Chapter 1

I want you to imagine a gigantic elephant like one you have seen in photos or at a zoo. "Then let your fantasy picture many blind men and women being led up from a cave where they have been kept for their entire lives, rather similar to the one in Plato's allegory. Now let's lead these persons in our imaginations to the elephant, telling them that if they can know what an elephant is or is like, they will understand reality and what the universe and God actually are.

Fortunately every person in the story here discovers precisely what the elephant and therefore reality and God are. One person grabs onto the tail and pontifically (owing to his experience) exclaims that an elephant is like a rope. As he rhapsodizes on the elephant and God, he spins out an authoritative tale of the elephant, and he gains many other blind followers who not only are persuaded by his eloquence but also take hold of the tail themselves, and in so doing, experience a religious epiphany, which they use later as grounds for conversion of others to their "true" point of view.

These "tight-tail holders" are amazed to hear, however, another man tell them that the elephant is like a tobacco leaf as he directs his sightless eyes towards an ear. He is gratified to hear immediate reinforcement from another man who happens to be holding the other ear. The controversy heightens when a woman compares the elephant to a tree limb, holding the trunk; she is congratulated about the simile regarding a tree, but at least four persons claim the elephant to be more like a tree trunk, all clinging tenaciously to each of the four legs. The confusion is later exaggerated when either another elephant, a female, or an imagined one is brought in; this elephant is described in terms of the vulva, while another group vociferously maintains that the only real elephant is like a penis; and so on....

This ancient Chinese parable has often been used to discuss each person, each philosophy, each sect, etc., asserting reality, or at least paths to reality--which perhaps may be God, nirvana, ideal marriage, excellent sexual relations, I-Thou encounter, therapy, religion, meditations, ad infinitum.

You and I are no different, though we might carefully try to exempt ourselves from those who are blind around ourselves. In fact you may see me sitting atop the elephant's head, pointing to a spot between the eyes, and saying the whole elephant is within that "third elephant eye"--the macrocosm within the microcosm; the whole elephant exists within the mind or soul of the elephant.

This point of view may be considered transpersonal, or idealistic philosophy. My position in my blindness is that the universe is only true in the spirit. This viewpoint sees a person's body, emotions, attitudes, and experiences as first found and contained within the person's mind, which in turn is found in the person's soul.

My point, however, is that a person's concept of reality and life in general is determined by the nature of his/ her elephant construct. However, if by the willingness to admit that other elephant constructs exist and might be equally "right," a person holds on to his or her "tail" lightly so to be able even to take up another part of the elephant. One takes a new paradigm or worldview. A person then is able to grow into a new construct of the elephant that fits his or her needs. Tight tail-holding yields limitation and may stifle the growth that occurs through what Wickes calls "god-forming images" [xii]:

The archetypal world is a magnetic center underlying the world of images. This world of image is the world of early man, of the child, of the still unawakened adult. Most powerful is the image of the god--that is, the secretly worshipped power

which holds dominion over his inner life. This may be very good or very evil.... [The] ancient gods of cruelty, brutality, and lust for power may arise as forces with which man must reckon as existent within himself. [These "gods" usually determine] his choices. He meets this unknown god on every level and, as he becomes himself created and transformed by his inner and outer life experiences, this god image also is transformed: a new god tells him of his own life's meaning, a new urge to consciousness impels him forward.

To trace the history of a man or a people we study these god-forming images. The beliefs, the passions that are the dynamism of man's inner life, the forces that impel toward life or death, move not only in the psyche of individual man, but in the life and death of societies. One cannot enslave a man or a nation until one has destroyed the god image that rules him. When his image is captured, his power of choice is destroyed [Wickes, xii; my italics].

In other words Wickes' god image is the elephant construct, that is, any paradigm, 'Weltanschauung, philosophy of life, transpersonal viewpoint. Such a view includes also one's self-image, assumptions of reality (for example regarding gravity, the solar system, telepathic experiences, etc.), humanity's qualities of evil, life after death, purposes on earth, and so on.

Further on I want to go more into detail about the nature of personal elephants on the level of the god image that each person finds welling up from within and places upon the outer. Each person's life moves through the mutual conflict and challenge between the daily consciousness of the ego and the levels of the unconscious that are impressed upon the ego through archetypes, symbols, and mythic images.

