surprising, but absolutely significant, that all of these otherwise divergent schools of thought agree rather unanimously as to the nature of the “farther reaches of human nature.” There are in-deed, these traditions tell us, higher levels of consciousness—as far above the ego-mind as the ego-mind is above the typhon. And they look like this:

Beginning with (to use the terms of yogic chakra psychology), the sixth chakra, the ajna chakra, consciousness starts to go transpersonal. Consciousness is now going transverbal and transpersonal. It be-gins to enter the true “subtle sphere,” known in Hinduism as the suksma-sarira, in Buddhism as the Sambhogakaya (the technical term I have adopted). This process quickens and intensifies as it reaches the high-est chakra—called the sahasrara—and then goes supramen-tal as it enters the seven higher stages of con-sciousness beyond the sahasrara. The ajna, the sahasrara, and the seven higher levels are, on the whole, referred to as the subtle realm.

For convenience sake, however, we speak of the “low-subtle” and the “high-subtle.” The low-subtle is epitomized by the ajna chakra— the “third eye,” which is said to include and dominate both astral and psychic events. That is, the low-subtle is “composed” of the astral and psychic planes of conscious-ness. Whether one believes in these levels or not, this is where they are said to exist (or rather, where they are said to reach maturity).
The astral level includes, basically, out-of-body experiences, certain occult knowledge, the auras, true magic, “astral travel,” and so on. The psychic plane includes what we would call “psi” phenomenon: ESP, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, and so on. Many individuals can occasionally “plug in” to this plane, and evidence random or higher-than-random psychic abilities. But to actually enter this plane is to more or less master psychic phenomena, or at least certain of them. Patanjali has an entire Chapter of his Yoga Sutras devoted to this plane and its structures (which are siddhis, or paranormal powers). I should also mention that most re-searchers in the field of parapsychology feel that the astral and psychic realms are really the same body, and so in general we speak of this realm as the astral-psychic.

THE HIGH-SUBTLE

The high-subtle begins at the sahasrara and extends into seven (or more) levels of extraordinarily high-order transcendence, differentiation, and integration. I am not going to present an exhaustive break-down of this realm—the reader is instead referred to the works of Kirpal Singh, who deals with this entire realm—of nada and shabd yoga—in a brilliant fashion. I will simply say that this realm is universally and consistently said to be the realm of high religious intuition and literal inspiration; of bijamantra; of symbolic visions; of blue, gold, and white light; of audible illuminations and brightness upon brightness; it is the realm of higher presences, guides, angelic forms, ishtadevas, and dhyani-buddhas; all of which—as we will soon explain—are simply high archetypal forms of one’s own being (although they initially and necessarily appear “other”). It is the realm of Sar Shabd, of Brahma the Controller, of God’s archetypes, and of Sat Shabd—and beyond these four realms to three higher and totally indescribable levels of being.

The point is simply that consciousness, in a rapid ascent, is differentiating itself entirely from the ordinary mind and self, and thus can be called an “overself” or “overmind”—almost like calling the ego an “overbody” or “over-instincts,” since the mental-ego transcends and reaches over the simple feelings and perceptions of the typhon. The overmind simply embodies a transcendence of all mental forms, and dis-closes, at its summit, the intuition of That which is above and prior to mind, self, world, and body—something which, as Aquinas would have said, all men and women would call God.

THE SUBTLE REALMS: SUMMARY

The whole point would be that in the subtle realm—and especially in the high-subtle—a very high-order differentiation and transcendence is occurring. Mediated through high-archetypal symbolic forms— the deity forms, illuminative or audible—consciousness is following a path of transformation upward which leads quite beyond the gross bodymind. This transformation upward, like all the others we have studied, involves the emergence (via remembrance) of a higher-order deep structure, followed by the shifting of identity to that higher-order structure and the differentiation or disidentification with the lower structures (in this case, the ego-mind). This amounts to a transcendence of the lower-order structures (the gross mind and body), which thus enables consciousness to operate on and integrate all of the lower-order structures.

This, however, is not a loss of consciousness but an intensification of consciousness through a higher-order development, evolution, transcendence and identification: “The ishtadeva does not disappear into us; we as individuals disappear into the ishtadeva, which now remains alone. Yet there is no loss of our indi-vidual being as we blend into the object of our contemplation, for it has been our own archetype from the beginning, the source of this fragmentary reflection we call our individual personality.”
The whole point is that the gross ego has not simply swallowed the high Archetypal Form, but that the prior nature of the ego is revealed to be that Form, so that consciousness reverts to—or remembers—its own prior and higher identity: “We remain now as a transcendental center of consciousness expressed through the Form or formless Presence of the ishtadeva. We are now experiencing the life of the ishtadeva from within. We are consciously meeting and becoming [via higher identification] ourselves in our arche-typal and eternal nature.” Such, then, is one form of true transformation or development into the subtle realm, the discovery or remembrance of a higher-order unity that is now approaching Unity—that enters the transpersonal sphere of superconciousness and discloses only Archetypal Essence.

8 – CAUSAL AND ULTIMATE REALMS

THE DHARMAKAYA: THE CAUSAL REALMS

As the process of transcendence and integration continues, it discloses even higher-order unities, leaciing, consumately, to Unity itself.

The low-causal, which classically is revealed in a state of consciousness known as savikalpa samadhi, represents the pinnacle of God-consciousness, the final and highest abode of Ishvara, the Cre-atrix of all realms. This represents the culmination of events which began in the high-subtle. In the high-subtle, recall, the self was dissolved or reabsorbed into the archetypal deity, as that deity—a deity which from the beginning has always been one’s own Self and highest Archetype.
Now at the low-causal, that deity-Archetype itself condenses and dissolves into final-God, which is here seen as an extraordinarily subtle audible-light or bija-mantra from which the individual ishtadeva, yi-dam, or Archetype emerged in the first place. Final-God is simply the ground or essence of all the arche-typal and lesser-god manifestations which were evoked—and then identified with—in the subtle realms. In the low-causal, all of these archetypal Forms simply reduce to their Source in final-God, and thus, by the very same token and in the very same step, one’s own Self is here shown to be that final-God, and con-sciousness itself thus transforms upwards into a higher-order identity with that Radiance. Such, in brief, is the low-causal, the ultimate revelation of final-God in Perfect Radiance and Release.

THE HIGH-CAUSAL

Beyond the low-causal, into the high-causal, all manifest forms are so radically transcended that they no longer need even appear or arise in Consciousness. This is total and utter transcendence and re-lease into Formless Consciousness, Boundless Radiance. There is here no self, no God, no final-God, no subjects, and no thingness, apart from or other than Consciousness as Such.

SVABHAVIKAKAYA: THE FINAL TRANSFORMATION