“an experience of one’s own existence”
If you do not listen to your own being [True Self], you will have betrayed yourself.
Rollo May
Ken Wilber’s Spectrum of Consciousness (1977) suggests that psychology is involved in steps toward awakening (consciousness). “At the Existential Level, man imagines himself separated from and therefore potentially threatened by his own environment. At the Ego Level, man fancies that he is also alienated from his own body, and thus the environment as well as his own body seem possible threats to his existence. At the Shadow Level, man even appears divorced from parts of his own psyche.”[i] Broadly speaking, these therapies help an individual broaden their sense of self-identity by contacting their alienated aspects and re-integrating them.
“Freud emphasized the importance of the unconscious mind, and a primary assumption of Freudian theory is that the unconscious mind governs behavior to a greater degree than people suspect. Indeed, the goal of psychoanalysis is to reveal the use of such defense mechanisms and thus make the unconscious conscious.”[ii]
However Simple Reality points out that “institutions, like psychology, which grew out of a Paradigm-B context are, by definition, dysfunctional and are often formidable barriers to our experience of reality (P-A). In other words, we cannot build a wholesome worldview, a healthy identity nor create sustainable behaviors with the same blueprint that we used to create the current human condition. The institutional building blocks of such a structure are inherently unstable, always tending toward collapse.”[iii]
Insight # 52 comes to us from Rollo May (1909-1994) an American psychologist and author. He developed an existential and humanistic approach to psychology where he favored the individual’s strengths, internal resources, and abilities to make better decisions.
“First the ‘I am’ experience is not in itself the solution to a person’s problems; it is rather the precondition for their solution. In the broadest sense, the achieving of the sense of being is the goal of all therapy, but in the more precise sense it is a relation to oneself and one’s world, an experience of one’s own existence (including one’s own identity), which is a prerequisite for the working through of specific problems.”[iv]
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Additional Reading:
- Psychology, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 2
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[i] Wilber, Ken. The Spectrum of Consciousness. Wheaton, Illinois: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1977, pp. 186-188.
[ii] McLeod, S. A. “Unconscious mind.” Simply Psychology (2015). www.simplypsychology.org/unconscious-mind.html
[iii] Henry, Roy Charles. “Chapter 3: Introduction.” Why Am I Here? October 2014, p. 170.
[iv] May, Rollo. Man’s Search For Himself. New York: Norton 1953, p. 100.
