There Is Work To Be Done

Tony Crisp

We Need to Clear out or Transform Old Social and Instinctive Patterns

Although we are now used to thinking of our body as an end result of evolutionary processes, we may seldom think of our mind or personality as also being shaped by evolution. To explain what is meant it helps to think of something like the female pelvis and childbearing in terms of evolution. Not only has the female pelvis much enlarged compared with that of early primates, but also the upright posture has added complications of supporting the developing child, and maintaining circulation. The breasts have also enlarged as females maintained sexual availability throughout their actively sexual years. So present situations in the body have arisen from the past. In terms of the mind and personality, early hunter gatherers had a very different mind-set than the present educated human adult. Nevertheless, just as early hominids started the move toward the erect posture, and so laid the foundations for present body form, so our ancient forebears laid a mental foundation for our psychological structure and patterns today. An obvious one is the terror of abandonment felt by children. This inbuilt emotional response is built upon millions of years during which abandonment meant death. To lose ones parents usually meant we faced death. Early tribal groups and hunter gatherers also started the process of electing or following a leader, a tendency still enormously potent in many modern people. During the development of such fundamental traits there was also the inclination in many groups to be ruled in a male dominated way. But there are yet more subtle ways in which our forebears left their mark in our present personality or mind. Julian Jaynes in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, or Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke in his book Cosmic Consciousness, both show how the human mind or personality has developed through various evolutionary stages to reach our modern perception of the world. Bucke breaks it down into three stages. These being Simple Consciousness such as an animal has, lacking any sense of self awareness: Self Consciousness such as most of us experience today, giving us a sense of being an independent and self aware person: Cosmic Consciousness, which brings to the person both a sense of personal identity, but also an aware connection of being an intrinsic part of the cosmos. Both Jaynes and Bucke point out that the evolutionary shift in how the personality experiences itself, also radically shifts the way the person experiences and sees the world. For instance, children raised by animals instead of human parents, do not develop a sense of self. They have no self awareness, no sense of time, but exist instead in a feeling or awareness of connection with the natural world around them. See Animal Children. and Feral Children. Writing about such findings Dr. Jan Strydom & Susan du Plessis say that: If one reads these stories, one simply has to agree with Ashley Montagu, who stated in his book On Being Human that being human is not a status with which, but to which, one is born. While every creature that is classified physically as man is thereby called Homo sapiens, no such creature is really human until it exhibits the behavior characteristics of a human being. He, however, adds that one cannot deny the status of being human to a newborn baby because it cannot talk, cannot walk erect or reveal any of the other behavior characteristics of human beings. The way in which he reconciles this apparent contradiction with his previous statement is by pointing to the promise the baby shows of being able to develop the behavior characteristics of human beings. The wonderful thing about a baby is its promise, not its performance — a promise that can only come true with the required help and assistance. The development of Homo sapiens, however great the promise might be, into a human being with behavior characteristics of human beings, requires more than just being kept alive physically. A child only becomes a human being thanks to education. The essence of Montagu's message is that being human must be learned. Viewed differently, it can be stated that there is nothing that any human being knows, or can do, that he has not learned. This of course excludes natural body functions, such as breathing, as well as the reflexes, for example the involuntary closing of the eye when an object approaches it. This is a characteristic, which very clearly distinguishes man from the animals. See: Right to Read. What is not mentioned in this discussion, but hinted at in Bucke's listing of the three states, is that the promise a baby has in becoming a human being, is shaped almost entirely by what is passed on to it by its parents, teachers and culture. This is an incredibly important point in considering the evolution of mind or personality. The new born baby, if raised by a wolf mother, becomes a wolf. It does not become a human person. If it is raised by a bear it becomes a bear. If it is raised by an ignorant and brutal mother and culture it becomes an ignorant and brutal person. If it is raised with love and nourished emotionally and intellectually, it becomes someone capable of love and high intelligence. However, there is still something that is not said here. It is that as a human baby we are potentially anything, and being raised as a human being might be as limiting to our potential as being raised a wolf would be in regard to our potential to learn language. This may sound a silly idea, but if the baby were raised by a being superior to humans, the likelihood is that the baby would become a fuller type of being. In a fictional way, Robert Heinlein explores this in his book Stranger in a Strange Land. The point being made is that what you are today is largely due not to some innate pattern within you, not to something that is intrinsically you, but to the shaping forces of the language you learned, the attitudes and mind-set, and to the viewpoints or worldview of the family and culture you were raised in. Of course, you are also dragging what we might call an 'evolutionary tail' with you - certain predispositions due to long exposure to the physical and social environment. But an enormous part of your nature is patterns of behaviour, viewpoints and responses to situations you absorbed in infancy and since. These were programmed in and can to some degree be programmed out. It is true to say you are a VICTIM of the culture you were raised in and suffer its crippling limitations. An oak tree shaped by wind and enviroment.