Such interfaces between the ego and the Supraconscious (the image deriving from the core of the ego and called the soul in religious terms) leads to dilemmas which are both personal and transpersonal. I propose to treat those dilemmas which confront a person's transpersonal needs, rather than take up the conflicts and confusions that accost a human being in the everyday world.

My assumption here is that the daily reality of choice is shaped by the inner reality, the transpersonal of the higher unconscious, and the complexes of the middle and lower unconscious, to be discussed later; to this point the Gestalt therapist, Latner writes:

Inner conflicts are splits in the unity of the self, battles over who we are, what we are to do, and how we are to do it. When they exist, they make it impossible for us to grapple with ... [outer] problems with facility. These are the reasons for the existence of Gestalt therapy, and it is limited to them.

This means the self is the focus of attention in Gestalt therapy [Latner, 131].

The self and its dilemmas of higher aspiration, identity, and meaning, for example, form the subject matter of this inquiry.

I intend to show not just the typical transpersonal dilemmas but also how a person creates them, what approaches might be taken to resolve them, and what sort of processes of living a person might use to develop and enhance "the good life."

My thesis--that the person, in whole or in part, creates her or his entire life and all the experiences therein--leads to the resultant conclusion that a person might create experiences that reflect growth and positiveness, rather than games and negativity.

While most of what is presented here grows out of humanistic, Jungian, and transpersonal psychologies, one additional "tail" or frame of reference or "map of consciousness" is the use of astrology for therapeutic and transpersonal purposes.

The issue in dilemmas and all of life to a large degree has to do with choices. I want to demonstrate the humanistic and transpersonal uses of astrology for determining the nature of the outer and inner psychic factors contributes a huge amount to the counseling, and growth of a person.

A final intention is to demonstrate the astrological approach in concert with other methods which can help a person live in a holistic, thus also transpersonal, manner.

* * *

The human condition, as I introduced so far, is typically characterized by a split in the psyche between all that is conscious and all that is unconscious, the latter of which constitutes the greater portion of the iceberg under the water of awareness. Depth psychology has told us for this entire century that the unconscious dominates and regulates the conditions and activities of the ego and its highly limited consciousness. However, the ego experiences itself usually as the sole participant and legislator of its world while also paying just due to the external forces beyond its control, such as floods, another assaulting individual, a cruel mother-in-law, hard financial times, and on indefinitely. The ego sees appearances, by which it either inflates or diminishes its self-esteem.

While psychoanalysis, both Freudian and Jungian, and similar approaches like primal therapy repeatedly demonstrate the force of the unconscious as the major controlling factor over the ego and its paltry consciousness, other groups like behaviorists and certain naive humanistic psychologists refuse to pay attention to any aspect other than the "here and now" of current consciousness, seeking to alter behavior, assertiveness, and attitudes in life without incorporating within their approaches the inner levels of our elephant.

They may be compared to those blind individuals who describe the elephant by the huge belly and flanks of that great animal's body. They feel that if a proper goad is used, the elephant can be made to acquiesce, as well as reveal its personal secrets of the universe.

I hold that a holistic approach to consciousness must include concomitantly an approach to the unconscious because the various levels of the unconscious direct our dreams; habits; choices of residence, mates, lifestyle; and perhaps the vast majority of everything we do and think and feel. In addition we are required to include the unconscious because we in fact are studying everything that is really who we are--that which makes up all of the psyche.

But the main reason is that the unconscious contains, is, the very ground and source of our being--in short our whole elephant we generally refer to as "God."

Since the term and concept of "God" is such a sticky one, let us stay with the "unconscious," the "inner reality," or the "inner source" [Emmons], or again our "elephant." I have long taken the transpersonal orientation that all the activities of the ego with which we are so familiar in our daily lives are merely manifestations of our unconscious (and in some cases conscious) attempts to maintain the perfect understanding and responses to that inner reality. Even the most unconfident of people still holds to his tail so as to preclude, perhaps for his entire life, any course of action other than the one he is committed to.

The celebrated novelist, Katherine Anne Porter, however, has one of her characters in Ship of Fools say, "I haven't met many people in my life who have committed themselves to anything." The disparity between her statement, which is true, and my statement, which is also true, is the same problem which plagues a great deal of human communication about personal reflections.

We are not talking about the same "selves." The inner self may refuse to commit to a person or cause, but his ego is fully committed to belief in gravity for example. Consider the diagram on the following page, Figure 1.

