Just as your existence is very real, so Good and Evil are also very real. God has given you the power to choose the good in loving obedience to His will. When you choose self-giving "love," things work out in your life and you experience a measure of happiness, even in this life. However, for this love to qualify as love, it must be infused with "freedom of choice." Otherwise it is just a robotic compulsion and a charade. For true choice exists where there is a real possibility of choosing not to love. This latter choice is called “evil,” and amounts to rebellion against God. And sooner or later this choice brings with it a multitude of “sorrows.” For example, you and I today experience pain, suffering and sorrow in our lives due to the evil proudly chosen by our first ancestors. This suffering sends us a clear message regarding the reality of our being, as well as the reality of the evil we inherited.

In like manner, if you have any doubts about the reality of your existence, just recall the last toothache or headache you experienced. The pain was telling you something that you need to remember. The existence of your distinct being is not a subject for debate. You are very real, and so is your distinct soul, the ultimate internal principle by which you think, feel, and will, and by which your body is animated.

"The term "mind" usually denotes this principle as the subject of our conscious states, while "soul" denotes the source of our vegetative activities as well. That our vital activities proceed from a principle capable of subsisting in itself, is the thesis of the substantiality of the soul: that this principle is not itself composite, extended, corporeal, or essentially and intrinsically dependent on the body, is the doctrine of spirituality. If there be a life after death, clearly the agent or subject of our vital activities must be capable of an existence separate from the body.

“The belief in an animating principle in some sense distinct from the body is an almost inevitable inference from the observed facts of life. Even uncivilized peoples arrive at the concept of the soul almost without reflection, certainly without any severe mental effort. The mysteries of birth and death, the lapse of conscious life during sleep and in swooning, even the commonest operations of imagination and memory, which abstract a man from his bodily presence even while awake-all such facts invincibly suggest the existence of something besides the visible organism, internal to it, but to a large extent independent of it, and leading a life of its own.”(Catholic Encyclopedia, “Soul”)

“The affirmation of mind in this connection is equivalent to teleologism, or idealism in the sense of there being intelligence and purpose governing the working of the universe. This is the meaning of the word in Bacon's well-known statement: "I had rather believe all the fables in the Legend and the Alcoran than that this universal frame is without a mind" (Essays: Of Atheism). It is, in fact, the doctrine of theism. The world as given demands a rational account of its present character. The proximate explanations of much, especially in the inorganic and non-living portion of it, can be furnished by material energies acting according to known laws. But reason demands an account of all the contents of the universe-living and conscious beings as well as lifeless matter- and, moreover, it insists on carrying the inquiry back until it reaches an ultimate explanation. For this, Mind, an Intelligent Cause, is necessary .

“ Even if the present universe could be traced back to a collection of material atoms, the particular collocation of these atoms from which the present cosmos resulted, would have to be accounted for- because in the mechanical or materialistic theory of evolution, that original collocation contained this universe and no other, and that particular collocation clamours for a sufficient reason just as inevitably as does the present complex result. If we are told that the explanation of a page of a newspaper is to be found in the contact of the paper with a plate of set types, we are still compelled to ask haw the prticular arrangement of the types came about, and we are certain that the sufficient explanation ultimately rests in the action of mind or intelligent being.”(Catholic Encyclopedia “Mind”)

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CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES-Arthur J. Deikman,M.D., Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3 (4), pp. 350-6. Arthur J. Deikman, "1" *Department of Psychiatry, University of California,Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, 401 Parnassus Avenue, San Francisco,CA 94143, USA.

“Abstract: Introspection reveals that the core of subjectivity — the 'I' — is identical to awareness. This 'I' should be differentiated from the various aspects of the physical person and its mental contents which form the `self. Most discussions of consciousness confuse the 'I' and the 'self'. In fact, our experience is fundamentally dualistic — not the dualism of mind and matter — but that of the 'I' and that which is observed. The identity of awareness and the 'I' means that we know awareness by being it, thus solving the problem of the infinite regress of observers. It follows that whatever our ontology of awareness may be, it must also be the same for ' I'.

“We seem to have numerous 'I's. There is the I of `I want', the I of `I wrote a letter', the I of `I am a psychiatrist' or 'I am thinking'. But there is another I that is basic, that underlies desires, activities and physical characteristics. This I is the subjective sense of our existence. It is different from self-image, the body, passions, fears, social category these are aspects of our person that we usually refer to when we speak of the self, but they do not refer to the core of our conscious being, they are not the origin of our sense of personal existence.

Experiment 1: Stop for a moment and look inside. Try and sense the very origin of your most basic, most personal `I', your core subjective experience. What is that root of the 'I' feeling? Try to find it.

“When you introspect you will find that no matter what the contents of your mind, the most basic `I' is something different. Every time you try to observe the `I' it takes a jump back with you, remaining out of sight. At first you may say, `When I look inside as you suggest, all I find is content of one sort or the other.' I reply, `Who is looking? Is it not you? If that ‘I’ is a content can you describe it? Can you observe it?' The core `I' of subjectivity is different from any content because it turns out to be that which witnesses — not that which is observed. The 'I' can be experienced, but it cannot be `seen'. `I' is the observer, the experiencer, prior to all conscious content.

