Heal the Split

I have noticed that there seems to be some confusion around the notions of spirituality and consciousness. I offer my perspective on these two, as well as a way of looking at transformation.

To begin with, let’s look at a basic outline of the architecture of the psyche.

The Realms of the Psyche

I see there being four groups of layers, or realms, in the psyche:

- Ego. This is the conscious realm, where our thoughts live. Any of our conscious perceptions reside here.

- Emotional. In the layers closest to the surface, closest to the border between our conscious and unconscious, there are eddies and currents of emotions. Life is teeming with emotion beneath the surface. When our unconscious wants us to know what we’re feeling, one of those emotions pops through into our conscious awareness, and we experience having a feeling. It’s like an iceberg — all we can see is the tip that is visible above the water line. So even though we are not conscious of it, we are always having emotions, every second of every day. In addition to the personal emotions of joy, fear, anger, sadness, and shame, in some of the deeper levels of this realm reside the impersonal emotions of unconditional love and compassion.

- Archetypal. The archetypes dance at levels beneath the emotions. Our emotions are layered on top of these archetypal forces. Archetypes belong to the collective unconscious, and are therefore not personal to us.

- Essential. Beneath the archetypes is raw energy of a particular nature. This is our core, our essence. As I wrote in January, this is imprinted us at the time we come into this world, and within which our life purpose resides.

The further away from the ego realm, the more distanced we are from being aware, and the more murky our sense of the deeper realms is. While our personally disowned shadow material resides in the layers closes to the boundary between the ego and the emotional realm, shadow material can and does reside in the emotional, archetypal, and essential realms. Doing consciousness work helps us build bridges between the ego realm and these other realms.

Consciousness work and spiritual work

A little over a year ago, I moved to the San Francisco Bay area, which has become the center of consciousness work in the world. This place is alive with this kind of work…it seems to bubble up out of the bay. And yet I could sense something strangely odd in many of the people I met who had worked on themselves here. For most of the year, I couldn’t quite get a handle on what it was.

I noticed there seemed to be two bodies of work here: spiritual work and consciousness work. These labels are used fairly interchangably in many places, and yet, as I see it, they are quite different.

Many spiritual paths teach us that the ego is a delusion or something to be destroyed or outgrown. However, most of us have under-developed egos — afraid and unaware — that grasp for securing and power or are unable to move forward.

A path of consciousness begins with our own inner exploration. Doing progressively deeper consciousness work long enough can lead us, over time, to an intimate connection with the infinite. But the reverse isn’t true — doing spiritual work doesn’t necessarily lead us to an exploration of our complex and our own unconscious.

A path of spirituality is intended to bring us into a connection with That Which Is Larger Than Us, God, Great Mystery, The Universe, The All — i.e., the Great “Out There”. Because the focus is on our relationship to the vast infinite, many spiritual paths do not lead our focus to working with our complex or mining our unconscious. And since we don’t work with our projections, this outward focus often brings about the activation of a projection of a deity, one of our most powerful and profound projections.

Some spiritual teachers do things that seem incongruous with our collective image of a fully enlightened being. Everyone, including spiritual teachers and gurus, has shadow — that which is lodged in the unconscious, that which we don’t believe we have or want to know about, and that is opposite of the image we have of our higher nature. Enlightenment implies that light shines on everything — everything is illuminated. However, the shadow remains. It turns out, the brighter the light, the more profound the shadow. The lack of working with projections, combined with that belief that light is shining everywhere, further disowns the shadow material. So while exploring the vastness of the unconscious can eventually lead us to the cosmos, the inverse is not necessarily so. Going outward is much less likely to lead us into an exploration of our own unconscious.

It is a mistake to believe that attaining spiritual enlightenment means there is no longer an unconscious. While we can experience connectedness to the infinite for moments, no one can be continually connected or conscious of everything. True integration involves the ego and deeper Self working in relationship. And between ego and Self, can you guess which can take on bringing about the change in relationship?

Internal experience vs. Transformation

Related to the confusion around spirituality and consciousness is another confusion. This other confusion comes about in mistaking a shift in our internal feeling state referring to an experience for transformation.

Let’s say I enter a workshop feeling sad, and when I finish that workshop, I feel joy. I have heard many a fellow participant say that he or she can see that I have been transformed, but what’s happened is that I feel differently. When a different emotion breaks through into our awareness, a different bit of the iceberg is now visible about the surface. So while I can experience a different emotion within me, has actual transformation occurred?

All those emotional currents reside in layers relatively close to the surface. In contrast, our essential energy lies in our core, quite deeper within our psyche than our emotions. We can’t change our fundamental core energy. What we can change is our relationship to what is. This is what I call transformation: a change in our relationship to what is, whether within us or “out there”.

To me, transformation suggests a fundamental shift in our being, not simply a change in what we’re feeling. Such a transformational shift can sometimes be seen and felt by others, and — unlike our constantly changing emotional experience — is either a permanent shift, or one that lasts for a substantial period of time. Therefore, there is only a loose association between our internal feeling experience and whether transformation occurs…in other words, transformation may or may not be accompanied by a change in our internal experience. My intent here is to, at least somewhat, decouple the association between our internal experience shift and the occurrence of transformation.

So while a transformational shift can sometimes indeed be accompanied by a change in feeling state, since our emotions are constantly changing anyway, more often than not, we can feel different without the occurrence of a fundamental energetic transformation. Here’s an example of this: If you keep working an issue in your I-group over and over, and each time, you feel differently at the end of the work than when you started, then clearly you’ve had changes in your internal feeling state…but if the pattern doesn’t shift out in your life, likely no core transformation has occurred. Conversely, it is possible to undergo an energetic transformation and experience little or no change in our feeling state. In this case, others may see the transformational shift, but our own feeling state may not have changed.

Transformational healing comes about by changing our relationship to what is, either within us or “out there”. While our feeling state may not actually change at all, our relationship to it can. While we can’t make our wounds go away, we can change our relationship to them.

(C) 2006 Cal Simone
[First published in the MKP New Warrior Journal, April 2006.]