Knowing Our Own Process
Outer process: this belongs to the sphere of instrumental doing and external experience—planning and acting in the world and everyday life. The outer is the most familiar level of our experience, the surface of our self.
Inner process: this is the sphere of feeling, values and motivation. It supports the emotions, reflective thinking, and physical sensations of our inner world. This is the level of our personal or subjective experience, intimately connected with our sense of an inner self.
Deeper process: this is the sphere of symbolic impersonal knowing—dreamlike experiencing at the subliminal and unconscious level. The deeper process underlies consciousness, providing the natural foundation for our physical and psychological integration. It feels other than our normal sense of self.
Greater process: this is the sphere of transpersonal being. It has a quality of wholeness, completeness, and connection with the essence of life. This is what we would call the realm of the spirit, the most profound and meaningful experiences of the greater Self.
Outer, inner, deeper, Greater—these are the bones, the skeleton of a way to understand experience. I use it daily to check in with different aspects of myself, different modes of being. So, if I am busy doing, busily rushing around, I try to remember to look inward to find what drives me. The outer process needs reminding that it is not always the most essential. When we remember that we are more than what we do, more than what appears on the surface, we begin to be self-aware.
In stressful situations, I feel frustrated that I can’t get everything done. Beneath this is the fear of not doing it right, of feeling inadequate. Awareness of these feelings may be enough to shift my state of being. I ask myself, “What do I need right now to feel better?” The answer may be simple and direct, or it may be more subtle and complex. In every case the inner process asks that we pay attention. Paying attention is the single most powerful thing we can do to help process unravel and move.
When I pause and let my mind go loose, I begin to feel the vibration in my body. Sensing that flow I notice an otherness that is me and not me. It is very soothing to feel aliveness well up from that deep pool of natural energy. This diffuse mode of awareness helps me whenever I cannot grasp something with my mind, when I am trying to understand a dream or connect deeply with someone. Often an unexpected intuition will present itself. But it only does so if I am open, listening with full attention as if to a being full of wisdom. The deeper process answers only to trust and respect. The more it is honored, the more it offers.
My intention is to be always aware of the Greater process—but naturally I forget much of the time. My relationship with the transcendent feels very personal, so I call it God—though other names seem to work just as well. Whenever I get quiet inside, whether working, playing or resting, it is there, constantly available.
Trying to will this connection does not work; I have to gently unravel the knot that keeps me tied to the small self. This requires a quality of letting go—but letting go with a purpose. The Greater process makes itself known through intentional surrender. The Divine, the transcendent, is waiting for us to expand enough to recognize its presence.
We are beings of many levels, each of which has its own form, rhythm, and purpose. As we tune in to each domain and accept its essence, life flows more easily. Remembering ourselves every day in everything we do is the beginning. Paying attention to our inner needs, noticing what is hindering the feeling of inner movement, this is a second essential. Respecting the depths, the dreams, the intuition—and trusting that we have powerful helping forces within us comes next. Finally, we must surrender, on purpose, to a Greater all encompassing force within the universe that leads us to harmony.
Exploring the Dimensions of Process
Flow down and down in ever widening rings of being. —Rumi
Although our family were not Catholics, each Sunday, between the ages of ten and thirteen I would cycle the two miles into town to attend Mass. The services were long and boring, and hard on the knees, but I would watch the nuns and know that they were experiencing something I could not understand—something I wanted but could not name. I would kneel in church daydreaming of becoming a saint.
Later, in reading spiritual and mystical literature of the world, that daydream transformed into a desire to reach enlightenment. I imagined that, like in a Zen story, one day a sudden burst of illumination would hit me and instantly I would know everything. Or maybe, like the Buddha, I would effortlessly sink deep into meditation and merge with the universe.
I look back on my innocent spiritual enthusiasms with a kind of poignant amusement. It is both funny and sad to entertain such grandiose aspirations. The spiritual path, the journey to become a human being, is so much more complex than I realized.