“In contemporary psychology and philosophy, the 'I' usually is not differentiated from the physical person and its mental contents. The self is seen as a construct and the crucial duality is overlooked. As Susan Blackmore puts it,

“Our sense of self came about through the body image we must construct in order to control behaviour, the vantage point given by our senses and our knowledge of our own abilities — that is the abilities of the body-brain-mind. Then along came language. Language turns the self into a thing and gives it attributes and powers. (Blackmore, 1994)

“Dennett comments similarly that what he calls the `Center of Narrative Gravity' gives us a spurious sense of a unitary self.

“A self, according to my theory, is not any old mathematical point, but an abstraction defined by the myriads of attributions and interpretations (including self-attributions and self-interpretations) that have composed the biography of the living body whose Center of Narrative Gravity it is (Dennett, 1991).

“However, when we use introspection to search for the origin of our subjectivity, we find that the search for 'I' leaves the customary aspects of personhood behind and takes us closer and closer to awareness, per se. If this process of introspective observation is carried to its conclusion, even the background sense of core subjective self disappears into awareness. Thus, if we proceed phenomenologically, we find that the 'I' is identical to awareness: 'I' = awareness.

“Awareness is something apart from, and different from, all that of which we are aware: thoughts, emotions, images, sensations, desires and memory. Awareness is the ground in which the mind's contents manifest themselves; they appear in it and disappear once again.

“I use the word 'awareness' to mean this ground of all experience. Any attempt to describe it ends in a description of what we are aware of. On this basis some argue that awareness per se doesn't exist. But careful introspection reveals that the objects of awareness — sensations, thoughts, memories, images and emotions — are constantly changing and superseding each other. In contrast, awareness continues independent of any specific mental contents.

Experiment 2: Look straight ahead. Now shut your eyes. The rich visual world has disappeared to be replaced by an amorphous field of blackness, perhaps with red and yellow tinges. But awareness hasn't changed. You will notice that awareness continues as your thoughts come and go, as memories arise and replace each other, as desires emerge and fantasies develop, change and vanish. Now try and observe awareness. You cannot. Awareness cannot be made an object of observation because it is the very means whereby you can observe. “Awareness may vary in intensity as our total state changes, but it is usually a constant. Awareness cannot itself be observed, it is not an object, not a thing. Indeed, it is featureless, lacking form, texture, colour, spatial dimensions. These characteristics indicate that awareness is of a different nature than the contents of the mind; it goes beyond sensation, emotions, ideation, memory. Awareness is at a different level, it is prior to contents, more fundamental. Awareness has no intrinsic content, no form, no surface characteristics — it is unlike everything else we experience, unlike objects, sensations, emotions, thoughts, or memories.

“Thus, experience is dualistic, not the dualism of mind and matter but the dualism of awareness and the contents of awareness. To put it another way, experience consists of the observer and the observed. Our sensations, our images, our thoughts — the mental activity by which we engage and define the physical world — are all part of the observed. In contrast, the observer — the 'I' — is prior to everything else; without it there is no experience of existence. If awareness did not exist in its own right there would be no 'I'. There would be 'me', my personhood, my social and emotional identity — but no 'I', no transparent centre of being. Confusion of Awareness and Contents In the very centre of the finite world is the “I”. It doesn't belong in that world, it is radically different. In saying this, I am not suggesting a solipsistic ontology. The physical world exists for someone else even when I am sleeping. But any ontology that relegates awareness to a secondary or even an emergent status ignores the basic duality of experience. Currently, there are many voices denying the dualistic ontology of awareness and contents. For example, Searle attacks mind-body dualism, regarding consciousness (awareness) as an emergent property of material reality. He likens it to liquidity, a property that emerges from the behaviour of water molecules composed of hydrogen and oxygen — atoms that do not themselves exhibit liquidity. `Consciousness is not a “stuff,” it is a feature or property of the brain in the sense, for example, that liquidity is a feature of water' (Searle, 1992) "2" *But liquidity, understandable as it may be from considerations of molecular attraction, is part of the observed world, similar to it from that ontological perspective. To state that the subjective ‘emerges' from the objective is quite a different proposition, about which the physical sciences have nothing to say.

“Colin McGinn also insists that there is no duality of mind and matter —all can ultimately be explained in physical terms —but he asserts that the critical process by which a transition occurs from one to the other will never be understood because of our limited intellectual capacity (McGinn, 1991). McGinn believes that the observer/observed duality is apparent rather than real; there is a physical transition from the observed to the observer. But the ontological gap between a thought and a neuron is less than that between the observer and the observed; there is nothing to be compared to the `I', while thoughts and neurons are linked by their being objects of observation, contents of `1', sharing some characteristics such as time and locality."3"* Granted that a blow on my head may banish `I', its relationship to the observed is fundamentally different from anything else we can consider. The best that can be said for the materialist interpretation is that the brain is a necessary condition for ‘I’.

“Confusion about `I' One can read numerous psychology texts and not find any that treat awareness as a phenomenon in its own right, something distinct from the contents of consciousness. Nor do their authors recognize the identity of 'I' and awareness. To the contrary, the phenomenon of awareness is usually confused with one type of content or another. William James made this mistake in his classic, Principles of Psychology. When he introspects on the core `self of all other selves' he ends up equating the core self with `a feeling of bodily activities . . .' concluding that our experience of the `I', the subjective self, is really our experience of the body:

. . . the body, and the central adjustments which accompany the act of thinking in the head. These are the real nucleus of our personal identity, and it is their actual existence, realized as a solid, present fact, which makes us say `as sure as I exist' (James, 1950).

