We tend to think that we become conscious when we wake up in the morning and become unconscious when we drop off to sleep at night. However, when we wake up, we become awake, but we may not become fully conscious. Without some careful practice, we tend to move through our days governed by habit and feelings, guiding ourselves by an internal voice in our minds whereby we talk to ourselves and tell ourselves what we should and should not do.
Without some practice for strengthening our concentration and focus, the different moments of our consciousness tend to jump from one short sensation or memory or feeling or thought or intuition string to another, without our controlling where the next associational jump will take us. We often construct our home, work, and recreational environments as outside stimuli that help us guide our consciousnesses into loose tracks.
Mindfulness
The Yogis and the Buddhists and the Taoists and the Sufis and the Kabbalists all practice ways to focus and concentrate consciousness. Almost all of these practices start with paying attention to the flow of our consciousness – the Yogic “Conscious of One’s Consciousness,” the Buddhist “Mindfulness,” or G. I. Gurdjieff’s “Remembering Yourself.”
Mindfulness, to use the term in widest circulation in the West right now, is the doorway to a stronger consciousness that can encompass and integrate more of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual reality. It’s the ante in the poker game of consciousness expansion. You can’t play without anteing, but anteing is only the beginning of playing.
One of the simplest ways to move toward Mindfulness is just to pay attention to our breathing for an extended time (breathe in, pause, breathe out, pause, breathe in, pause, breathe out pause). For people who haven’t put in some serious practice with this, it is shocking to discover how difficult it is to do. Our minds just wander off and we suddenly realize that we are worrying about something or anticipating something or participating in some other stream of mental activity and we aren’t paying attention to our breathing anymore.
Inner Dialogue
For most of us, when we begin to pay attention to our consciousness, what we find is that we are talking to ourselves silently in our minds. Some say that the way we keep our world together and keep functioning is through this “inner dialogue.” We tell ourselves how to interpret events, how to react, what to do, how we should feel, and so forth. Some of the various spiritual traditions refer to this inner dialogue, this inner talking to ourselves, as our ‘Ego.’
For many of us, our inner world is composed almost exclusively of this Ego. (This was most certainly my situation when I began my consciousness practices many decades ago.) Our Egos help us interact with and cope with our worlds, but they also can get us into a lot of trouble. The other aspects of our inner world often operate subconsciously.
Feelings, for example, may take place below the surface of our awareness and subconsciously determine how the inner dialogue proceeds. If we don’t like a particular feeling for some reason, we may tell ourselves to act in a way that avoids causing that feeling, even though the action we tell ourselves to take may be quite counterproductive.
After some time spent undertaking one or more consciousness practices, it can become possible to turn off this inner dialogue (quieting that portion of the brain) and shift levels of awareness to become conscious of other aspects of our inner worlds.
One of the reasons that paying attention to our breathing is a good first step is because our consciousness has a certain size or scope. If our consciousness is full of one form of awareness, another form of awareness won’t fit unless the scope is expanded.
A way we can assess the size of our consciousness is to check to see how much of our body we can be aware of at one time. Is it a finger, a hand, a whole arm, two arms, two arms and a head? Most people, when they start out engaging with consciousness practices, can be aware of maybe one hand or perhaps one hand and an arm. (When I started, I was about at the one hand level.) Typically, their inner dialogue fills up their consciousness and there isn’t room for anything else.
So, paying attention to breathing means there isn’t enough consciousness to pay attention to the inner dialogue at the same time, so the inner dialogue shuts off for a (usually brief) time. As we proceed, that time gets longer. As we proceed further, it begins to be possible to pay attention to our breathing and other things, like other bodily sensations, or feelings, or thoughts at the same time. Through this process, our consciousness expands.
With practice, it becomes possible to pay continuous attention to our breathing for many minutes, even hours, and eventually pretty constantly. It’s important to understand that being aware of our breath is not really Mindfulness yet. It’s just being aware of something else besides our inner voice. This is also true of walking meditation with the inner voice turned off or any other Mindfulness practice.
