PARADOX OF EMANCIPATION

[written 1980 when I was 28

VI.B.1 Model for the complete consciousness

The advantage of this quotation and this model of the whole content of consciousness is that it puts Freud, Gung and Grof, among others, into a larger context. Bhagwan is beings asked:

What is sexual perversion? Why do strange sexual habits arise, and from where, e.g. sadomasochism?

and answers, among other things (the answer is 5 times larger than this excerpt):

'Man is great. Hidden behind the conscious part is the whole unconscious. This is Sigmund Freud's great contribution to humanity. The unconscious is nine times bigger than the conscious. It contains all your instincts. It contains all your inner functions, body mechanisms, emotions. Except for logic, it contains your whole totality. ...
More light must penetrate the darkness of the unconscious, for it is the unconscious that is nine times more powerful. Anything you decide in the conscious plane (e.g. to stop smoking - my note) will not materialize unless the decision also reaches the unconscious. ...
That's why hypnosis goes deeper than any other method. Hypnosis works directly on the unconscious. You may have been trying for years to get rid of a certain habit and you haven't been able to because you've been using the conscious part. The conscious is very small, it has no power compared to the unconscious, and the unconscious in no way knows what the conscious is thinking.
The hypnotist can help you to get rid of certain habits in a few seconds, or at least after a few treatments. He will disable the conscious and work directly with the unconscious, and if the habit is expelled by the unconscious, it is also out of the conscious. The conscious cannot hold it any longer. All realities change from the unconscious.'

I will try to clarify this a bit. At Friedriechshof in early 1979 they got some books on practical hypnotherapy (or hypnotherapy). The important thing in this context and in the quotation is: 'How can one put the consciousness or the self out of action?' One can use at least two methods as a therapist, and one usually uses them simultaneously - I cannot go into details here, but only sketch to some of what was written earlier.

The first method consists in putting the person into a trance speaking to him or her in a certain way which is logically confusing. The trick is to do this without the person 'noticing'. This is a form of double-bind. The second method is more of a verbally confrontational double-bind. The therapist puts the person in a double-bind situation without the person 'realising' that this has been the intention.

Now this should not be seen as manipulation.

What is important is that the person enters the therapeutic situation voluntarily, and hypnotherapy only works if the person trusts the therapist, i.e. enters a voluntarily chosen dependency situation. My experience is that I intuitively did not go into trance if I did not trust the therapist 100%. Later I will mention the 'exceptions' to this rule).

The positive - from the point of view of a trusting therapist in the double-bind situation - is that the person cannot act from his conscious self and therefore has to give up his conscious self (and this further enhances the trance). At this moment, the unconscious spontaneously breaks through. This can be in the form of emotional repressed outbursts, perceptive, here-and-now action that was otherwise occupied with anxiety, etc.

The negative aspect of the double-bind situations created in childhood and upbringing mentioned earlier is that the child has not voluntarily chosen the dependent double-bind situation. He is dependent on the parents and has basically two ways out: either to repress the paradox, the crying, the hatred, the desperation etc. The result is a well-functioning social citizen who, in the extreme case, functions as a robot (the 'authoritarian character' described by Reich, Adomo and others) - or, because the paradox is so powerful and obvious, to escape into the psychotic state (Laing, the film 'Family life', etc.).

At Friedrichshof, for example, a collective hypnotherapy of smoking was carried out on 60 people a year ago and still nobody smokes.

At Friedrichshof, hypnotherapy proved so effective that it has been retained as the most widely used technique ever since. Hypnotherapy is highly effective. I have experienced this myself, and I would warn against starting to experiment or play with it for fun. It requires trust, a safe environment, experienced therapists, etc. In principle nothing can 'go wrong', as someone has put it, but you can very easily get into states that you don't know or have not heard of and therefore become frightened. The fear, as described earlier, is not in the experience itself or the unconscious content, but in our agreed definition of reality.

In this regard, it has been helpful for me to have read (e.g. by Grof or Bhagwan) about possible perceptions before I had them (e.g. the psychotic state, which is not at all 'sick', but merely in terms of most people's perception of reality un-average). Reading about this is therefore highly recommended, even if the anxiety just before the actual breakthrough of the experience is often the same. For the same reason, I also mention some of my perceptions.

The 'exception' to the rule that a person cannot be deeply hypnotised without voluntarily wanting to be is precisely the totally hypnotised and automated robotic 'authoritarian character'. There is no accidental coincidence between Hitler and his hypnotic figure of speech, fascism and the common enemy in the projected 'Jew' in the concrete Jews, Reich's and Adorno's almost contemporary works on the 'authoritarian character' and the brainwashing methods 'invented' during World War II.

That is why I use the word 'hypnosis' to describe the usual permanent double-bind Christian upbringing in the West. And I use the word 'de-hypnotization' to designate those methods (psychotherapy, meditation, etc.) which, by means of attention to the original double-binds and hypnoses, attempt to understand these latter in order to be able to return the process to our natural childhood-destroyed intelligence or spontaneous intuition.