“To the contrary, I would say that I am sure I exist because my core `I' is awareness itself, my ground of being. It is that awareness that is the `self of all other selves'. Bodily feelings are observed: `I' is the observer, not the observed.

“Beginning with behavioural psychology and continuing through our preoccupation with artificial intelligence, parallel distributed processing, and neural networks, the topic of awareness per se has received relatively little attention. When the topic does come up, consciousness in the sense of pure awareness is invariably confused with one type of content or the other.

“A few contemporary psychiatrists such as Gordon Globus (1980) have been more ready to recognize the special character of the self of awareness, the observing self, but almost all end up mixing awareness with contents. For example, Heinz Kohut developed his Self Psychology based on considering the self to be a superordinate concept, not just a function of the ego. Yet he does not notice that awareness is the primary source of self-experience and concludes: `The self then, quite analogous to the representations of objects, is a content of the mental apparatus' (Kohut, 1971). “We see the same problem arising in philosophy. After Husserl, nearly all modern Western philosophical approaches to the nature of mind and its relation to the body fail to recognize that introspection reveals 'I' to be identical to awareness. "4"* Furthermore, most philosophers do not recognize awareness as existing in its own right, different from contents. Owen Flanagan, a philosopher who has written extensively on consciousness, sides with James and speaks of ‘the illusion of the mind's ‘I’' (Flanagan, 1992). C.O. Evans starts out recognizing the importance of the distinction between the observer and the observed, `the subjective self', but then retreats to the position that awareness is ‘unprojected consciousness', the amorphous experience of background content (Evans, 1970). However, the background is composed of elements to which we can shift attention. It is what Freud called the preconscious. `I' awareness has no elements, no features. It is not a matter of a searchlight illuminating one element while the rest is dark — it has to do with the nature of light itself.

“In contrast, certain Eastern philosophies based on introspective meditation emphasize the distinction between awareness and contents. "5"* Thus, Hindu Samkhya philosophy differentiates purusa, the witness self, from everything else, from all the experience constituting the world, whether they be thoughts, images, sensations, emotions or dreams. A classic expression of this view is given by Pantanjali:

“Of the one who has the pure discernment between sattva (the most subtle aspect of the world of emergence) and purusa (the non-emergent pure seer) there is sovereignty over all and knowledge of all. (Chapple, 1990.)

“Awareness is considered to exist independent of contents and this `pure consciousness' is accessible — potentially —to every one. A more contemporary statement of this position is given by Sri Krishna Menon, a twentieth century Yogi:

“He who says that consciousness is never experienced without its object speaks from a superficial level. If he is asked the question `Are you a conscious being?', he will spontaneously give the answer `Yes'. This answer springs from the deepmost level. Here he doesn't even silently refer to anything as the object of that consciousness. (Menon, 1952).

“In the classical Buddhist literature we find:

“When all lesser things and ideas are transcended and forgotten, and there remains only a perfect state of imagelessness where Tathagata and Tathata are merged into perfect Oneness . . . (Goddard, 1966). "6"*

“Western mystics also speak of experiencing consciousness without objects. Meister Eckhart declares:

“There is the silent `middle', for no creature ever entered there and no image, nor has the soul there either activity or understanding, therefore she is not aware there of any image, whether of herself or of any other creature' (Forman, 1990).

“Similarly, Saint John of the Cross:

“That inward wisdom is so simple, so general and so spiritual that it has not entered into the understanding enwrapped or clad in any form or image subject to sense' (1953).

“The failure of Western psychology to discriminate awareness from contents, and the resulting confusion of ‘I’ with mental contents, may be due to a cultural limitation: the lack of experience of most Western scientists with Eastern meditation disciplines."7"*

“Attempts to in Eastern mystical traditions use meditation practice to experience the difference between mental activities and the self that observes. For example, the celebrated Yogi, Ramana Maharshi, prescribed the exercise of `Who am I?' to demonstrate that the self that observes is not an object; it does not belong to the domains of thinking, feeling, or action (Osborne, 1954). `If I lost my arm, I would still exist. Therefore, I am not my arm. If I could not hear, I would still exist. Therefore, I am not my hearing.' And so on, discarding all other aspects of the person until finally, `I am not this thought,' which could lead to a radically different experience of the `I'. Similarly, in Buddhist vipassana meditation the meditator is instructed to simply note whatever arises, letting it come and go. This heightens the distinction between the flow of thoughts and feelings and that which observes 8tegrate Eastern and Western psychologies can fall prey to the same confusion of `I' and contents, even by those who have practised Eastern meditation disciplines. Consider the following passage from The Embodied Mind, a text based on experience with mindfulness meditation and correlating Western psychological science with Buddhist psychology .

“. . . in our search for a self... we found all the various forms in which we can be aware — awareness of seeing and hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, even awareness of our own thought processes. So the only thing we didn't find was a truly existing self or ego. But notice that we did find experience. Indeed, we entered the very eye of the storm of experience, we just simply could discern there no self, no 'I' (Varela et al., 1991).