Eventually we can learn how to turn that inner dialogue off altogether and experience our inner and outer worlds directly, without that filter. As we proceed with focusing and developing our consciousness and learn how to shut off the inner dialogue, it becomes possible to experience much more of our outer world. That sunset, that painting, that piece of music can affect us much more deeply if we aren’t talking about it or talking about something else in our minds while we are seeing or hearing it.
Full Mindfulness or consciousness of our consciousness comes when we take the next step and become aware of a constant stream of awareness that is the backdrop for all of our experiences and all of our actions and, through that constant awareness of our awareness, we become better able to locate and focus our awareness wherever we choose.
Watching babies work and work, over months, at getting control of their physical experiences and movements can be a pretty good analogy for what we need to do in working to get control of our different forms of mental experiences and actions.
Mindfulness, then, is a doorway to continual awareness of one or more aspects of the full range of our outer experiences and actions and the full range of our inner experiences and actions.
Great athletes or dancers often have this kind of conscious awareness and control of their kinesthetic awareness and expression. Great actors often have this kind of conscious awareness and control of their emotional awareness and expression. Albert Einstein has been said to have had this kind of conscious awareness and control of his visualizing ability.
In the Yogic and Rosicrucian traditions that I am familiar with, Mindfulness is also a doorway to Vision Meditation through which it is possible to shift awareness in order to experience directly many different inner dimensions.
Mindfulness as a Foundation for the Self
Attaining Mindfulness semi-consistently and then consistently is a significant accomplishment. However, Mindfulness is not enough. In the Jungian, Gestalt, and Psychosynthesis approaches to psychotherapy, psychological health can emerge as we move beyond the reality of the Ego (the inner voice) surrounded by and largely governed by different substantially unconscious psychological patterns that often take the form of self-fragments that have a kinesthetic dimension, an emotional dimension, an intellectual dimension, and a spiritual dimension. These self-fragments often fight with each other to see who will predominate and take the stage in any given situation in our lives.
Psychological health comes about when we evolve a coherent Self that maintains a conscious perspective on each of our self- fragments and that chooses when any one of them will take the stage and govern our behavior and when the next one will. Psychological health is like acquiring a writer/director (a Self) to guide our personal dramas, enabling our self-fragments to become personas that we can put on stage and take off stage as needed.
Without being aware of our awareness, without Mindfulness, and without being able to turn off the inner voice and shift awareness and become aware of the different physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions of our existence, it is extremely difficult to evolve a coherent Self. In fact, Mindfulness is really the foundation for a coherent Self.
We have to build on that foundation of Mindfulness in order to actually explore our different self-fragments and turn them into willing, effective, collaborative characters in our personal dramas, under the direction of an emergent and then fully realized coherent Self. However, the results are definitely worth the effort. With a coherent Self, built on the foundation of Mindfulness, it becomes much more possible to live a satisfying life and take effective action in the world.
My Encounter with My Own Self-Fragments
My most intense encounter with my own self-fragments came during a retreat with Joya Santanya, the controversial, now deceased, spiritual teacher that Ram Dass first promoted and subsequently repudiated in his famous essay, Egg on my Beard.
When I participated in my first weekend retreat with Joya, we arrived at a camp in some wooded hills, got situated, and some of Joya’s followers gathered us by the swimming pool to do some singing and chanting. About 3:00 PM, Joya arrived with a fellow named Krishna Das holding one of her hands and a fellow named Ragu holding the other.
Joya sat down on the pillows arranged for her and began greeting people. Then she talked some about Kali, black Kali who destroyed impurities, Kali garlanded with skulls, dripping blood from her fangs, Kali who loved to eat the Karma of her devotees. She told us to close our eyes and surrender to Kali.
I closed my eyes and saw Kali right away, then scenes of killing and devouring and destroying, fields of blood and bodies and much death. I also saw light skinned shining men invading and killing and being killed and images of a great war between men and women. The quality and texture of the vision shifted, and I began to descend down into the lower realms and found a great sea of fire. I entered the fire and disappeared.