Christianity plays precisely on the psychology of polarity and says: 'You must, should, must be so and not so. You must think well and not badly, condemn your own sexuality and turn only to the love of your heart, you must love your neighbour, you must and should do this and that, and you must not do this and that, etc.' - Reagan won the election well supported by a Christian ideology.

From the point of view of a Christian dualistic and condemnatory morality, the new growth movement is of course a form of hypnosis and brainwashing in a negative sense, because it reveals Christian hypnosis as negative hypnosis.

The point is not whether it is hypnosis and/or brainwashing - these words are negatively charged in our language. The point is whether the hypnosis or brainwashing is negative or positive, and that is for the individual to determine. The ideology and morality is to say that my form of hypnosis or brainwashing is the only true or right one.

If we are to stay with the brainwashing, Bhagwan is the best and biggest washing machine I have been washed in and I am extremely happy with the result. The washing powder is love, trust and meditation! I'm not saying Bhagwan is good for everyone, you'll have to find out for yourself.

Now back to the Bhagwan quote.

'But even the unconscious is only a part. Hidden behind the unconscious is the whole collective unconscious, which contains your whole past - and it's not small stuff. Once you were a lion, once you were a snake, and once you were a tree.'

Whether you believe this or not, it would be just as unscientific to deny the possibility of it or to deny it categorically as to deny the existence of Australia simply because you haven't been there. Nor will I attempt to 'prove' the existence of past lives and reincarnation. That would be the same as trying to prove the existence of light to a blind man. It depends on the eyes that see. The blind do not see the light, the sighted see the light.

I have had reincarnation experiences in psychotherapy and dreams, and they were so unusually intense (Jung calls it luminous) that I myself have difficulty finding other reasonable explanations for this phenomenon. Some of my friends have 'researched' their perceptionr and the facts experienced have corresponded closely with history books and other source material.

As shown in Grof: 'The Inner Journey, vol. 2' such perceptions can facilitate man's encounter with death. My perceptions have lessened my fear of death, absolutely.

It does not matter how we theoretically try to explain such perceptions, the point must be what happens in practice to such people after such perceptions. What is further interesting is that more and more people have had or are having such perceptions and that this is changing their world view. Now back to the Bhagwan quote.

'It is to Carl Gustav Jung's credit that he has brought to the psychological world the concept of the collective unconscious.'

Thus, in his ongoing study of the collective unconscious, Jung looked increasingly to Eastern literature for a framework of understanding. That he did not, as far as I know, speak of reincarnation, but instead 'invented' the so-called 'archetypes', is probably because he wanted acceptance in the Christian culture and period in which he lived, in addition to the desire to convey something in a language reasonably understandable to Westerners.

'But they are all just parts - even the collective unconscious is a part. Western psychology has still not begun to move upwards - it is still going downwards: consciousness, under it the unconscious, under it again the collective unconscious.'

Above consciousness there is 'superconsciousness' - nine times more than the conscious. Parallel to the unconscious is the superconscious or superconscious. And above the superconscious there is cosmic consciousness - you can call it divine consciousness or God consciousness, Tao. It means the ultimate degree of consciousness: everything has become consciousness, and you have become great as the cosmos itself.

If you go below the conscious, you will move into darkness. If you go above the conscious, there will be light. So there are five consciousnesses in you and you are only aware of a very small part - the conscious.

If anyone has wondered why I don't use Grof's model of consciousness, this is one of the reasons. I am not familiar with Grof's volume 3, but from the first two volumes it appears that he does not work with this essential distinction between up and down. He subsumes the collective unconscious, the superconscious and the cosmic consciousness under the term 'The Transpersonal Layer'.

This loses the important definition of the concept of psychic development, which consists precisely in moving both upwards and downwards. In Grof, it seems that one moves downwards in perception only for the sake of experience. And this misses the point that I have called total understanding. Of course, this does not change the phenomenal work Grof (and Danish translators) have done.

It is to Grof's credit that he has given the world the empirical written 'mapping' of the content of consciousness. Bhagwan's model of consciousness is thus on a higher plane of abstraction than Grof's (empirical plane of perception without form determination), even if in a theoretical context and presentation this of course presupposes at least intellectual familiarity with Grof's works. For Bhagwan, however, this is unnecessary, for he has experienced it and thus does not need to have read Grof in order to make a statement. Back to the Bhagwan quote.

Going upwards to superconsciousness and cosmic consciousness is an unknown path. If you are able to go back, you will have learned how to travel - you will have learned how to penetrate dangerous areas of your being. Then the next higher step can be taken: you can move from the conscious to the superconscious. It is in the superconscious that all the experiences of angels, gods, devatas, kundalini, chakras and lotus openings are present.

Above that is the cosmic-conscious world, where all experiences disappear, ugly and beautiful. Where the subject is left alone. Total absolute aloneness. This is the ultimate goal of consciousness. This is the point evolution is moving towards. ...

Before you can take this step into the world above you, you must go deep down to the roots, down to the outermost dark roots - to your unconscious and past experiences.

(from the danish magazine 'Rajneesh', vol. 5, no. 1 - translation corrected)

next page: VI.C Spirituelle Entwicklung in Zeit und Raum