Patterns such as intolerance of other human beings because of their skin colour, religion or opinions; going to war rather than confronting differences in a creative way; the desecration of our own host - the earth; the carrying forward of negative behavioural responses for generations - these are not patterns worth keeping. They need to be transformed.

When a person opens to and explores their innate potential, the process or processes that lie behind ones ability to grow beyond what one is at present capable of, often bring about a new condition, a new being. In fact the old myths of death and rebirth are very relevant in this. A new you emerges, sometimes uncomfortably due to the enormous changes incurred. And this appears to arise from the core of Life process itself. It is as if Life has a pattern it is expressing - a pattern that your conscious self was not aware of and had not the skill to imagine or create. I call this the New Pattern. It is something I sense is emerging in many people today. My speculation is that Life is already preparing many people for changes in the world that are developing beneath the surface of what we know and can observe. See Life Stream

I know this sounds as if what I am calling Life has a sort of fatherly eye on us and is offering an advanced pattern of human personality if we are willing to accept it. As far as I can gain insight into the process, it is more complex than that. Your conscious human personality is only a tiny part of your whole being. Consciousness is a fraction of your total self. Underneath that, spreading into areas of mind that are diffuse and universal, your personality connects with a much wider sentience. This collective unconscious, as Carl Jung called it, is constantly absorbing human experience. J. B. Priestley called it the White Flame of Life (See Priestley's description). As far as I can understand, this core sentience learns. It constantly takes in the vast ocean of human experience and summarises it, as Priestly suggests. From this summary arises possibilities. In fact it is almost as if part of the action is a probability generator, a tendency to move toward emerging probabilities or trends. So the new pattern is possibly emerging from collective human experience, and the direction and vision emerging from that.

As far as personal experience is concerned, this new pattern comes about partly by a transformation of your old or present behaviour and responses. It comes through a healing of childhood trauma, a gradual entrance into your earliest memories and experiences in a process of re-evaluation and reprogramming. But it digs even further back than that, transforming the ancient heritage you carry with you; taking all the lessons you have gathered and finding their essential power relevant to today. The emergence of the new pattern is also a meeting with the many values, responses and needs we hold in our relationships with each other, and particularly with those we love deeply. In many cases it enters into the way you work, into the way you live your life and into your creativity and what you put out into the world and other people's lives.

The new pattern emerges out of your relationship with your core, as explained above.

The Dark Mass of Negative Past we Carry Can Now be Dealt With

There have always been methods and pathways leading toward personal transformation. Although healing techniques have had a bias toward physical injuries and ills, they have also always included methods dealing with psychological ills and toward personal growth. In most cultures religion and its systems dealt with ways of dealing with the heavy load of darkness an individual might be carrying. In most societies, the move toward, or the search for what was called the 'spiritual' life was the pathway to such healing or change.

It is a generalisation, but in the past religious beliefs pointed followers away from the world, away from everyday life. There was an enormous motivation to leave behind the everyday, and enter a monastery, a convent, become a hermit, or renounce the world in some way. In the Christian tradition it was gradually taught that everyday life, sexuality, was sinful and in some way denied the person from transformation.