To be human is to balance many different and conflicting yearnings, needs and visions. The physical demands of the world do not cease because we wish them to go away. We need others to love, or our hearts wither and die. Compulsive urges surge up from some dark place within, reminding us of our brotherhood with animals and all living beings. It is a difficult juggling act to be human with so many forces pulling and pushing at us.
Now I believe that the spiritual journey has only one position, only one level of development—and that is the beginning. We are all beginners, all learners of the lesson of what it is to be human. Somehow we have to harmonize all levels of our being to become more fully ourselves and thus more connected with the transcendent.
The Limits of Consciousness
All of us have moments of profound insight scattered throughout our lives. Why is it so hard to hold onto them? What keeps us from remembering the unity of life? At a physical level, our senses, thinking, and egos are designed for bodily survival. They distinguish things that help us stay alive. Our eyes and visual cortex create discrete images with phantom lines around objects, the better to recognize what we need. Words and language slice and dice the world and our experience into useful chunks. Continuity and completeness are not so important for day-to-day life. We give up the whole in order to concentrate on the parts.
In some greater reality everything flows together continuously; each process is intimately connected with all others. Yet my experience has only one limited viewpoint. I only look out of my own eyes, and will never see the back of my head. I cannot be in two places at the same time. I do not know how to be awake and asleep simultaneously. I live in a world of either/or, in which things and events seem somewhat piecemeal.
We cannot totally escape the bounds of our consciousness. Immediate experience contains only those things that grab and hold our attention. Everything else sinks into the background. That is the nature of attention; it eliminates and separates the world into one thing at a time.
If you are engrossed in reading, other needs go on hold. You forget about the rest of your experience. Only if your bladder gets full will you stop to go to the bathroom. If something is bothering you—a physical discomfort, an emotional upset or an unfinished project—you will not be able to concentrate. You can keep only a few pieces of information in your mind at one time—about the same amount as in a telephone number. Awareness and attention are severely limited.
To make matters worse, we suffer from state dependent memory. As we shift between different experiences, our ability to recall becomes tenuous; we forget. Did you ever notice how hard it is to hold onto dreams? It takes less than an instant for an image, vivid only moments ago, to glide effortlessly out of our waking mind. Similarly, drug-induced experiences remain hidden until a similar substance is ingested (have you ever forgotten what you did when you were drunk?). Working in deep hypnotic trance, clients seldom remember the details of what they experienced when they wake, even if it was vivid and intense.
Enclosed as we are in our own restricted awareness we tend not to notice its limitations. Mind is tricky; it dismisses contradictions and fills in the gaps of experience. We take it for granted that we lose keys through forgetfulness. We never notice the blind spot that is a hole in our field of vision. With brain injury, we can lose half of our visual field without noticing; the brain just sketches in the missing part. Our memory of distant events is perhaps 50% accurate—cobbled together from actual details and what probably happened. We delude ourselves if we think that we completely know the nature of our own reality.
Disconnected from Experience
We are not only deluded; we are also disconnected. Like Dave in the last chapter, most of us identify ourselves with outer experience: “I am what I do.” This rift between the outer and inner processes makes it impossible to fully experience. How can you make any sense of the inner world if you do not feel it? A reliance on outer activity helps avoid unpleasant inner feelings. It is easier to get on with life if we don’t have to bother with the messiness of emotions, yearnings and imagination—but then most of our humanness is lost.
For many, the deeper process, the unconscious does not exist. I cannot count the times someone has told me they do not dream. When I say that is impossible, they should be mad or dead, they then say they can’t remember them or they are meaningless nonsense. Little wonder, in the face of this neglect, that their deeper process remains hidden. To live without knowledge of the deeper process is to float, anchorless, on an ocean of experience without ever looking down.
Most therapy aims to help different parts of a person connect and communicate. I will stop a client in mid story and ask them to notice what is going on inside. As they find an un-noticed inner meaning to their narrative, their experience becomes fuller and richer. Sometimes I will sense that a client has brought a dream and has forgotten to tell me. I try to help them recognize the riches they are ignoring—create a space for the deeper process to be heard.