“But when they say, `. . . we just simply could discern there no self, no "I" ', to what does `we' refer? Who is looking? Who is discerning? Is it not the `I' of the authors? A classic story adapted from the Vedantic tradition is relevant here:

“A group of travellers forded a river. Afterwards, to make sure everyone had crossed safely, the leader counted the group but omitted himself from the count. Each member did the same and they arrived at the conclusion that one of them was missing. The group then spent many unhappy hours searching the river until, finally, a passerby suggested that each person count their own self, as well. The travellers were overjoyed to find that no one was missing and all proceeded on their way.

“Like the travellers, Western psychology often neglects to notice the one that counts. Until it does, its progress will be delayed.

“Similarly, discussions of consciousness (awareness) as `point of view' (Nagel, 1986) or `perspective' do not go far enough in exploring what the `first person perspective' really is. In my own case, it is not myself as Arthur Deikman, psychiatrist, six feet tall, brown hair. That particular person has specific opinions, beliefs, and skills all of which are part of his nominal identity, but all of which are observed by his ‘I’, which stands apart from them. If awareness is a fundamental in the universe - as proposed most recently by Herbert (1994), Goswami (1993) and Chalmers (1995) — then it is ‘I’ that is fundamental, as well, with all its ontological implications. Arthur Deikman is localized and mortal. But what about his `I', that light illuminating his world, that essence of his existence? Those studying consciousness, who can see the necessity for according consciousness a different ontological status than the physical, tend not to extend their conclusions to 'I'. Yet, it is the identity 'I' = awareness that makes the study of consciousness so difficult. Güven Güzeldere (1995) asks:

“Why are there such glaring polarities? Why is consciousness characterized as a phenomenon too familiar to require further explanation, as well as one that remains typically recalcitrant to systematic investigation, by investigators who work largely within the same paradigm? Güzeldere, 1995.)

“The difficulty to which Güzeldere refers is epitomized by the problem: Who observes the observer? Every time we step back to observe who or what is there doing the observing, we find that the 'I' has jumped back with us. This is the infinite regress of the observer, noted by Gilbert Ryle, often presented as an argument against the observing self being real, an existent. But identifying `I' with awareness solves the problem of the infinite regress: we know the internal observer not by observing it but by being it. At the core, we are awareness and therefore do not need to imagine, observe, or perceive it.

“Knowing by being that which is known is ontologically different from perceptual knowledge. That is why someone might introspect and not see awareness or the `I', concluding —like the travellers —that it doesn't exist. But thought experiments and introspective meditation techniques are able to extract the one who is looking from what is seen, restoring the missing centre.

“Once we grant the identity of `I' and awareness we are compelled to extend to the core subjective self whatever ontological propositions seem appropriate for awareness. If awareness is non-local, so is the essential self. If awareness transcends material reality so does the 'I'. If awareness is declared to be non-existent then that same conclusion must apply to the 'I'. No matter what one's ontological bias, recognition that 'I' = awareness has profound implications for our theoretical and personal perspective.*References-please refer to the following url for the list of references: http://www.deikman.com/awarenessref.html

“PRACTICE,PRACTICE AND PRACTICE...Begin to observe your thoughts and feelings…Until you develop the other skills for healing and separation just allow your self to “ be there”… with your thoughts and feelings.. Practice on a daily basis of LETTING GO..of the thinking.. and just completely OBSERVE whatever is in front of you, what ever you are doing…

"PAY ATTENTION WHEN YOU ARE THERE IN HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS, COMPLETELY FOCUSED ON THE TASK AT HAND,OR GAZING AT THAT MAGNIFICENT TREE ( don't "Think"how beautiful it is ..OBSERVE THE BEAUTY)...OR AS SIMPLE AS WASHING THE DINNER PLATES..NOTICE THE "PEACE AND TRANQUILITY THERE..NO THOUGHTS, NO FEELINGS..If you do this while walking down the street, suddenly you are going to see things you never seen before...It's like opening up to a brand new world, and brand new experience"..

Another wonderful exercise ideal for the evening when your head is spinning and you want to get to sleep.. Practice “letting Go…” of your thoughts and focus on your breathing.. it will also help to count as you inhale and then as you exhale.. focusing on the air as it passes through the nostrils.…this too will take a lot of time to learn.. but you will also find your self falling asleep much faster.. You can of course create your own exercises to practice “Letting Go”of the thinking mind and focus outward using your Consciousness.. I can almost guarantee that once you develop the skill you will do it throughout the day, everyday for the rest of your life.

