The Imperialism of the Mind
Integral Consciousness – Part 2
To begin to understand how we might move toward a more integral consciousness, we must first realize how we have been subjected to what has been called the “colonization of consciousness.” Our mystical moments, as we remembered in part one—as well as other embodied experiences of knowing, are glimpses beyond this occupation we find ourselves suffering. And we are suffering from it.
Like many empires, we cannot see beyond the “edge of the walls” that have been built. Many, if not most, do not even realize there is another way of being beyond the current common state of existence. The predominance of mental imperialism has largely shut off most from even being able to see or experience other ways of knowing and being, or at least to accept or receive them when they happen.
We have, to use another metaphor, retreated to the attic and sealed ourselves off. It’s all we know. When we hear the word “know,” we almost certainly think of our brains and mental thoughts. Even if we consider ourselves “heart” or “gut” people, we probably still locate the vast majority of our “thinking” in our heads.
Before we can descend back into the warmth of the entire house, we first might take a hard look at how we ended up in this attic—and what’s keeping us here.
Cognicentrism
Prominent transpersonal psychologist, writer, and professor Jorge Ferrer describes our predicament as cognicentrism. While this “mind-centeredness” manifests in several ways, he says the deepest form is “mental pride” or the mind’s intrinsic disposition (at least in the modern West) to consider itself the most important or only player in the search for knowledge and understanding.”
As with most pride, it is primarily unconscious or unrealized. And for good reason, for we have been brought up into it at the expense of our other faculties. Ferrer says, “The cogni-centric character of Western culture hinders the maturation of nonmental attributes, making it normally necessary to engage in intentional practices to bring these attributes up to the same developmental level the mind achieves through mainstream education.”
So this pride comes naturally because it’s all we’ve been taught. Consciously or unconsciously, we think the only way of knowing, or at least the best way is almost exclusively with our mental capacities.
However, in so many of our forms of learning and knowing—including spiritually—we don’t even know where or how to begin developing our “nonmental attributes.” And so we continue to accumulate more and more mental knowledge, hoping we can learn our way out of this predicament.
But under the supremacy of the mind, this learning simply piles up in the mental structure. Jean Gebser describes this situation as a “progressive fragmentation of basic knowledge into a growing aggregate of disparate material. . . . Wisdom becomes accumulated knowledge; when summarized and compiled, it yields a new sum, but no new wisdom. Wisdom is reduced from a quality of being to a quantity of possession.”
He lamented of our time, “When thought began to usurp the spirit.”
Transformations of being into a new consciousness will not and cannot happen in the mind alone. Learning more will not do the trick. We must be ready and willing to give up our addiction to feeding the beast of mental accumulation. We need to return to a whole sense of our embodied self, welcoming again and reintegrating our previous structures of consciousness and ways of knowing.
Our whole body is our true home—not just something to carry our head around. To fully return to it, we first have to throw off the shackles of our mental occupation and go beyond the empire of the mind.
This is ultimately not a problem to be figured out by our mind, but the first keys to unlock this prison will be mental. After all, the door is in our heads.
Going Beyond Thought
How do you know a thought? We are often so identified with our mind that we don’t even see a gap from origin to receptivity in our mind. It is just our consciousness of being awake.
Some spiritual approaches and practices seek to help us to dis-identify with the mind by widening that gap, perceiving the separation from our thoughts to our witnessing center.
To say, “I am not that.” And this is true. We are not our thoughts.
But it is also true to say, “I am that.”
This is nondual mysticism.
We can say “I am that” with nature, with the trees, with the water, with one another, with the deeper underlying reality of oneness that is among all things. We feel this. We know this.
And also, this oneness includes our thoughts. When we no longer solely identify with them, we are freer—but they still belong in who we are, in our experience of life. How could they not? Though in this day and age, we are so desperate to find relief from the constant experience of our fragmented, deficient mental structure that we make our thoughts and our ego out to be the enemy. We grab hold of the path of emptiness and denial in order to escape, to “get out of our heads,” so to speak.
With nowhere else to go, this most often creates an internal disassociation. We’re left searching for experiences that help free us for a few moments, or a spiritual practice that maybe offers relief in the brief instants of emptiness or stillness. We look out the dormer window at the night sky, perhaps even traveling amongst the stars for a time. But then where do we return? Back to our minds. Back to the attic of our head.
Some make it their path in the spiritual life to live in this transcendence, to seek to dwell permanently in this reality of the beyond. It is incredibly difficult, even for those in monastic hermitages who are able to give most of their hours to this endeavor.
For most of us, we need a path that integrates more into the immanent experience of everyday life, that can include the beyond—but also what is before us. What is in us. What is as us.
