Upgrade Your Operating System
Transcription:
We are all computer programmers. The main act we have performed in this life is to program this bio-computer. We did that work of programming and completed it by the age of three. A lot of the work was done intrauterinely before we were born. This is so that the operating system that we can call our “psychology” was fixed before the organism had a great deal of experience—and then could only interpret that experience in terms of the capacity of the operating system to integrate new information.
And what was determinative in the type of programming of the operating system that you use and are now identified with is based on the initial conditions in which you created that system. And the primary factor that determined that initial condition was the psychological condition of the mother, in whose womb your body was formed, and out of which was born the relationship of the mother to the father and the family system, and the amount of love that was in the environment.
These things enabled that operating system to develop a non-defensive relationship to reality in which the desire to learn, to know, to grow, to discover truth became the major raison d’être, the major function of the operating system, rather than to defend you from aggression, to enable you to fight or flee, to force you to seek security at all costs and never experience the unknown, never dare to learn new things, but to have that basic sense of inner safety, internalized security, wellbeing, and goodness that would enable you to move out from the base of that original source of physical security (the mother) and enter fearlessly into the world.
If those initial conditions were not optimal, then the operating system had to be modified in order to deal with the adversities that would be faced in life. And to do that, various subsets of the operating system specifically designed be militarized, to be aggressive, or to be evasive, or to be compliant, on the other hand, to choose a strategy of pleasing the other so that you would never be subject to conflict, to be seductive or to be submissive, or simply to be too internalized to even relate to others, or too crazy for others to relate to you.
Many different strategies for the psychological operating system were ingeniously devised by each of us before this organism was three years old. Some of those operating systems were designed in a modular way so that new applications could be integrated, and some rejected the new applications that were offered by later experience because they were too threatening. If the operating system that you created was designed to reject new information, to maintain a homeostasis insecurity because it felt too insecure to know too much, then you cannot learn from experience and the system was destined to repeat the same patterns over and over again, and would have to deny new information or fall asleep when new information was being given, or run away or forget it and not be able to think about and otherwise make sure that no new information came into destabilize the system.
Now, once the psychological system was created it included more than one self-image, more than one icon to put on the screen, because you wanted different icons to be able to deal with different kinds of situations. The problem was that these different icons and subsets of the personality, some to be in situations that were calm and others to be in situations that were combative, tended to become semi-autonomous, and there was no center of control of all of these various subpersonalities.
Therefore, there would be an internal battle for which one would be dominant at any given moment. And to the extent that such an internal battle goes on, the mind feels extremely peaceless, and often one must then resort to external adjuncts to modify the system since there is no way to modify it from within itself. And then people choose alcohol or drugs or various other external methods to keep the system calm. But then, the addiction to those external adjuncts creates worse problems of feeling out of control.
Once the psychological system has been created, it cannot change itself. It cannot do anything that it was not designed to do. Now, if it was designed in an optimal way to learn and to grow, then it has the capacity for self-modification to a certain extent, but it still cannot transcend itself. What the great mathematician Kurt Gödel discovered (he was a friend of Einstein and one of the greatest thinkers 20th century) was that every logical system, whether it’s arithmetic or algebra or calculus or modal logic, or any system of command and control—including the ego, including the psychological system—every system reaches a point of failure. It reaches a point of either inconsistency or incompleteness. In other words, there will be questions that the system cannot answer, or it will answer incorrectly.
To the extent that the psychological system was designed under adverse conditions, its failure point comes sooner, and its ability to adapt to different kinds of circumstances than those in which it was originated creates an incapacity to adapt that leads to what we generally call a breakdown, a meltdown. That can either be of a minor sort or it can be a major crackup that is very difficult to repair.
If you study the history of modern psychology and psychoanalysis, and the various forms of depth psychology that have developed over the last 150 years, there’s an interesting trajectory. Originally there was a branching out and many different systems developed. But in the last 30 years there has been a convergence. There’s almost no difference any longer between the understanding of Jungian, a Freudian, a Lacanian, and Adlerian, a Kohutian, and various other theories that have developed because they have all gained enough evidence about the spectrum of ego systems that develop, that they can all pretty well accommodate and come to an understanding of the logic that causes people to act the way they do, that brings about either breakdowns or breakthroughs, either growth or petrifaction, either health or illness; how the failure of the system leads to psychosomatic diseases and leads to other kinds of crashes.
Because of this homogenization, this convergence of understanding of very different models, we can ascertain through that the scientific verifiability of the basic understanding that runs through these different systems (even though they have different premises as to, let’s say the ultimate concerns of a psychological system in itself). But what they have come to recognize is that there are a number of different developmental levels that are possible for us. Some egos stop at very low levels of development; they’re very simple to understand; they are very primitive; they can be manipulated pretty easily. There are others of higher complexity, of more subtlety, of greater aesthetic capacities and of greater capacities to relate and to grow. But the logic of that developmental order is also well understood.
What is most extraordinary about this is that the modern/postmodern psychological understanding replicates entirely the most ancient yogic model of psychology, called kundalini yoga, but it stops short of the developmental levels that kundalini yoga says are possible to us because the society that we are in does not valorize the higher states of consciousness that are possible to us, and discourages us—even ridicules those who attempt to grow to those higher-levels. What’s important to understand is that psychology itself represents only the lower levels of the spectrum of consciousness, and meditation, properly speaking, is not a psychological act because you can’t solve a problem at the same level that it was created.
There must be a capacity for a meta-psychological transcendence of the ego system if you are going to reprogram it. The system cannot reprogram itself, but if you rediscover the original Programmer of the system, that programming intelligence can reprogram the system and modify it so that it can rise to higher and higher levels of capacity, of intelligence, of love, of freedom. You become the user of the system, not simply identified as an icon in the system. Once you are free of the system, when you don’t need to use it, you can explore dimensions that transcend psychology itself.
It is in that meta-psychological level of consciousness that we seek to center ourselves in meditation.
Audio File: Upgrade Your Operating System – Audio File.MP3