When we move into the rest of the Program we will show you how to apply your new skill of applying your Higher Consciousness.. PHASE I SUMMARY Accepting or even the thought of considering this new paradigm is a MAJOR step in your transformation. That is why it is recommended to experiment with the concept of "letting Go" of the comfort ( illusionary) of the control you, we all think we have by "being in the head" ..and just really get a grasp, a "Taste" of a Real, Reality... You might have a "struggle within" to get to that point... We'll be explaining that later..we talk about how to free your self from that "resistance".. In the meantime.. 1.) REVIEW MATERIAL PRESENTED HERE.. 2.) PURCHASE ( OR BORROW AT LIBRARY ) REFERENCE BOOKS RECOMMENDED AND STUDY MATERIAL MORE INDEPTH. 3.) PRACTICE ON A DAILY BASIS JUST LETTING GO, GETTING OUT OF THE THINKING MIND AND FOCUS STRICKLY ON THE HERE AND NOW... PRACTICE THE EXERCISES ...PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU FEEL AND / OR WHAT YOU ARE THINKING OF .... 4.) PRACTICE ON A DAILY BASIS TO PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR THOUGHTS AND YOUR FEELINGS WITHOUT TRYING TO CONTROL THEM, JUST BE THERE WITH THEM FOR NOW..

"Phase II Compares Feelings with Emotions and explains a simple yet very difficult means to heal the buried Emotions. Mystic Experience and Two Modes of Consciousness adapted from the work of Psychiatrist, Arthur J. Deikman, M.D.

“Deikman identifies the basic characteristic of mystical experience as the intuitive perception that we are part of a universe that is a unified whole. As William James and others have remarked, such an experience is usually accompanied by feelings of reverence and awe; it is highly valued and is felt to be a more direct perception of reality than is possible ordinarily. Such an intuitive experience is called mystical because it is considered beyond the scope of language to convey.

“Reports of mystical experiences encompass a wide area, from moments of joy and sensory enhancement not much different from ordinary consciousness, to states that are said to go beyond all images, ideas, and customary perceptual experiences. For descriptive purposes we can group these experiences into (1) untrained-sensate, (2) trained-sensate, and (3) trained-transcendent. "Untrained-sensate" applies to experiences occurring in persons not regularly engaged in meditation, prayer, or other spiritual exercises.

“Apparently, anyone can have a sensate-mystical experience. Such states feature intense affective, perceptual, and/or congnitive phenonema that appear to be extensions of familiar psychological processes. Bucke, a physician, had a classical experience, occurring with no particular stimulus at all, arising from a state of quietude. All at once, without warning of any kind, he found himself wrapped around as it were by a flame colored cloud. For an instant he thought of fire, some sudden conflagration in the great city, the next he knew that the light was withing himself. Directly afterwards came upon him a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe.

“The "trained-sensate" category refers to the same phenomena occuring in religious persons who have deliberately sought "grace" and "enlightenment" by means of long practice in meditation and religious discipline. The untrained sensate and the trained-sensate states are phenomenologically indistinguishable, but the reports of trained mystics are usually expressed in the language of the religious system in which they are trained.

“As one might expect, a mystical experience occuring as a result of training, with the support and direction of a formal social structure and ideology, tends to have a more significant psychological effect. However, there are also accounts of spontaneous conversion experiences that are noteworthy for their influence on a person's life. It is typical of all mystical experience that it more or less fades away, leaving only a memory or longing for that which was experienced. The transensate or "enlightment" experiences are said to have more permanent effects, but, even in those cases, training is continued for a long time until the person has "realized" the experience in his everyday life.

“It would seem that mystical experiences form a progression when they occur as part of a specific spiritual discipline. Mystics such as St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, commentators such as Poulain, and Eastern mystic literature, in general, divide the phenomena and stages through which mystics progress into a preliminary experience of strong emotion and ideation (sensate) and a higher experience -- the ultimate goal -- that goes beyond affect or ideation. It is the latter experience, occuring almost always in association with long training, that characterizes the "trained-transcedent" group. Poulain describes the state as follows: "Then the spirit is transported high above all the faculties into a void of immense solitude whereof no mortal can adequately speak. It is the mysterious darkness wherein is concealed the limitless good. To such an extent are we admitted and absorbed into something that is one, simple, divine, and illimitable, that we seem no longer distinguishable from it. . . . In this unity, the feeling of multiplicity disappears. When, afterwards, these persons come to themselves again, they find themselves possessed of a distinct knowledge of things, more luminous and more perfect than of others. . . . This state is called the ineffable obscurity. . . . This obscurity is a light to which no created intelligence can arrive by its own nature." In "The Heart Sutra" what is apparently the same state is expressed as follows: "And no feeling, thought, impression, understanding, and no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind, No form, sound, smell, taste, touch or thought. . . ."

“Poverty, chastity, isolation, and silence are traditional techniques used in pursuing the mystical path. As dramatic as such techniques may be, they tend to obscure the fact that the renunciation sought is much more basic than merely modifying external behavior. For example, Walter Hilton prescribes a renunciation of thought: "Therefore if you desire to discover your soul, withdraw your thoughts from outward and material things, forgetting if possible your own body and its five senses. . . ." St. John of the Cross calls for the banishment of memory: "Of all these forms and manners of knowledge the soul must strip and void itself, and it must strive to lose the imaginary apprehension of them, so that there may be left in it no kind of impression of knowledge, nor trace of aught so-ever, but rather the soul must remain barren and bare, as if these forms had never passed through it and in total oblivion and suspension. And this cannot happen unless the memory be annihilated as to all its forms, if it is to be united with God."