This is the participatory path of mystical embodied consciousness, seeking to incorporate the deeper structures within us—the mythic (heart), the magic/mystical (womb), the archaic oneness and interconnected web of being (feet/body). This is where we can go to reintegrate, to discover once again our wholeness, to engage in the necessary integration that leads to integral consciousness.
Or, as Aurobindo describes it in The Life Divine: The liberation of consciousness should not be confused with an integral transformation that entails the spiritual alignment of all human dimensions.
But how do we open the attic door to be able to descend once again into our full home?
A Sacrifice of Consciousness
A few years ago, one of my spiritual guides placed a blindfold over my inner eye. It was very clearly this, for I could see the slits of light at the top and bottom of the strip, but nothing else. The interior visions and pictures I had dwelt among for much of my life were suddenly darkened. No longer given to the realm of visionary sight, at first, I felt disoriented and confused. But this was a gift, as I soon begin to feel, for it forced me to begin to sense and know in new ways from my body, my heart, and my spiritual womb.
To discover new ways of being, we must be willing—at least to some extent—to give up or sacrifice our predominant way of knowing and thinking. We must go beyond thought in another way. Down into ourselves rather than escaping up and out.
Jean Gebser refers to this as requiring “a sacrifice of consciousness” from the mental, such as through a trance state. We call it moving into awakened consciousness, where the mind takes on a different role. This is necessary, as Gebser says, because the mind, “in its process of deduction discursive thought, always excludes any openness in its compulsion to system.”
If we don’t learn how to do this consciously and intentionally, we will be subject to the unconscious uprisings of our deeper structures of consciousness—which we are seeing more and more in response to the increasing breakdowns from a society in the throes of the deficient mental structure. There will be a revolt against the imperialism. The internal rioting will come forth as anxiety, anger, despair, and all other sorts of internal damage, which then come out in unhealthy manifestations all the way to extreme conspiracy theories, group narcissism, and other expressions which will not in any way be subject to the tyrannical mental rule, now projected externally. They literally cannot be reasoned with.
“Sacrifice” isn’t a glamorous concept, to say the least, and the word itself may even cause some aversion. And yet, so many are making these sacrifices daily in response to our plight—they are just done unconsciously through “escapist” entertainment, legal and illegal chemical substances, social media addiction, and other mind-feeding or mind-escaping goods and services.
We can discover more freedom from these forms of coping, as well as alleviation from the root problem—not just the symptoms, through conscious sacrifice that leads us into fuller consciousness, not less. We’ll explore this a little more next week, but for now, it’s perhaps enough to say that great pearls do not come cheaply, and discovering The Field and its hidden treasures will not come without a cost—but gladly paid if we know what we’re gaining.
Not Against the Mind
Crucially, we are not rebelling against the mind. While being disembodied is harming us significantly, decapitating ourselves will only make it worse. Jorge Ferrer explains:
“Anti-intellectualism is the equally problematic backside of cognicentrism. The pressing challenge today is to break away from dichotomizing tendencies, and to explore integrative approaches that allow intellectual knowing and conscious awareness to be grounded in and enriched by somatic, vital, emotional, aesthetic, intuitive, and spiritual knowing without losing their powers of clarity and discrimination. In other words, the contemporary task is to forge a middle path that avoids the pitfalls of both cognicentrism and anti-intellectualism.”
Our path ultimately is not to escape the mind—though we may need to do that in the beginning. Our mind’s grip is often so tight that breaking free will require a sort of “throwing off the yoke.” At first, it may feel more “against the mind,” but we’ve been so top-heavy for so long that rebalancing is almost bound to feel that way.
However, the ultimate goal is to rein-corpor-ate, to bring the body back into our fullness of being and knowing. Knowing from our heart, from our spiritual womb, from the roots of our body, and also too our heads, which includes our mental thoughts. I am that, too. We can say this freely and generously when the mind is no longer oppressing us, when balance has been restored in a healthy, fully embodied, awakened consciousness.
This is what Ferrer calls “the principle of equiprimacy, according to which no human attribute is intrinsically superior or more evolved than any other. It affirms that all human attributes can participate as equal partners in the creative unfolding of the spiritual path.”
And so we might find freedom from the imperialism of the mind, not by throwing off our oppressor, but by loving our “enemy” and blessing our persecutor. Disarming our defensive mental ego by gently inviting it back into the sacred communion, taking its seat in the circle around the fireplace within. Into the healing circle together.
Doesn’t that feel relieving? Not only yearned for by the rest of you, but the place also your mind longs to be. Living again in our entire home, not just the attic, enjoying the warmth and mutuality in the full participation of our whole being, leading us into new ways of being.
More next week on the process of integrating into our embodied consciousness through embodifulment.