At that point, Joya called us back. I realized that the quality and intensity of my vision was coming in a much-heightened form from what I had been used to and that I was experiencing much more energy through my system than usual. Then, Ragu took Joya’s hand and walked her out, leaving us to chant to Kali.
Next, we all walked inside and did some Hatha Yoga (various Yoga postures) and ate supper. During this time, I experienced an intense struggle inside my mind. One part of me was nagging and complaining that I shouldn’t need to go through this. I really had as deep an access to the inner worlds as Joya did.
The other part of me responded that I didn’t know what I was doing at all and that I had pretty much screwed up my life. These two kept talking and arguing with each other through the medium of me silently talking to myself, alternating from one voice to the other.
That evening we all went to another session with Joya. We sang and chanted and then she came in. She told us to breathe into our hearts. By that she meant to expand the upper part of our rib cages as we engaged in the physical act of breathing, and concurrently to draw the subtler energies directly into our hearts. She exhorted us to go deeper and deeper. As I breathed, I experienced a series of quick reminiscences of the successes and failures in my life, with the failures overpowering the successes.
I went deeper and deeper. Joya told her followers to go and help the rest of us. Someone came over to me. He held on to me and pushed my chest in and out with the rhythm of my breath. I burst out crying, crying and sobbing very deeply, and saw a little boy – me – standing up in his crib crying and screaming, wanting to sleep that night in the bed with his mother, but not being permitted to.
The little boy became frantically enraged, until he seriously frightened himself.
Somehow, the fear took over from the anger and put the boy to sleep. In the morning, the little boy was found asleep, still standing in the corner of his crib. I found myself saying over and over, “I’m sorry Mom, I’m sorry Mom.”
I realized that, somehow my emotions had locked up standing there in that crib, and, for all the subsequent years, I had been controlled by my fear that reacted to my anger by putting my body to sleep. I cried for a quarter of an hour or more, feeling a deep gratitude to Joya.
Joya said that her people had to go through that heart opening process two or three times, but after that their hearts stayed open. She said that if she just concentrated on opening people’s hearts, she could have a huge following.
After the session, I had to wait quite a while for my ride. To wait, I sat down on some steps at the doorway to one of the cabins at the edge of a little meadow surrounded by great redwood trees. I closed my eyes and clearly saw the whole scene that I watched with my eyes open, except with my eyes closed, the scene became suffused with a beautiful soft red color. Suddenly I realized that with my eyes closed, I was looking at the scene from a different perspective and I could see my body sitting on the steps looking very peaceful. I played back and forth between seeing the meadow with my physical vision and with my inner vision until finally my ride came.
On the drive back, I realized that, during the whole weekend, my consciousness essentially became either the inner vision of great intensity, or a war between two sides of me arguing with each other, one angry, jealous, and arrogant and the other timid and frightened, but somehow holding the power over the angry one. I was clear that those two dissociated fragments of myself seemed to have first emerged from the time I accessed during my heart opening. I recognized that, throughout a significant piece of my life, the self-fragment governed by fear had struggled with the self-fragment governed by anger.
Transforming My Self-Fragments into Personas
As I reflected on my self-fragment reality and continued to pay attention to my experience and the psychological forces underlying my experience, I identified three basic self-fragments, which I came to call: “The Child, governed by fear; “The Kid,” governed by anger; and “The Mother,” who was not very emotional, but exerted a significant amount of control.
I believe I got the Mother self-fragment by imprinting on my mother. My father left my mother while she was pregnant with me. I had asthma, so, when I was 5 years old, my mom had to move us from where we lived with her family in Northern Minnesota to Prescott, Arizona for the climate. That meant, for most of my life, my family consisted of my mom and me.
My Mom was very loving, but she did not operate much from her emotional center. She led our little family by establishing a few strong limits, always explaining why some action was necessary or was to be avoided, providing strong positive reinforcement whenever I acted in ways she wanted and/or she thought would be beneficial for me, and withdrawing her attention when I was deviating from the prescribed paths. She was very proud of me and continually put me forward in social situations. All this happened within a strong religious context with a lot of church reinforcement for following the 10 Commandments and trying to avoid sinning.