“A seemingly simple, but perhaps equally subtle and difficult, statement of a contemporary Zen master is that renunciation "is not giving up things of this world, it is accepting that they go away." The statement also prepares the way for appreciating a shift in Deikman's research perspective. At the time of the original meditation experiments, he tended to understand renunciation as being a way to intensify the process of deautomatization by depriving perceptual and cognitive patterns of their usual stimulus nutriment, thereby helping to bring them into disuse and dysfunction. It seemed as if renunciation would increase motivation, for having abandoned the world the mystic has no other hope of sustenance than his goal of enlightenment.

“However, Deikman then became a participant observer by undergoing meditation training under the auspices of the Zen Center of San Francisco. The meditation experience, coupled with visits to a Zen monastery, interviews with the Zen master, and reading of Buddhist literature, led him to view renunciation in a different way. In his revised view, renunciation can be understood as relating to a change in attitude. It is a shift from doing to allowing, from grasping the world to allowing the world to enter us. It is the meditative attitude carried into everyday life. Ordinarily, we tend to categorize renunciation as virtuous, attributing various moral or holy qualities to it. But Deikman's hypothesis is that the basic attitude or purpose of a human organism has a determining effect on its state of consciousness. From this revised point of view, renunciation is a practical, not a moral issue: Your state of consciousness fits your intention, and renunciation changes intention.

TWO MODES: RECEPTION AND ACTION

“Deikman's proposal assumes that we think of a human being as an organism composed of components having both psychological and biological dimensions. These components have two basic modes of operation: an "action mode" and a "receptive mode." The action mode is a state organized to manipulate the environment. To carry out this purpose the striate muscle system is the dominant physiological agency. Base-line muscle tension is increased and the EEG usually features beta waves. Psychologically, we find focal attention, heightened boundary perception, object-based logic, and the dominance of formal characteristics over the sensory; shapes and meanings have a preference over colors and textures.

“These attributes develop together. For example, as Piaget has shown, thinking develops in association with the manipulation and perception of objects, and object-oriented thought is associated with muscle activity, especially eye muscle activity. Thus we experience "effortful" thinking -- reflecting the involvement of our muscle system. Likewise we can understand the perceptual characteristics of the action mode as providing what is needed for success in acting on the world. For example, a clear sense of self-object difference is necessary to obtain food. Similarly, a variety of psychological and physiological processes are coordinated and developed together in multidimensional unity adapted to the requirements of the task; i.e., manipulating the environment.

“In contrast, the receptive mode is a state whose purpose is receiving the environment, rather than manipulation. The sensory-perceptual system is usually the dominant agency rather than the muscle system. Base-line muscle tension tends to be decreased, compared to the tension found in the action mode, and the EEG tends to the slower frequencies of alpha and theta. Psychologically, attention is diffuse, boundary perception is decreased, paralogical thought processes are evident, and sensory qualities dominate over the formal. These functions are coordinated to maximize the intake of the environment. But as growth proceeds the receptive mode is gradually dominated, if not submerged, by a natural and culturally enforced emphasis on striving activity and the action mode that serves it. The receptive mode tends, more and more, to be an interlude between increasingly longer periods of action-mode organization. A consequence of this bias is that we come to regard the action mode as the normal one for adult life and to think of the unfamiliar receptive states as pathological.

“The pervasiveness of the action mode is evident when we consider how our language reinforces it. We tend ordinarily to use language to analyze, discriminate, and divide the world into pieces or objects which we can then grasp -- psychologically and physically -- in order to act upon them. The richness and subtlety of our language for any particular area of our lives reflects the extent to which we apply the action mode to that sector. For example, most of us have only one word for snow; if we are skiers we may have several. The Eskimo has many words that discriminate the varieties of snow conditions which he must take into account to survive.

“In some cases, the issue is not how many differences we have learned to detect but the mode of consciousness in which the experience takes place. "Love," for example, is represented for the average person by only one word. Yet, each of us probably has experienced many different varieties of that condition. We have not developed a rich vocabulary for love because it is experienced in the receptive mode; indeed, it requires the receptive mode for its occurrence. Similarly, color experience (rather than the use of color as a sign) requires the receptive mode, and colors have only a relatively few names compared to the vast variety of hues to which we are sensitive. This is true even for the artist to works with, manipulates, and makes color objects and therefore has an expanded color vocabulary, compared to most people.

“Some extreme examples can illustrate these contrasting yet complementary modes. Imagine a cab driver in heavy traffic, struggling to get a passenger to the airport in time so that he may earn a large tip. S/he is intentionally engaged in maneuvering among the objects of his world and is focused on a future goal, trying as best he can to control what happens. S/he is not occupied with the color of the automobiles, the blueness of the sky, or the aesthetic qualities of the streets and buildings, but sees only openings or blockades of traffic, and notes only the colors of the stop lights. He sees the shapes and understands the meanings of the various objects flashing into his narrowed attentional field while at the same time part of their attention recalls alternate routes, and they scan their memory to remember the typical traffic flows. Their base-line muscle tension is high and his EEG would probably show a desynchronized, fast voltage pattern.

“In contrast, consider a monk or nun who is sitting in contemplative meditation in a garden. At that moment, their organism is oriented toward taking in the environment, a function that is performed via the receptive mode. If they are deeply into that mode, their state of consciousness may feature a marked decrease in the distinction between themself and their environment to the extent that they merge with it or have a nonverbal (ineffable) perception of unity, or both. Sensory experience dominates their consciousness, their muscles tend towards relaxation, and their EEG is likely to show alpha and theta waves. In contrast to the cab driver, they are not concerned with the future but instead are letting whatever happens happen, while language and thinking are relinquished almost entirely.