During the last century an enormous shift took place as these old values were re-examined and a whole new realm of experience discovered and explored. I am referring to the entrance into the unconscious through using dreams, psychoanalysis, psychoactive drugs, and new approaches to meditation and working with the body. This development of psychotherapy had never been a feature of past cultures. Nowhere in ancient texts can you find a description of dealing with the birth trauma during meditation or a spiritual experience. Nowhere can you find mention of healing childhood pains and cleaning the unconscious of its store of past darkness and family disfunction. Nowhere was there a mention of dealing with sexual abuse as a child.

In saying this I am not suggesting that any one school of thought, such as Freudian or Jungian, has in it the completeness that is emerging as Western thought and practice develops. Freud never really integrated the levels of awareness beyond the usual waking personality. He never acknowledged that the human personality emerges from something that existed before it - a core life process. It is what Jung called the Self. But Jung nowhere writes about dealing with infantile traumas, or the cleansing of the huge backlog of misery and inherited life lessons we all carry. It is only the emerging therapists, teachers and healers who are integrating the wide spectrum of human experience, and helping people to deal with it. In their own life they demonstrate the merging of the essence of East and West, the integration of the everyday with the transcendent core of their being. These are the true healers and social activists of our time. Quietly and persistently they are changing the world. See: Cultural Creatives and The Great Work.

In this new approach, nothing needs to be killed or denied. There is no attempt to kill the human personality, the sexual urges, or the dynamics of everyday existence. Instead everything is brought to the process of transformation. It is thereby uplifted and renewed. Strangely this is very much the message found in the New Testament where we are told to judge not, to turn the other cheek, to love all. If these are applied to our own inner multitude of drives, animal instincts and multiple personality traits, they are profoundly transforming. See Religion Society and Identity.

The Imprisoned Splendour Within Can be Released

Lyall Watson, in his wonderful book Lightning Bird, writes that, "It is no longer possible to deny that our thoughts and desires might influence our environment. The most recent cosmologies all include consciousness as an active participating factor in reality. The new explanations of how the world works are strangely like the old beliefs of non literate people everywhere. ... It seems that merely by admitting the possibility of unlikely events, you increase the probability of their occurrence."

Perhaps ancient cultures didn't put it in quite those words, but they all agreed that consciousness or awareness is a fundamental fact of the universe. They all believed that the universe, the environment, living creatures, respond to how you live your life, and what you put out to others, or request.

The Naskapi Indians of Labrador call this responsive aspect of the universe Mista'peo or Great Man. Writing about the Naskapi, Marie von Franz, in the book Man and His Symbols, says, "... the major obligation of an individual Naskapi is to follow the instructions given by his dreams, and then to give permanent form to their contents in art. Lies and dishonesty drive the Great Man away from one's inner realm, whereas generosity and love of one's neighbours and of animals attract him and give him life. Dreams give the Naskapi complete ability to find his way in life, not only in the inner world but also in the outer world of nature. They help him to foretell the weather and give him invaluable guidance in his hunting, upon which his life depends."

There has perhaps never been a culture, apart from modern Western society, that did not believe each of us have access to a great treasure, a pearl of great price, an imprisoned splendour. We have arrived at this strange paradoxical state of not believing we are part and parcel of the universe, even though latest scientific findings and human experience show we are, because of the belief, now outdated, that the atom was the fundamental particle in the universe. That belief seemed to prove that there could be nothing other than material objects - a clockwork universe without a soul, without fundamental awareness and therefore without the ability to respond other than in a mechanical way.

However, Dr. Shafica Karagulla, in her book Breakthrough to Creativity describes her observation and study of professionals in such work as medicine, business and engineering, accessing information in a way that leaps beyond the limitations of the senses. Dr. Shafica was a pioneering physician and neuropsychiatrist who after a training in psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh, went to Canada to work with Dr. Wilder Penfield of the Montreal Neurological Institute. Later she became an assistant professor in psychiatry at the University of New York. So she is not a lightweight in observing the human condition and potential. The point she, along with so many others make, is that we each have vast resources of creativity, of intuition and perception that most of us never tap.

