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We all have divided psyches. Some parts developed as children, then remain focused on pleasing our parents long after we’re grown. Some were formed during intense emotions, and forever anticipate the return of a pain that we rationally know will never come. Some simply reflect the helplessness of childhood, carried over into our adult selves.
If you’ve ever had a nagging guilt that you knew was illogical, but you couldn’t quite drop it, you’ve experienced these divisions in the human psyche.
Until recently, my enlightenment work focused on updating these old, maladaptive parts of my psyche. I call the technique consciousness integration, because it focuses on integrating these unconscious and semi-conscious parts of your psyche with your conscious mind.
I initially got the idea in 2009, reading the fluent self, a non-magickal self-help blog. She talked about letting the dark parts of yourself surface enough to speak, then talking with them, listening to what they want, and embracing them. Shouldn’t be too foreign to anyone who’s done meditation or spiritual journeying, or even psychology or hypnosis. And it was helpful, but not helpful enough.
Well, you know me: When a solution doesn’t cut it, I see if a little magick can help. And so, I looked in my thinking mind to find the unhealthy part of my psyche that I was trying to talk to. Then I looked at my conscious mind, found the path between the two, and activated it. That let me talk with that unhealthy bit more easily, and ultimately solved the problem.
When I say it like that, it sounds like I had a plan. Really, I didn’t. I knew there should be something involving the signature of that unhealthy bit of my psyche, or the connections around it, or my conscious mind, or, you know, something dealing with my mind that would help. And so, I tried about a dozen wrong answers before stumbling on this one.
But once I did, it worked well. I had only intended to weaken the unhealthy thoughts that kept nagging me. I would have counted the technique really successful if it had gotten rid of them entirely. But it went further: Once my conscious mind explained how the adult world was different, the unhealthy part of my psyche didn’t just go away, it became healthy, and its nagging changed to useful ideas and encouragement.
Since then, I’ve refined the technique several times. We’ll talk about those later in this series. But the underlying idea is always the same: Connect the unhealthy part of my psyche with my conscious mind, let my conscious mind bring that unhealthy part into the adult world, and watch it become healthy.
That’s the essence of enlightenment in direct magick.
Other posts in this series:- Enlightenment and Modern Psychology (August 13, 2012)
- Direct Magick for Enlightenment (July 30, 2012)
- Western-Secular-Style Enlightenment (July 30, 2012)
- My Main Technique for Enlightenment (August 1, 2012)
- Enlightenment and Ascention (August 2, 2012)
- From Psychology to Enlightenment (August 3, 2012)
- Enlightenment: A Systematic Model (August 4, 2012)
- An Advanced Technique for Enlightenment (August 6, 2012)
- Algorithms for Consciousness Integration (August 7, 2012)
- Why Enlightenment Improves Your Magick (August 10, 2012)
- 3 Results from the Enlightenment Technique (August 8, 2012)
- Rewiring Unconscious Thoughts (August 9, 2012)
Tags: Consciousness Integration, Enlightenment, PersonalStory
To me this seems like you’re missing part of the picture. The idea that being enlightened or awakened or whatever you want to call it simply consists of an absence of observable mental disfunction sounds more to me like psychotherapy than mystical practice. It’s also the basis of Scientology – Hubbard thought that enlightened people were simply “clear” of dysfunctional complexes (called engrams in Dianetics). I’m not sure that’s an idea you really want to be associated with, given the nature of that organization.
Don’t get me wrong, consciousness integration like you’re describing here is part of the picture. My methods are different than yours, but I’m pretty sure that the end goal and results are essentially the same. In order to develop a coherent mind, the first step is to get all the pieces working together. But it’s just the first step. Once you have the unhealthy conditioning loops and so forth turned around, your practice can start to unfold in a much more effective manner. But in a real sense, it’s much closer to the beginning of the path than the end, and I would hesitate to describe someone who reached that point and no further as enlightened.
Hi Ananael, at this point in my series (I’m about 5 posts further along at the time I’m writing this reply), you probably know that I agree that this post is only part of the picture. I wish I’d laid this series out better from the start, and made it clear which beliefs I still held, and which were old beliefs that I was supplanting with my new work. Honestly, it was only in writing this series and reading all the replies that I revisited these definitions, and realized that my meaning had shifted implicitly in my thinking, and that the explanations I’d been using for the past year or two had gotten out of date.
I am curious about your own methods. If you have a post on them (or do a post on them), please leave a link.
What’s interesting to me is trying to see where you tie together practical magick with this focus on self-improvement, psychological well-being and acting in a non-harmful way. I actually think the more useful aspects of magick are its application to self-transformation (as opposed to getting apartments, hooking up with lovers, getting rid of the unpleasant roommate, etc.). It reminds me of the one thing that annoyed me most about Harry Potter – most all the magick they did was simply as a substitute for muggle tools and technologies. Wave a wand to clean your room, send messages long distance, travel quickly – substitutes for using your hands, a phone, or an airplane…
So where magick is more interesting – much more interesting – is when the focus is on wisdom, spiritual development, enlightenment, etc. And I think using magick for healing oneself and others is a good part of that. A lot of people are terribly stuck in their own fears, anxieties, phobias, crankiness, etc. It sucks. To work on healing that baggage is a wonderful thing (nice for others, too, because when you are happier you make other people’s lives more pleasant as a side effect).
But is that the end of the journey? Is that the most one can aspire to?
Thanks! I haven’t thought much about what’s the most useful type of magick — I just think about it all as solving problems for myself and my friends. But I’m glad you’re excited by it, and I hope that the rest of this series gives you some more ideas on the subject. I’ll also be programming some of these techniques into my ethereal software later this year, so you can try them yourself if you like.
As for this being the end of my journey, I think the reply I just left for Ananael should answer you, too.