“During most of our lives what occurs is probably a mixture of the two modes or at least a fluctuation between them. For the majority of us, that fluctuation is heavily dominated by the action mode. However, it is not the presence or absence of physical activity per se that determines the mode. Rather, the underlying purpose or attitude seems to be crucial. For example, a monk working in a garden or lovers in embrace ideally would be given up to the receptive mode. However, if the monk or nun are worried about how soon they will gain enlightenment or experience mystical union, or if the lovers are preoccupied about how well they are performing, quite a different kind of experience will result.

“Thus, we are not talking about activity versus passivity as usually conceived, or about the secondary and primary processes of psychoanalytic theory. There is some similarity between aspects of the receptive mode and the cognitive style associated with primary process. However, the bimodal model addresses itself to a functional orientation -- that of "taking in" versus "acting on" the environment. The receptive mode is not a 'regressive' ignoring of the world or a retreat from it -- although it can be employed for that purpose, but is a different way of engaging the world in pursuit of a different goal.

“With this discussion in mind, we can understand renunciation as a strategy to establish the receptive mode as the dominant orientation and to intensify its effects. In most spiritual disciplines a psychosocial system has been developed for use in a monastery or ashram, where technical exercises, communal living, and ideology are integrated to bring about change. It is instructive to look closely at one example of such a system; we can consider life in a Zen monastery of the Soto Zen sect. The basic principles of its operation are similar to those of other spiritual disciplines. The Zen monastery teaches its students (monks or nuns) a state of acceptance and "nondiscrimination." This is accomplished by meditation, communal living, an ascetic way of life, and a supporting philosophy -- Buddhism. There are different forms of meditation prescribed but the purest form is called shikan-taza, or "just sitting." A person performing shikan-taza is not supposed to do anything except to be sitting; trying to meditate better than the day before or trying to achieve enlightenment represent incorrect attitudes. The basic instruction is acceptance, rather than doing. Even intrusive thoughts or fantasies while meditating are not struggled against, but are treated as distractions that one must be patient with until they go away. The monk is told that if he is truly sitting, he is enlightened -- to just sit, to just be, is enlightenment, itself.

“The average person finds it very difficult to just sit and not do anything. When they try it, they begin to realize how rigorously they have been trained to be busy, to solve problems, to make objects, to look ahead, to strive toward a goal. The sitting meditation may be regarded as an experiment in which the student explores what it is like when he does not respond to the usual commands of pain, anxiety, boredom, or desires.

“One effect of this meditation is to give the student the actual experience of having their ordinary sense of linear time change to something which might be described as timeless. For brief intervals, time can be felt to disappear -- and anxiety with it. Likewise, the feeling of a personal self (the core dimension of the action mode) tends to become less vivid and, in some instances, may disappear, too.

“The philosophical instruction that is given in lectures or, indirectly, through the chanting of religious texts, presents a theory that the world is one of constant change, composed of a basic nothing that takes an endless variety of forms but whose essence cannot be analyzed. In particular, the usual concept of death is taught to be an illusion. In this way, the most powerful force that orients us towards the future -- the fear of death -- is diminished.

“The social systems of the monastery also undercut the action mode by minimizing material rewards. No one accrues profits; one day is very similar to the next. The food stays the same, there are few status rewards, and, thus, there tends to be nothing very concrete to "look forward to."

“In these ways, the monastic system strikes at the attempt to grasp, to cling to, to strive for, to reach ahead and possess. The psychological importance of this is readily apparent. If we examine the content of our thinking, we can see that most of our energies are devoted to prolonging or bringing back a particular pleasure that we have had, often at the expense of enjoying the pleasure available at the moment. Operating in the action mode with an orientation towards the future, we tend to lose what is available to us in the present; for example, a person taking a pleasant walk on a beautiful spring day may be unhappy because they anticipate the end of their vacation. In contrast, a monk or a yogi is taught to accept, to allow -- rather than to be concerned with seeking pleasure or avoiding pain. To the extent that they succeed in this reorientation, they establish the groundwork for a mode of consciousness that the mystical literature describes as timeless, nondualistic, nonverbal, and completely satisfying. In brief, Deikman proposed that a key to this is a mode of organismic being that he called "the receptive mode," one that is natural to us, but seldom employed to its full potential.

“A lesson derived from Deikman's research is that the receptive mode is not the exclusive property of monks. Almost all of us make use of it (without being aware of it) to perform functions that we do not usually regard as esoteric or mysterious. To take a very mundane example: trying to remember a forgotten name by a direct, conscious effort may yield nothing. In such a situation we typically remark, "It will come to me in a minute" -- and it usually does. We stop struggling to remember and allow ourselves to be receptive. Only then does the name pop into awarness. Our shift in attitude -- a change in strategy -- permits a latent function to be exercised. Switching to the receptive mode permits the operation of capacities that are nonfunctional in the action mode.