Now is the time for us to break through the barriers in the way of a wider life. It is not enough to simply work to earn a wage and be a successful earner. There is more to life that that. It is possible to open to your core self and discover who you really are, and what it is you can most creatively do with your life. To paraphrase what a friend recently wrote to me, "What's the sense in continuing building competence in any or all other fields and graduating from school having no clue as to who you are or what you are doing on earth? It's like expecting yourself to fill in a picture of which the framework, the outline, is missing - shit, there's not even a canvas to paint on. For suggestions on how to experience your core self see: Core Experience; African Dancing; Contraction - Expansion; Your Inner Child; Extending Your Awareness; Core Consciousness; Learning to See our Core Self.

A New Type of Human Being is Ready to be Born in You

You have already been born once. When the sperm and ovum came together that your body developed from, the formation of a new human being was under way. But is is a part of life to have successive new aspects of oneself emerge. Perhaps the most dramatic and personallly remembered experience of this is when we enter puberty. We emerge from this as a new person with many new ways of experiencing and acting in the world and relationships. In Hinduism some of those who have passed through puberty are called twice born - once from the womb and the second from the internal transformation.

There can be another equally dramatic change that can occur in the way we experience ourselves and relate to the world. Throughout history different cultures have called this 'rebirth'. In most cases this has been a teaching or belief of cultural religion. But that is because most profound psychological insights were expressed within the teachings of the cultural religious beliefs. This change can also be seen and understood from a psychobiological viewpoint as well. For instance in psychological terms Carl Jung said that if we try to see the complete human person, only a fraction of who they are is conscious. This is obvious when we consider that we are not aware of most vital functions. Also, the process that grows us from conception onwards is completely outside our awareness. As I have written elsewhere:

That mysterious and wonderful process of life that brought you to birth occurred quite without your conscious effort or participation. You share that journey from conception to birth in kinship with all the other life forms that exist with you on this earth. But unlike most of the other creatures you developed self-awareness and can look back on your origins. Nevertheless, even though you have attained some level of self-awareness, the process that brought you into being still functions within you to continue your existence. Without it you would immediately cease to be. In fact most of the vital processes within you still occur without any conscious effort or participation on your part. Your ego, your conscious self, is a tiny and almost insignificant part of the process. However, what you do, what you think and what you feel can enhance or interfere with that core process.

The possibility of a new birth, a new level of human experience, comes about when you open yourself to the core process continually active in your life. This can be looked at from many different standpoints.

1. If we look at it from the standpoint of human awareness, we can easily see that a great deal of our life is spent in unconsciousness or sleep. So one way of understanding the new birth is to see it as an emergence from the deep waters of sleep or a mass of ones inner content. Literally it can be seen as a birth into a new awareness, one that integrates what was unconscious yet vital to your existence.
2. From a biological sense it can be seen as an expansion of perception from the physical senses, into levels of awareness developed in past ages of evolution, but buried or made unconscious by the development of language.
3. From a viewpoint that accepts we are a body mind and spirit - i.e. a body existing as a physical object within the limitations of time and space. This body needs to feed upon physical substance and is constantly changing. The soul is your individual awareness, personal experiences and memories. Just as the body feeds upon physical substance, so the soul feeds upon experiences gained through the physical senses, and although the sense impressions are fleeting and changing, the soul gives them a level of permanence in memory and understanding. Your spirit is a permanent and universal level of energy/consciousness that is fundamental to all manifestations occurring in the universe. It feeds upon the understanding gained by the soul in its life experience, but transforms it into more universal insights. So from this standpoint the new birth would occur when the personality or soul recognises that there is something more permanent than physical impressions it can allow into its experience. When it does this by opening to the spirit, a transformation takes place in which the soul realises its connection with the universal, with the eternal, and with a vast gathered knowledge.

Summarising this, Alvin Pitcher says "The third birth is a birth into acceptance of our connectedness with the rest of the world, human and non-human, at a deep level, even though at the empirical level we act and feel unconnected." See: Special Times - Tools

See also: Varieties of Rebirth; Earthkeeping News; Roberto Assagioli; The Core Experience..

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