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Thoughts

In this section I write about different topics according to my own understanding and observations. I explore ideas around consciousness, the sense of Self, trauma, conditioning, developmental stages of childhood, etc. 

The development of the human psyche

What is Self?

Any healing journey is a movement towards “reconnecting to our Self”. Sense of Self is the embodiment of Soul, the felt presence of our Soul in our body-mind, it is an Essential reality. Our Soul is already whole, accomplished yet consciousness or self-reflection is needed in order to fully embody it in our life. The Soul is composed of perfect and immutable qualities that have been defined in different ways by different spiritual traditions: Essential nature (Diamond approach), Platonic Forms (Plato), divine qualities in Buddhist or Hindu deities, God’s perfect blueprints in Christian’s theology, etc. Children are naturally and unknowingly made of Essence and bathing in it, yet they don’t have self-awareness (or self-reflective capacity) and are not yet aware of who they truly are. Because the infant initially does not have a self-reflective capacity, she cannot mirror herself (and her Essential nature) and she relies on her environment to see her, to tell her who she is, to give meaning to her (and to the world around her). If her environment fails to mirror her true Self, the child progressively disconnects from her Soul qualities and develops a self-image that is not in tune with her Essential qualities but that rather reflects the way that she is perceived by her environment. While if the environment is successful (or at least partially successful) in mirroring the child’ Self, she will stay connected to her Essential nature and acquire a self-image that reflects more accurately the qualities of her true Self. So, any Essential quality that is positively mirrored, seen and recognized by the environment is integrated in the child’s system, both as an energetic embodiment of her true Self and as a positive self-image reflecting her true Self. While, on the negative side, any Essential quality that is negatively mirrored, rejected, ignored (not seen), manipulated or taken advantage of by her environment, will be both energetically disconnected from and negatively integrated in the child’s self-image. In other words, consciousness is what allows a Soul quality to be both physically embodied and mentally integrated in the mind of the child (self-image). While lack of consciousness leads to an energetic disconnection on the body level and to an identity distortion on a mind level (fake self-image).

What is ego?

In both cases a self-image is built, an ego (more or less healthy depending on the circumstances described above), which is a crystallized identity, in Almaas’s words: “a psychic structure that is based on crystallized beliefs about who we are and what the world is” (Almaas, Facets of Unity, the Enneagram of Holy Ideas, pp.21-22). Those memories, thoughts, images and impressions usually give the sense of a relative coherent self-image. These crystallized memories are linked to how we have came to perceive ourselves (and the world around us) in childhood, as the self-reflective capacity started to manifest and to develop within the child. Ego is then the result of the development of self-awareness, which is consciousness filtered through the prism of our mind. Without the progressive acquirement of self-consciousness or the capacity of self-reflection, we wouldn’t develop an ego.  

What happens to consciousness when it is filtered through the prism of the human brain?

The human brain and nervous system is so incredibly developed that it has become able to access consciousness, yet it is also limited and cannot be fully conscious all the time, so it uses filters and strategies like shortcuts, concepts, generalizations and automatisms in order for the body-mind to move and to function correctly (when we drive a car most of our gestures aren’t conscious). These strategies allow a person to function in the world without being constantly conscious of everything within and without, which would require an impossible amount of energy and of brain processing. Yet, generalizations and concepts usually create an identity: I am like this so I behave this way, she is like that so she behaves that way. Generalizations, concepts, automatisms and shortcuts are needed in order to function in the world, yet they can limit our capacity to consciously (freshly, newly, concept-free) apprehend reality. The brain creates strategies that allow the body-mind to survive and to keep functioning even in critical or life-threatening situations. Trauma in a situation in which the brain creates a shortcut that distorts the perception of reality, the shortcut happens because the brain has no time for conscious processing (due to the urgency of the situation), so the person is forced to disconnect from her conscious awareness in order to survive. When fighting or running away are not an option, the person freezes, meaning that she cuts down her senses, the ability to both consciously perceive reality and to consciously perceive her Self. Therefore disconnecting both from reality and from her Self. 

How trauma narrows down the capacity to be conscious?