“The same principle is illustrated futher when we consider a more important use of the receptive mode: to solve more difficult problems by means of creative intuition. Typically, there is an initial stage of struggling with the problem. A sense of impasse develops and the struggle is given up. Sometime later, while completely occupied with a less important activity, or perhaps waking from sleep, the answer suddenly appears. Often, it is in a symbolic or spatial form and needs to be worked over to make it coherent and applicable. In terms of the modal model, the process begins with the use of the action mode during the preliminary or preparatory stage. When progress is blocked, a shift takes place to the receptive mode. In that mode, our capacity for creative synthesis is able to function and the intuitive leap to a new configuration takes place. Then, we shift back to the action mode in order to integrate the new formulation with our previous knowledge and to communicate it to others.

“For most people, the receptive mode probably has its most important function in intimate relations. The capacity for a deep and satisfying experience with another is related to a person's ability to relinquish control, to allow the partner to move through physical and psychological boundaries, and to stay focused in the present. Futhermore, intimacy in persons who are thus able to "let go" is associated with heightened sensation, diffuse attention, and a decrease in the boundaries of the self (as in meditation); and in some cases, profound experiences occur that may be properly termed mystical. In contrast, persons who are unable to give up their customary mode of activity striving and control will continue to suffer a constriction of their experience; for them the pleasurable sensations, the release of tension, and feelings of closeness tend to be minimal or absent.

“Mystics claim to have a direct, intuitive perception of reality, and that claim is a reasonable possibility. Studies in perception and developmental psychology indicate that typically we exercise a significant selection process over the array of stimuli with which we are presented. For efficiency's sake, we have to pay attention to some things and not to others, and we automatize that selection process to such an extent that it becomes difficult to recover our perceptual and cognitive options. For that reason, mystical disciplines make use of a variety of means to bring about a deautomatization so that a new, fresh perception can occur. Deikman hypothesized that when this deautomatization is combined with an increased capacity for receptive-mode function (as a result of "spiritual" training), the event traditionally referred to as "awakening to the awareness of one's true nature" takes place.

“As in the case of creative intuition, descriptions of such "enlightenment" experiences indicate that they are sudden, involuntary, and present the "answer" in a flash. They tend to follow a long period of struggle and are often triggered by something of an irrelevant nature -- the same pattern noticed for creative intuition. Futhermore, accounts of enlightenment often stress that additional work was needed before the new knowledge was fully "realized." One might say that it had to be integrated through use of the action mode. Thus, Deikman proposed, mystical "enlightenment" or "awakening" may be the result of a radical use of the basic creative process with which we are already familiar.

“Although our conscious experience may seem to be a mixture of these different mode components, in a certain basic sense the modes appear to be complementary. The term "complementarity" was introduced by Niels Bohr to account for the fact that two different conditions of observation could lead to conclusions that were conceptually incompatible. For example, in one set of experiments light behaved as if it were composed of discrete particles, while in another set of experiments light behaved as if it were a continuous wave. Bohr suggested that there was no intrinsic incompatibility between the two results because they were functions of different conditions of observation and no experiment could be devised that would demonstrate both aspects under a single condition. "Enlightenment" has been likened to an open hand. When you try to grasp it, you transform your open hand into a fist. The very attempt to possess it (the action mode) banishes the state because it is a function of the receptive mode. To put it in more modern terms, if you change your own organismic program from intake to manipulate, your functional characteristics will change at the same time.

CONCLUSION

“Our ordinary and habitual mode of consciousness can be called the action mode, organized to manipulate the environment and featuring an acute consciousness of past and future time. Its basic reference point is the experience of a separate, personal self. In contrast, we have the capacity for a different organization -- the receptive mode -- oriented towards the present, in which the personal self as a preoccupying orientation fades away and the world tends to be experienced as more unified and satisfying. As the action mode is used for problem solving and manipulating the environment, the receptive mode is used for receiving, for providing nutrition and satisfaction.

“Which mode is better? Deikman proposes that if we think in such terms, we are missing the point. His claim is that we gain nothing by restricting our functions to one mode or the other. Rather, we need the capacity to function in both modes, as may suit the occasion.

“What stands in the way? Deikman points out that the first barrier is a cultural bias that tells us that "mystical states" are unreal, pathological, crazy, or regressive. Without knowing it, under the banner of the scientific method, our thinking has been constricted. He proposes that we have been indoctrinated to avoid looking closely at these realms, but that it is time to make the receptive mode, and the experience which it engenders, a legitimate option for ourselves and for science. If we do so, we will be able to see more clearly the psychodynamic barriers that limit this option: defenses aginst reliquishing conscious control, defenses against the unexpected and the unknown, defenses against the blurring and loss of boundaries defining the self. We will be able to discriminate those instances in which the pathological or regressive are indeed present, but we will not miss seeing and exploring those phenomena that are truly mature and life promoting.

“Deikman speculates that our survival as a species may depend on being able to utilize our receptive-mode function so that we can experience the basis for humanitarian values. The action mode that pervades our civilization does not support selflessness; the receptive mode, ordinarily the specialty of mystics, does. From this point of view, mystics have been the guardians of a potentiality that has been ours and that it is now time for us to reclaim. We can integrate this realm with our present knowledge, making it less exotic and less alien. By doing so, we can explore and regain a functional capacity that we may now need for our very preservation.