The self-fragment that emerged from imprinting on my mother carried a powerful sense of what was right and what was wrong, operated primarily along the receptive mode, and used a pretty subtle psychological strategy of rewarding with my attention the behaviors that I wanted from others and withdrawing my attention when someone I wanted to influence didn’t behave the way I wanted.
The Mother was the dominant self-fragment allying with the frightened Child when there was something to avoid that I should not do and allying with the angry Kid if there was something to do or a public performance to give.
Once I uncovered the Mother self-fragment to go with the frightened Child and the angry Kid, a lot of the unfortunate aspects of my psychology popped into focus. I came to be able to start recognizing when each of the self-fragments took center stage, often in ways that tended to get me in trouble. On stage, the angry Kid behaved with significant arrogance, often projecting a future that I had a lot of trouble delivering on. The frightened Child often hung back when I would have been better served by asserting myself. And the Mother could be quite manipulative and controlling.
As my (higher) Self emerged, I came to be able project the Mother as a persona that led by being receptive and the Child as a persona that exhibited appropriate caution and the Kid as a persona that was brave and took effective overt action when needed.
And I came to realize that I could create new personas consciously by establishing a set of habits that I regularly practiced – e.g., the Husband, the Consultant, the Philosopher, the Framer, the Writer, and the Dancer.
Given that our consciousnesses are structured as successions of relatively brief presents, where we have freedom to choose within or among paths, it’s important to have personas to choose among that structure paths of action. We can’t be jumping from one totally different path to another every instant. We need to be able to identify a situation, choose an appropriate persona path, and then follow it – changing paths only if we get in trouble or come to the end of that particular situation.
Every Moment We Choose Which Morphic Field To Feed
The philosophy of Spiritual Realism helps us make sense of this process. From its perspective, a persona exists as a particular morphic field (to use Rupert Sheldrake’s term) in the Spiritual Domain (vibrating faster than the speed of light). (See my essay Planetary Consciousness Revisited for a discussion of Spiritual Realism.) As we build personas and feed them with our intentions and our actions within them, the strength of the morphic field becomes stronger and stronger by morphic resonance. The stronger the morphic fields become, the more powerful their impact on the alternative futures available to us. (See my essay Transformation for a discussion of alternate futures.)
Ultimately, every experience we have and every action we take happens within the context of one self-fragment or another or, if we have developed to a certain extent, within the context of one persona or another. This means that every experience we have and every action we take happens within the context of one morphic field or another. Every moment we choose which morphic field to feed. Every thought we have, every experience we have, every action we take feeds some morphic field. It may be a morphic field that we want to feed or it may be a morphic field we definitely do not want to feed. Through morphic resonance, every time we feed a particular morphic field we tap into all the past instances of feeding that morphic field.
At any given instance we chose (consciously or unconsciously) which morphic field (self-fragment or persona) to feed. All of them exist as Alternative Futures that we can access. Developing a coherent, healthy self gives us the possibility of consistently accessing the optimal alternative future, the optimal morphic field, the optimal persona for each or our successive instants.
There is no escape from this reality. We are always feeding a morphic field and, through morphic resonance, strengthening it. It can be a positive morphic field that is a persona that we want to strengthen. Or it can be a negative self-fragment that we ought to weaken. Those are our only two choices.
Within the Spiritual Domain there are all the potentialities available to us as morphic fields including the perfect choices manifesting the best personas in each moment. Perfection exists. The Absolute reigns in the Spiritual Domain. Each moment that we live is an incarnation from the Spiritual Domain into the Physical Domain. Our intentions and our choices determine which spiritual potential manifests. That is our fate. That is our blessing. The result of these choices – that is our life.
Let us take this reality into our hands and make our best choices and create our best lives whereby we bring about our own personal transformations and contribute to the Great Transformation that all humanity is undergoing, whereby we find peace with ourselves, peace and justice with each other, and peace and regeneration with the Earth.
James Hurd Nixon
