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Chapter 4: Unleashing the unconscious

Genesis

If we assume for a moment that the reality we think is real is in fact not real, but a projection made by our consciousness, then how could the truth have been concealed for us for such a long time?

The answer lies in the connection between the phylogenesis and ontogenesis of the human being. The development for the individual human being (ontogenesis) is starting with a creation of identity; you learn about who you are, what you can and what you can not do. With the help of your parents you condition your actions from being totally random - you learn to behave yourself in relation to other people. During this process your ego-consciousness inevitable grows: You have to make the distinction between your self and the world in order to be able to influence your own behaviour, get a will of your own.

As the ego-consciousness grows you feel more and more alienated from the world, which means that you identifies more and more with your ego-consciousness. The world is ”out there” and I am “in here”. A deviation between what you do and what you think emerges, and the bigger this deviation is the further away you are from a state of pure “being” or flow. Therefore when you have conditioned your behaviour - when you know how to behave responsible - you must start to show what you have learned so to speak, i.e. let go of ego-consciousness again.

It is like when you learn how to ride a bicycle: You want to learn it so that you can ride around in the woods or out on the country or wherever. Then you put your self in the saddle and start to learn it. At first you are very self-conscious about your movements to avoid crashes. Soon you learn it and then you have to let go of your “bicycle-consciousness” - you have to trust that you do not fall and that you turn left on the handlebars when you want to go left and so on. If you can not let go of your bicycle-consciousness you can not enjoy the ride. Say the reason that a person learned to ride a bicycle was to watch the trees as he rides by them. When he rides with his bicycle-consciousness turned on all the time he cannot experience the trees as he would otherwise.

The ego-consciousness is like the bicycle-consciousness - the major difference is that whereas most people pretty quickly learns how to let go of their bicycle-conciousness and start experiencing stuff on a higher level of complexity, almost no modern person knows how to let go of ego-consciousness. In the process of riding the bicycle they forget the reason they got up on the bicycle in the first place - which is always something more important than just riding the bicycle. Modern man is in a state of forget-fullness.

We all ride around with our thoughts on whether or not we have the balance on our "bicycle" or not, and we look ahead on the road to be prepared to make the turns necessary and so on - all skills that we know how to do and that we infact would do much better if we trusted our learned instincts and freed our mind from the burden. But instead we do not and we think reality is about riding a bicycle. The few people who succeeded in letting go of their ego-consciousness have discovered a whole new world, and they try to explain it to the people around them, but are only met with suspicion or worse.

To explain it in another way, the following excerpt from Ole Vedfelts book 'Bevidsthed' can be used:

"The development of personality happens in sequences from primitive to more differentiated, from lower to higher complexity. The transition from a lower to a more developed phase implies that a control system on a higher level emerges in a creative process, and that it is being admitted energy, that previously was tied to a lower system level. By this it becomes possible for the higher level to integrate the lower levels with the new superior structure, and a differentiation of the personality can occur, controlled by the new superior system." [Vedfeldt, 1996, p. 113, (my transl.)]

Here the lower system is the ego-consciousness ("bicycle-consciousness"), when you let go of it, the energy does not just disappear, but is being integrated in a new superior system. Instead of identifying with your ego you identify yourself with something beyond your ego. Once liberated from the ego-consciousness, we are once again back in a state of pure being, in a state of flow. Using the bicycle example we do not think before we make a turn to the left or the right, we just do it.

The three different conditions are illustrated on figure 6.

Figure 6

When the person moves from state B to state C, his consciousness increases - he reaches a higher state of consciousness. Using the bicycle example he moves from being conscious of the bicycle to being conscious about the bicycle and the world around him. In state C his physical body are controlled by the higher consciousness. All new ideas, theories, art, and creative achievements in general comes from people in this state.

The phylogenesis for the human being mirrors the ontogenesis and the other way around. Just as the individual human being are striving towards higher degrees of consciousness, so are the human species. In mythological words it is a striving towards the light from the darkness. Figure 7 is both representing the development for the individual human being and for the human species.