This adaptation of Assagioli's [17] famous Egg Diagram can let us get into a comprehension of the workings of the psyche, as well as understand the human condition and my view of the elephant. This should help you assess your view of your own elephant holdings. [See bottom of article for diagram.]

Let us note immediately that each of the levels, #1-#9, represents at least one probable voice in our beings, and may at any time seem to be the "I" who is speaking and thinking. Additionally #4 is usually characterized as multiple selves or subpersonalities.

Which one is the "I" who thinks you are committed or uncommitted? The ego, as we said earlier, usually can only see appearances, but even if this model were a proper description of our personal elephant --the psyche--and were drawn to scale, the ego constitutes a very small portion of the Egg and of the whole sheet of paper which is the entire elephant in this case.

Viewing life and consciousness from the sole vantage point of the ego is like trying to view a mountain from two feet away and peering through a keyhole. Furthermore the eyes and personality that seem to be doing the viewing are like a mask behind which different characters come to announce their impression of the mountain, often leaving each of us persons, the "viewer," quite confused and unsure of what we are seeing, thinking, or feeling.

We can best get at the human condition, then, by understanding our own personal psyches; and this model, an amalgamation of other persons' and my own view of the elephant, seems like a good approach. Let's look briefly at each level and the whole diagram so that we can refer to what it's saying.

As mentioned, the whole of the diagram's page is the collective unconscious, our whole elephant, which includes all the existing psyches or Egg Diagrams of all human beings. Jung's collective unconscious may be divided (like everything else) into positive (or higher) and negative (or lower) unconscious.

This compares to Bentov's [200] "protomatter" or protoenergy that separates into the positively and negatively charged opposite ends of the cosmic egg (prior to the "Big Bang" of the universe). While the collective unconscious is the repository of mythic images or archetypes, the higher collective unconscious presents images of spiritual, religious, and transpersonal nature. The lower collective unconscious presents archetypes of demonic, perilous, destructive nature. Our elephant contains, then, the positive of Yang and the negative of Yin.

This is mirrored inside the psyche, or the egg of our diagram, which is at the same time permeated by the unconscious, rather like gas within water in a bottle. Of numbers 1, 2, and 3 Haronian says,

Region number 1 stands for the familiar lower unconscious which controls the biological functioning of the organism, its instincts, and its drives towards self-preservation and sex. The middle unconscious, number 2 on the diagram, contains all the facts, skills, memories, and ideas which are readily available to consciousness and to the self. Area number 3 represents the higher unconscious, the region of the so-called higher drives that are manifested by esthetic interests, intellectual curiosity, social feeling, altruism, the search for meaning to life and for the philosophical basis for one's existence [27].

I find it helpful to think of the egg as the oval circumference of a person's trunk and head, and to bring in the Eastern understanding of the human being, whose unconscious is made accessible through psychic energy centers corresponding to different nerve plexuses, ganglia, and glands. These are usually described to be in the vicinity of certain organs or openings.

The energy of these chakras (Sanskrit for centers), "which exist only in the living organism and never in the dead body, are ... [connected with] the innermost channel ... of the spinal cord as consciousness potentials," says professor of philosophy and president of the California Institute of Asian Studies in San Francisco, Haridas Chaudhuri. He continues:

The chakras as consciousness potentials relate to, although they are not equivalent to, various nerve complexes, ganglia, and glands [physical organs which control the ordinary physiological and psychological processes of a person, in contrast to the chakras which are not physical]. Purification of these nerve complexes by yogic methods is a sine qua non of the opening of the chakras, actualization of the spiritual potentials [25].

It is through these chakras that a person becomes conscious of the inner regions of the unconscious; these are doorways, so to speak.

I have indicated these psychic centers on our diagram with the letters A through G to show the approximate location in the egg and the body, as well as to suggest the nature of the energy involved in each chakra. "A" is the root center, often called the "anal chakra," and is connected with the womb and is the origin of the well-known kundalini energy--and the region corresponding to Freud's Id. Chakra "B" corresponds to the gonads and the vital or instinctual nature.

It may easily be seen that Haronian's description of Region #1 of the lower unconscious fits with these energies, as does chakra "C" for some people--the will to power, located at the navel, a center where a great deal of humanity focuses the ego, drawing powerful, negative energy from lower levels. I have placed "C" on the border to suggest its inclusion in the unconscious of either the lower or middle, according to the person involved.