Trauma happens when the mind develops strategies of survival that distort the objective perception of reality and therefore narrows down the capacity to stay conscious (trauma reduces brain plasticity and impairs the natural response of the amygdala). Healing happens every time a person manages to regain access to the objective perception of any situation that was previously seen through the lenses of the trauma-response mechanism. Each time this happens, neuroplasticity is regained. We can start to imagine here the fundamental importance of healing situations such as: corrective experiences, reality-check and consistency. Healing situations in which the body-mind learns that the trauma-response is not needed anymore because now it is safe. We also need to remember that consciousness is what allows the connection and energetic integration our Self. So, reconnecting to conscious awareness also means reconnecting to our true Self both mentally (recognition of our truth) and physically (feeling and sensing energetically our Essential presence).

Healing also happens when we revisit the wound with our present adult consciousness, when we revisit the moment of the disconnection from a certain quality of our Self (we disconnected when we lost the objective awareness of it). For example, as children we might disconnect from our healthy anger because our parents see it excessive or wrong. Healing happens when we re-experience, with objective awareness, a situation in which awareness was missing or distorted. By re-experiencing objectively a traumatic event and the feelings around it, by baring the pain, sometimes the hell of it, by experiencing it directly, consciously, objectively, instead of disconnecting from the painful reality, we restore the connection to who we were before the trauma. We reconnect to the objective reality on a mental level and to our Essential Self on the body level. Finally, trauma is so painful because it is the moment in which we lost the connection to our true Self. No event is unbearable if we can stay who we truly are as we face it.

 
 

 

 

In this article I explore the constitution of the Self and the difference between Self and self-image. I describe the fundamental importance of the self-reflective capacity in the development of the human psyche and the implications of the limitations of the human brain.

 
 

 

 

Table of Contents

"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness".

Albert Einstein

The structure of reality

To explain the structure of reality we can start to notice that the whole game of existence is created by polarities and oppositions. Darkness/light, life/death, movement/stillness, feminine/masculine, pleasure/suffering, love/fear, knowledge/mystery, etc. The art of living being based on finding a balance between these contradictory but complementary aspects of life. Yet the most fundamental of these polarities is the basic principle of existence itself, which has been named in the Vedas dual-unity. It is the apparent opposition between union vs separation, between the physical or material reality (which is separation from the Source) and the invisible or “beyond matter” reality of Soul or consciousness (which is union with the Source). The latter has been denied by most of humanity and this is why the world is currently out of balance. Denying that there is a reality that unites us all beyond any kind of separation is the source of all psychic suffering on our planet earth. This invisible reality can be called Source, love, Tao, God, the absolute, etc, it is where we all come from and where we all go back. Actually we are bathing in it in this very moment, but the human mind functions in a way that bypasses this truth and focuses only on the awareness of separation. Einstein itself said that this sense of separation is an optical delusion of our consciousness. Part of my reflections on consciousness aim to clarify why and how this optical delusion happens and how it is kept in place in our daily life. 

 
 

 

 

Consciousness and the Self

Introduction

Consciousness is the great secret. Whenever we try to understand it, to grasp it, to reach towards it, we are always thrown back at the eternal mystery of life and of the origin of creation itself. Lao Tzu writes in the Tao De Ching: “you can’t know it but you can be it“. And indeed, it seems that we can’t solve the riddle of what consciousness is, nor where it comes from and yet, we can embody it within us, in our own life and we can observe its reverberations and the outcomes of its presence (or absence) in ourselves and in the world. 

[…]

  1. The first part of the research will be dedicated to discussing some fundamental questions concerning consciousness, its nature, its origin and its interaction with the human brain.
  2. The second part will be attributed to understanding the structure of the self and in digging into the mysteries of the incredible human capacity for self-consciousness. 
  3. The third and last part will be consecrated to describing the development of self-consciousness throughout the developmental stages of the human infant, from utero time to teenage years. Though it is still a mystery how self-consciousness initially arises in the human brain, we can nevertheless study the outcomes of its progressive appearance within the child throughout its entire growth. In this regard we will notice that usually, the more conscious the parents are, the more the child will be able to develop a coherent and stable sense of oneself. To study the development or the sense of self implies to dig into the entire development of the human psyche, the mysterious introcosm of human subjectivity. The whole “psychological birth of the human infant” being the gradual (and more or less successful) process of acquisition of self-awareness (or self-consciousness). Of course, the birth of self-awareness needs to be understood in the light of how it all started in the very beginning, how was human consciousness born? So, if we want to have a full overview of the question of consciousness, we need to begin with the most basic question of all. What is it and how did it appear within the human mind?