We Suffer From a Confusion of Levels of Mind
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In the lower unconscious of an ego that has done little or no processing of a psychoanalytic variety, or a Jungian variety—it hasn’t gone into the depth dimension of their imperiential activity—what they will be affected by, are what we can call proto-affects. They are not yet affects, but they are energies that are not cohesive or coherent, but that irrupt from time to time, or in patterns of activity that have no meaning—but because the unpleasant nature, because these proto-affects are almost always extremely negative, bad feelings, anxious feelings, depressed feelings, feelings of wanting to die, although they’re not experienced as that, they’re not experienced with any meaning whatsoever—that’s the point—and therefore they tend to express themselves somatically. They’ll come out as tics, as coughs, as anxious movements, as needing to scratch, as needing to move around, as needing to get away, as if one has to get out of one’s own body—one is not at peace in one’s body, nor in one’s mind. But these proto-affects are like a plague, and they will often appear in dreams as insects attacking you: ants, or locusts, or some kind of viruses or bacteria—but forces that are of a lower nature, that can bite, can sting, can attack, and one wants to flee from them, but one is being invaded, or in some way being surrounded, besieged, by these energies.
But because they have no meaning, there’s nothing that one can do about them. And someone plagued by these negative proto-affects will not be able to process them in a psychoanalytic or an Atmanological session, and the analysts will say, “Why are you doing that? Why these movements? What’s going on for you?” And they say, “I don’t know. Can’t figure out. I don’t know.” No words, speechlessness.
And the Censor will not allow the unbearable nature of these proto-affects to release their embedded images; they do have images, and proto-thoughts and proto-fantasies, but they are shattered—they are like a jigsaw puzzle, but splintered into pieces that have not yet come together. And the work of analysis or depth psychology, or Atmanology, is to put it together, to create a pattern, a picture, an understanding of what is the scenario.
And after a great deal of resistance is overcome, the proto-affects will be turned into affects, and now there will be the beginning of an ability to talk about that. And at least in terms of “I’m feeling bad, I’m feeling anxious, I’m feeling worried”, but will not be able to say why. They will often have still a sense of “I don’t know why I’m feeling. I know what I’m feeling now, but I don’t know why I’m feeling it. And now I don’t have to somatize it so much, but I still can’t really talk about it as having any meaning. It’s just there.” It’s a thing in itself, but it’s not yet for itself. It does not yet have a conation. It does not yet have a will to express itself, but it’s coming together.
And as someone begins to focus more on these energies, and begin to collect them more into patterns, and be able to see that this situation triggered this, and that triggered that, and this thing happened, and “now I remember that that thing happened, and I can begin to see that there is a structure of meaning that is very vague and obscure”—but it’s beginning to make sense as to why these feelings are there—whether in terms of glimpses, of memories, or vague dreams and visions of things, or voices that come along with the affects, but they’re beginning to become connected to thoughts. And the thoughts to images, and the images beginning to collect into a kind of motion picture—a fantasy scenario with the beginning, middle, and end, begins to take place, but so far you’re just getting glimpses of scenes that do not have, yet, that structure, but it’s becoming vaguely apparent that either there was a trauma that had a beginning and a middle and end, that seems to be repeating, or there’s something else that wants to express itself and appear fully, but is not yet here. And there’s a tension between wanting to know and not wanting to know, and one becomes more aware of that tension.
As one begins to do further work, one recognizes that it’s not just this affect or that affect—there can be many different affects, and some have more of a desirous nature, and some more of a fearful nature, some more hateful, some more disgust, some more wanting to flee, some more wanting to fight, some more wanting to achieve something, to produce some work of art, or poem, or expression in some way.
And so they begin to become emotions, which I will define as a complex of affects, that begin to show a more unified meaning, but a complex meaning, or a set of meanings, that now can begin to be talked about. “I’m having this emotional reaction to what you’re saying, or how you’re looking at me, because it’s triggering a hysterical memory of some trauma that happened.” And you can begin, now, to present a rational understanding of why you’re feeling what you’re feeling, and what’s triggering it, and what you would like from the other person, or what you need to say to the other person, or whatever, but now it’s something that can enter into discourse. But the level of it that enters into discourse is not yet the level of imperience—it’s the level that is first appearing, but it’s usually a screen, still, for a deeper level of what’s going on, because the person doesn’t know. They’re starting to get clues and rationalizing and trying to make sense of these energies, but they are still themselves being used by this, in order for it to express itself in ways that the conscious mind cannot yet grasp. It comes from a level of an intelligence that’s greater than that of the conscious mind.
And so the conscious mind needs to stretch itself to be able to grasp and comprehend the entirety of the patterns. But it takes a long time to do that, and so you get glimpses, and you get a sense that there’s something really deep and huge going on. And this is when you start to get dreams of massive kinds of phenomena: earthquakes, or you’re in the ocean and whales come up beside you, or gigantic creatures of other kinds, or massive tornadoes lift you in the air, and you’re beginning to recognize that these forces have an intention for you, to take you somewhere, to change you in some way, to bring about some result. But you’re in the grip of this force that you do not yet understand. And if you are not willing and able to allow it to emerge, then it will continue to somatize, and it can become some very grave illness, or some other karmic kind of event in which you have to face the shock and awe of some experience in the external world.
But these begin to reveal themselves more as you free associate and allow the unconscious mind to speak through you, without knowing what you’re going to say. And that’s the big shift in Atmanology, when you go from preparing what you want to say—with a script, with ideas, with questions, with ways of wanting to format the session—to allowing the unconscious to speak itself. And then things will get revealed from this imperiential level that you would not have imagined, or wanted to hear. They’re usually not nice, and they are usually something that’s not only not nice to you, but is not nice to others, and that you don’t want to know because you’re going to have to tell other people something not nice as a result of this, and it’s going to create some situation you don’t want to face. So there are all these other levels at the register of experience as well as imperience, that are interlocking and interweaving.
But as they begin to come up and you see the fantasy structure of the whole, from its beginning to its unconscious intention of the end, then it becomes an affcept. Now, you can conceptualize the affect in its context of the entirety of its meaning, and you can grasp that that meaning is intending to realize itself in the phenomenal plane, so that your conscious mind and your unconscious are finally in sync, and that there is no longer anything hidden. But the result of the way it becomes revealed will often be a very unpleasant one that will bring about a sense of guilt, and a sense of failure, or remorse for having had feelings of murderous rage, or of revenge, or of the desire to act out some kind of a lower chakra intention that you had repressed, or denied, that wants to dominate your life, or someone else’s life.
But if that affcept as a whole can be grasped and worked with—if it doesn’t slip away from you—then you are able to integrate it with the superconsciousness. You are able to integrate it with a teleological dimension of your destiny, and understand what you were to learn from it, without it having to enact itself fully on the plane of karma. And you can turn it into wisdom before it ends up bringing you to tears. And it’s this race between the imperience wanting to produce the effect, and the mind wanting to understand its meaning, so that the effect can be transformed before it reaches its revelation of the pain of some aggrievement, or some trauma, or some past life karma that had not yet been reconciled, or resolved, that can now lead to a shift of the trajectory of one’s destiny.
Once you can do that and connect the unconscious to the superconscious…