Haronian's description of Region #2, as just said, may include the willpower of the ego of "C" and also "D"--the heart chakra, which expands understanding of the middle unconscious giving access to most of the range of feelings and sensibilities (in contrast to the gut emotions from the lower unconscious).

It is this region that is most similar to the field of consciousness (#4), and is in point of terminology called the preconscious [Ring, 128], that primary state of consciousness of the young child; also the place from which we draw close-by memories; and also the region of gestation psychologically for our ordinary mental and imaginative activities [Assagioli, 17].

When the ego enters (with awareness or not) into the unconscious through the heart chakra ("D") and somewhat connected with the thymus gland, the ego is able to experience love and varieties of positive feelings, as well as negative feelings and moods--though none quite devastating like those of the lower unconscious.

The ego is an image of the mind through which the image-ego constructs its contents (a view Skinner would never accept) and becomes ruled and controlled by them (a view Skinner would feel more comfortable reading).

I therefore may be sitting atop the elephant's head, blindly looking at the third eye, and still accept to a large degree Skinner's description of reality in terms of the buttocks.

To complete the discussion of the model, I can explain the dual view of the ego by describing it (as does more than half the population of the world) as a function or projection of the soul or Supraconscious, #3 of the diagram.         To continue at Top, Col. 2

It may be seen though that various tales of elephants, therapies for example, would be quite correct in their viewpoints, simply because they are considering different elephant portions, and that the approach is probably perfectly suitable to the level they are scrutinizing.

The higher unconscious, Supraconscious, which I designate as soul, constitutes the immediate core of the replaceable ego and focuses the entire region of #3, having some genuine existence and containing some self-radiating light. This is the I that survives amnesia, brain damage, and death, although to a paltry degree the ego may survive a while (I'm referring to such tracts like Moody's Life After Life and countless other testimonies that speak of persons in their ego-personalities, having just died, meeting other egos of their family whom they've known to be dead for several years).

However, usually we speak from the level of ego, and to that I assign "I" while giving to the personae or subpersonalities of the "i" that changes so very constantly. Actually the italicized portion of Haronian's description above aptly points to the soul as I depict it. In this I depart from Assagioli's psychosynthesis.

Finally we come to the Transpersonal Self, about which nothing really can be said, since it is quality-less as we know perfection in ego language--that is, from the cognitive level of mind. The Transpersonal Self and the Supraconscious are really only known through functions like imagination and intuition, being of the spirit and beyond the powers of the matter that make up the mind (common points of view of course to anyone familiar with Eastern thought).

The soul usually resides between the eyebrows in what has been dubbed the "third eye," of which the physical eyes are said to be the windows of the soul. (You may have already guessed my attitude on this, since I've suggested my elephant tale.) This is the sixth chakra "F" in the diagram, while "E" is found near the thyroid; and "G" is the crown chakra that corresponds with the pineal gland. The third eye is associated with the pituitary gland.

These last three chakras, all within the spiritual or transpersonal realms are the higher regions that come to a person in visions, intuitions, brilliant leaps of awareness, peak experiences, meditations, and so on. Functioning from the head, the energy emanating from these chakras and used at the level of ego and consciousness manifests as Haronian suggests, as intellect.

Armed with this model of the elephant, let's go further into the human condition to see how it fits your experience of yourself, others, and your elephant construct.

Consider your reaction to this actual newspaper headline:

... 8-Year-Old's Description of previous Life as a Man Murdered 17 Years before--Is Verified as Fact by the Dead Man's family.

The article is a selection of one case of a famous Ph.D. of parapsychology at the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, India--Dr. H.N. Banerjee [22], who elaborates about the boy who led Banerjee and his assistants to a house he'd never been to, named everyone at the place, and also identified a person partially hidden behind a drape in a photo as shown in the article.

You might ascribe this to reincarnation as I do. With my model I would describe, corroborated by Banerjee, the ego of the murdered man dissolving to leave the Supraconscious using mind to project a new ego into manifestation. Any ego can reach into the unconscious (which is relatively timeless) to remember, or relive, a past life.

But of course this is only the head of the elephant. You might take an a priori skeptical view and doubt any persuasions that don't match your own. But this thinking would be tight tail-holding.

You might take the position that the boy was psychic; that he tapped into the collective unconscious; or that some of the 90% of the brain we're not supposed to have used was used; or that there's a perpetrated hoax; or that ...

