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People with
a psychological need to believe in
marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological
need not to believe in
marvels. Charles Fort
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We are in two minds about everything – all of the
time. We literally do have two minds: one logical and the other intuitive. Popularly,
we know them as the ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’, sometimes as the rational and Intuitive minds. But we name these two aspects of the psyche in
so many different ways it can be confusing. To make it easier to talk about let’s
call the (rational, thinking, Animus, logical mind) the Analytical Mind and lets call the (emotional, artistic,
intuitional, feeling mind) the Soul or
Inward Mind. *
The Analytical
Mind seems easy to understand. It is simply ‘me’ as a thinking, conscious
individual; it’s my sense of personal identity where I can say ‘I am the
manager of my life’. The Analytical Mind is
the one who copes with the realities of day to day existence. The person I call
‘me’ lives in this coping mind; it’s who I am most of the time, living in a
rather flat, one dimensional world, doing what has to be done each day so that
I will have a tomorrow where I can do it again.
In our ordinary life The Soulful Inward Mind, our other half, is like a stranger within
– mostly in hiding. But there are moments when this stranger comes alive and I can
feel the zest for living life outside the box. Reminders of Christmas morning
as a child can free me up, or the first day of the school holidays are memories
of a time when I was fully awake to the wonders of the world. Remembering these
moments I realise that the stranger within is no real stranger at all, but is
really me at my best. At those moments the coping mind takes second place and
life is full and flourishing.
The Inward Soul constantly reverberates with the
ordinary day to day of living, giving us two realities at once. Then the Soul’s
input can vitalize the plain facts of life with wider intuitive panorama,
colouring each moment with a deeper significance. We see further. We feel
further. Using our Felt-Sense we, as
it were, live in two places at once: the ordinary world and the world of the
imagination. Living in two places like this we are more connected and alive.
The Analytical
Mind working alone is simply flat and boring. For me this is most
noticeable when I am writing. To try to write using the Analytical Mind alone I am inside the Box. I can only repeat what I
have said before. My writing is dry, wooden, unimaginative and boring. To work well
I have invoke the magic of living in two places at once. I have to invite The Soul’s deeper sense before the
writing comes alive. Magically, the Inward
Soul constantly disrupts the status quo, bringing fresh insights and
connections.
But the Soul
Mind has to be larger than this taste of aliveness. The problem is: where
do we put all our psychic stuff we don’t
understand. There is so much of it. All my
bizarre dreams, memories and fantasies, the vagaries of the libido, the imaginative
magic and abilities that seem to defy the rules of nature. These are powers over
which I have no control. They are my powers, yet they belong to the stranger. For
example, telepathy is an established fact – it happens all the time. The only
place we can put this ability is somewhere in the Inward Mind. We call it paranormal
or supernatural, dismissing it because
it shouldn’t be possible. We banish it beyond the natural world only
because there is no place for it in our present restricted scientific outlook. This
is the reason for Rupert Sheldrake’s call to free science from its
materialistic fixation.
Then there are even more fantastic worlds: bizarre and
unlikely phenomena like poltergeists, faith healing, telekinesis, hypnosis, pre-cognition,
the experiences of LSD, children who remember past lives, autistic savants, shamanism, near
death experiences, alien abduction, and exceptional artistic talents. All this,
as well as the higher levels of spirituality. Either it’s all delusional nonsense
or there is something going on, something real we should give serious attention
to.
We have only a vague idea of what it all adds up to or
what it prefigures for humanity as we evolve – except to be sure they are all connected
in some way with the great mystery of the Inward
Soul and beyond that to our connection to what Aldous Huxley called ‘Mind at Large’. Plus we do know that to
make life peak we must be able to live in two places at once.
*
Seven years before Freud’s Interpretation
of Dreams, Thomson Jay Hudson (1834 – 1903) published his Law of Psychic Phenomena (1893) in which he proposed that:
1. Man has two minds: the objective mind (conscious)
and the subjective mind (subconscious).
2. The subjective mind is constantly amenable to
control by suggestion.
3. The subjective mind is incapable of inductive
reasoning.
contact:
stanrich@vodafone.co.nz
(03) 981 2264
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