Each of these explanations and any other ones are likely to be based on a belief system, an elephant portion, any or all of which may be "true (real") or "false."

These are the "as if" values: "as if true" and "as if false." This is the pair used when we describe model or represent or simulate a system.

If I assume ... something to be "true" or "false" (whether not it is either), then the assumed value is either "as if true" or "as if false" [Lilly, 10].

Lilly is reminding us that our constructs, models, ears, and tails are only simulations--"as if realities" that need to be believed lightly, tails held loosely. Lilly says that he is "examining those simulations, those scenarios, those myths, those models of inner and outer reality which lie at the base of our thinking-feeling-doing" [11].

Another observer, Joseph Chilton Pearce compares Lilly's "simulations of God" and our elephant reality to a "cosmic egg." Pearce's thesis is that each of us as babies takes on the beliefs and perceptions of the persons around us, and accepts these as reality:

The infant's dream-like association of ideas is slowly won over to an agreement of what should constitute reality. By the time our reasoning has developed enough to reflect on the process by which our reasoning has formed, we are part and parcel of the whole process, caught up in and sustaining it [154].

We blind human beings are taught and coerced by other blind human beings what reality is and is not--for example, that persons cannot walk on red-hot stones without getting burned; that plants do not have feelings; that elves do not exist; that persons cannot fly; that a stone is not alive and can have no spirit.

Such viewpoints represent the physicalist apprehension of reality. Physicalists see the elephant's legs like immovable pillars of concrete tangible realness, while the elephant's mind and other people's minds that may experience a nature spirit as being false and fabricated, the result of which thinking and beliefs lead

to the deadness of the stone as the only real, while the enormous capacity of life the imagination of man is considered the most unreal [Pearce, 155].

For example Pearce [104-111] reports on fire-walking in Ceylon as told by Leonard Feinberg a University of Illinois professor writing in The Atlantic Monthly, not only regarding the natives but also psychology professor who "walked the fire ecstatic and unharmed." [111]. In Pearce's terminology both professors would have cracked their "cosmic eggs" by radically converting their belief systems.

Tompkins and Bird have quite startled the world (perhaps even cracked some eggs) with their scientific revelations about plant responses. Casteneda [165-168] taught readers about shamanism with its ability to "fly" or to move instantaneously miles away or up to a tree.

The Findhorn Community convinced the world with photographs that forty-pound cabbages can be grown, though their reasons that they had made friends with the plant spirits is less likely to be appreciated.

And the respected writer and bio-medical engineer, Itzhak Bentov [119-125] presented cogent scientific models and theory to explain the workings of an earth spirit having some modicum of sentience. Bentov developed that thesis in terms of the unconscious that he referred to as the astral plane, describing it as a "vast reality that serves as a bridge connecting all 'physical' realities--the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, and the human with or without physical bodies" [Bentov, 127; my italics]. What is one with a physicalist view of the elephant to do with commentary like this?

But even brain specialists and neurophysiologists who consider the physical brain to be all the consciousness that we can know have recognized hemispheric dichotomies.

The view of the two halves of the brain is quite commonplace and documented at this point. Ornstein recognizes "autistic thinking" abilities along the imaginative, intuitive, hypnogogic, acausal lines of knowing [67] leading to parapsychology (still viewed askance by hardcore, physicalist scientists): clairvoyance, telepathy, telekinesis, etc. [Tart, chapter 3]. This would constitute Bentov's "astral plane."

In other words for the above experiences to be possible for most persons' cosmic elephant, they have to begin to accept that the brain and consciousness are not one and the same:

We simply have to admit that conscious processes and mental processes do not mean the same thing [i.e., brain and mind aren't identical]. Just as we need both the wave picture and corpuscular theory to explain the behavior of the electron, so we need both the physiological and psychological picture to explain the working of the brain [von Bonin].

As Pearce [111] so beautifully puts it, "New constructs are no more true than false, but matters of choice." Scientists choose a physicalist viewpoint of the mind or telepathy or autistic thinking to be unreal; they do not discover a reality!

These simulations of reality, then, need to be approached as if "true," with a willingness to hear other constructs, especially since it is likely that each of us is "hypnotized" throughout childhood [Harman, 324f.]; and only in cracking the cosmic egg or in viewing other parts of the elephant can we commence to "awaken." This is particularly true when we maintain our simulations of God (Lilly) and focus them as the basic values, which constitute our basic reality. These values receive our programmed beliefs and energy.

What we direct our simulations (in place of God or our unconscious) may be at self-inflation, the husband or wife, a group, a cause, sex, alcohol, money, position, fame, science, and on and on. Lilly discusses each of these to point out that when we take these as the bottom line of our lives--that without which we cannot live--we have placed our attention (and therefore our simulation) upon the contents of consciousness at best upon our personal self, the ego--which is an action tantamount to accepting the body as the final reality, and therefore the "things" of our daily lives as primary.

And yet the elephant exists almost entirely in the unconscious levels--in fact maybe fully in the unconscious dimensions, so that each blind person clinging to a personal simulation of reality may be only holding on to a substitution at best, and at worst a complete illusion created by the ego!

What we've come to is that any simulation of god, or tail-holding description of what life is "really" about, represents the process of the ego using its "searchlight" of attention and contents of consciousness to try to join with and/or describe god of the inner reality of his Supraconscious and Transpersonal Self. And this process goes on, whether or not we are aware of it.

Such a human condition--hot in pursuit of the ephemeral and the imaginary and the imitation--has been described ironically as a dilemma of isolation, that is, "encapsulation" [Royce, 3]:

This is the thesis "that man is encapsulated.... If man wishes to gain a more inclusive world view [we spoke of Weltanschauung] or to approach ultimate reality it will be necessary for him to break through the several cocoons within which he is inevitably encapsulated. The first step in this process is to recognize that he is, in fact, encapsulated. Unfortunately, this first step is the most difficult.

Usually the encapsulation of a person is meant to describe emotional alienation from other human beings--an inability to establish an I-Thou relationship. Harman [321f.] extends this explanation to suggest that the encapsulated person suffers from psychological hypnotism--the enculturated condition that commences in childhood when there is "willingness, at a deep level in the personality, to accept suggestions" from an unquestioned source, the parents and environment [Harman, 322].

I accept both of these views and add or elaborate them by suggesting that this alienation originates in the separation and alienation from a person's source: first, from the ego; second, from the Supraconscious; and third, from ultimately the Transpersonal Self. Although an outer encounter with another person with intimacy, openness, and love is necessary to overcome encapsulation and alienation, the prerequisite is inner integration.

The degree to which I disidentify from my false egos or subpersonalities, and then from my ego (a much harder task), is proportional to the depth of intimate encounter that I'm able to achieve in my outer life. In other words, all outer, conscious activity begins and has its source inside within the unconscious.

No matter how humanitarian, loving, altruistic, and selflessly concerned about others I may think I am, and even others think I am, if I still feel emotionally isolated and alone, then I am functioning only on the periphery of my personality and being. I have not reached into the transpersonal elements of myself. I am encapsulated. Let's examine how this isolation develops:

First we'll expand upon the diagram. This 2-dimensional drawing perforce must fail to show what is actually 4- and 5-dimensional. The Transpersonal Self (#6), while the most transcendent "point" for the psyche, is also simultaneously one with the whole psyche itself, encompassing the whole egg and the entire collective unconscious, but having its "manifestation" through #9 the higher collective unconscious, #3 the higher unconscious (the Supraconscious or soul), and its transcendent point, #6.

Thus our diagram, and of course each human being (body, emotions, mind, soul, and spirit) is one, a holistic being whose exterior manifestations of ego, subpersonalities, and body are creations of the mind of the ultimate and only real self, the Transpersonal Self:

Thus, one's real Core is Transpersonal Being and because in reality one is That already (albeit unrealized in most) it is meaningless to talk about how close one can get to that Core. Who is it that is to get close? The personal self is basically an illusion anyway [Hammer, 42].

This view of the psyche and the personal elephant should sound familiar to any reader who knows Eastern thought, yet Hammer is a Western transpersonal psychologist teaching in Maine; and his view bears out the relationship of ego to Self that I am proffering.

Let us approach an illustration "as if" reincarnation were "true." Imagine the psyche of a particular entity, whom we'll call Jack, functioning on an inner level which to us is unconscious, but to Jack is quite conscious.

Let's assume he is functioning at the level of the Supraconscious and is about to be born into "life" as we know it on this planet. Within the womb Jack experiences oneness with the unconscious, rather perfect attunement with the Self; a body is shaping around him which is properly nurtured, protected, and warm. The actual oneness that is always present, but very seldom experienced, pervades the fetus, whose images and awarenesses are unique to each incoming entity according to evolvement and past-life occurrences.

We do not, however, have to employ reincarnation to see this process from oneness to differentiation. Little Jackie's circle of attention may be located at any position in the unconscious. His memory no longer retains awareness of his previous incarnation--except in instances like those mentioned above in the newspaper article, and when one contacts the unconscious to obtain such knowledge.

He painfully struggles into life, and is presented with the first shock of separation. From this point on, baby slowly becomes aware of the self and the not-self, me and the other, Jackie and environment, subject and object. Oneness is fled.

Though unitive consciousness leaves the baby and slowly focuses outside Jackie upon the external source of comfort, later to be known as his mother, the infant still retains an existential oneness of body and mind; but the form state of "awareness" has been lost or repressed back into unconsciousness. That nurturing at-one relationship in which the new ego, Jackie, dwelt is forgotten and projected out onto the external mother and environment.

Thus each dualism is accompanied by a repression and a projection: a dualism "severs" a process, represses its non-dual or "unitary" character, and projects that process as two apparently antagonistic opposites, [such as Jackie and his father] ... [Wilber, 119].

Whatever is repressed into the unconscious is projected out to consciousness as something or someone apart from the psyche--a common recognition of self-deceiving mechanisms in psychology.

But what isn't commonly recognized is that such projections are necessitated simply because of being born, and thus separated from the Self--the major theme of Eastern yoga and Western transpersonal psychology.

The dichotomies continue as the child gets older; for Jackie begins to differentiate himself as "I" and "me," a different self from his body, which becomes "my" and "mine." He is no longer holistic. He is apart from his Self and now apart from his body, a major segregation that in later years will manifest in a sense of alienation, conflict with his spouse, separation of "head" and "heart," lack of body sensitivity, and so on. He will need some integrative process like therapy or meditation to put him and his view of the elephant back together again.

Yet his problems don't end here. Apart from his core Self, he continues to separate from his core self. In other words he as soul (parted from Transpersonal Self) and a little baby projects his ego (albeit unconsciously of course). Another dichotomy. The ego's function is consciousness utilizing the body's brain but not equal to it (you will recall). Since Jackie has no recollection of who he really is (within), he is dependent upon those around him to "define" him, give his shape, so to speak.

That's why Locke's Blank Tablet metaphor fits, that's why Skinner's programming works, and that's why sociologists and social psychologists find the causes for a person's problems in the environment.

Yet the problem doesn't really originate in the environment, even though the external evidence suggests the total importance of nurture. It is still a result of the initial and subsequent dualisms and projections. On the other hand, if parents were able to aid a child with what Buddha calls "right knowledge" and "right living" Jackie might be better equipped to comprehend the inherent schizophrenia that occurs as he matures.

He still hasn't stopped creating polarities. His psyche gains more and more contents, many of which don't fit with other contents of his superego (data from various authorities); therefore he may repress some of these experiences (consciously or unconsciously), which of course immediately sets these up for later projections. Such projections from the psyche and conscious mind of the ego known as Jackie become his persona and/or his shadow, so completing the distant separation from his true inner Self [Wilber, 143].

With such distance from any truth about his own being it is no wonder that a person is described as blind by those who have integrated the self-created polarities and returned to be able to function from the Supraconscious as the center, rather than through a shadow, persona, or ego.

That's the basis of the parable of our elephant that Buddha told to his disciples in the Theravada scriptures to depict a stumbling humanity and limited scholars looking through keyholes and trying to describe reality when they do not even know themselves.

The projections of the unconscious have been well drawn by Jungian psychologists who have recognized major constellated energies that Jung called the shadow and the animus for the woman or the anima for the man. What comes from this concept is that everything we see and especially what we are affected by in the outer elephant is a reflection of the inner elephant.

Our refusal to accept this process as "real" results in an amplification of these images or archetypes in our dreams, symbolic experiences, and eventually into our outer world to such a degree that we become overwhelmed by our own creations in one form or another. Such "makings" stretch from accidents, broken marriages, and people around us who seem evil or contemptible, to suicidal urges and insanity. We isolate ourselves with dishonesty about others and ourselves, that is, by clinging to the skin of the elephant and calling reality a balloon. Maslow appropriately says, "Ultimately, dichotomizing pathologizes, and pathology dichotomizes" [Maslow, 164].