We may not be able to hold the different levels in our awareness at the same time but we can learn to sample the quality of each, regularly and naturally. To be stuck in any process is unhealthy, even if it is an aspect of the Greater process.
I worked with an adolescent boy who got lost in a ‘spiritual crisis.’ There was no doubt he was in touch with a reality from which profound wisdom flowed. He knew astounding things about the inner nature of those around him; he could speak with authority about life. But his immature body and mind could not contain the outpouring of energy; it was too much too soon. Diagnosed as hypomanic he was prescribed drugs to bring him back down to reality. Sad as he was to lose that visionary experience, the decision to ground him was what he needed for his ordinary life.
All levels of our being have to become more related. That is the path toward integration and wholeness. So as you read and think about these processes, aim to put it all together, not only in your mind but also in your experience. Remember incidents and events that are characteristic, which evoke the essence of each level for you. Let it become real.
The Greater Process
Religious and mystical literature offers a tantalizing but elusive vision of reality. In that divine universe there is no separation, no self and no suffering. Everything is one, indivisible, complete, and unified. Many of us struggle with that vision, yearning for some ultimate truth, yet embarrassed by the irrationality of religious dogma. There seems little space for transcendence amidst the daily demands of life. And to whom would we talk about those precious yearnings, that ‘still small voice’ we hear inside?
People nowadays speak more easily about their intimate sexual exploits than their spiritual experiences and aspirations. The enigmatic, the inexplicable, the inexpressible are powerfully repressed. The pressure to conform, to be normal is intense.
After many months of therapy I got a hint that an ex-Catholic woman, as a youth, shared my yearnings to become a saint. She would pour over “The Lives of the Saints,” pray fervently, do penance and good works. By the age of eighteen that powerful yearning was tattered and discarded—her naïve sense of the transcendent had gone underground. As she confessed to that devotion in the session, her face glowed red with embarrassment. Much as she wished to deny it, that thirst for the divine was still within her, but obscured.
The Greater process is inaccessible because we fail to notice the extraordinary in the ordinary. Everyone tastes sacredness at some time. But do we value those ‘big’ dreams, odd coincidences, subtle intuitions, and intense connections that sprinkled our lives? Are we willing to notice the mystery all around us?
The most common brush with the Greater process comes during immersion in nature. The immediacy of water, earth, air, vegetation and animal invite us to connect. For some this is too overwhelming and unsettling; they talk louder, walk faster, cycle harder to maintain their sense of small self in the face of all that vastness. To know the Greater process we have to settle, get quiet inside, put away the distractions and allow ourselves to expand. Then a Presence makes itself known.
This Presence comes unexpectedly. We can only invite, not control. A birth or death, great joy or sorrow, creates a doorway, an opening, for that contact to be made. Jillian, working through the most terrifying abuse, was touched one night by a ‘being of light’ that filled her with a healing peace. Jim recalled his old experiences of hearing celestial music, a memory that became a soothing companion through periods of despair and emptiness.
Dreams and Synchronicity
Dreams are a wonderful doorway to another world. I have been witness to a multitude of life changing dreams that point toward the transcendent. Certain ones stay in mind. Julia was riddled with cancer when she dreamed of a glorious golden tree sweeping over a rainbow pool, drawing up light that ever-flowed through the branches and leaves to return to that pool; she died not long after. In a time of darkness, Mark was visited by a giant ‘Wise One’ who surrounded him with protective wings; slowly he began to accept the reality of his deep spirituality. For Rhona, a pool of solid darkness that is both beginning and end of a river, invites her to baptism and renewal. She must take care not to stay immersed too long or she will never return to shore.
The unusual, the strange and the coincidental that summon us to awareness visit us all. In Jung’s terms these are synchronistic happenings—inner and outer experiences connected, not by ordinary causes, but by some other joining force. One client, again in a dream, was given a detailed picture of the inside of a house that she visited for the first time the following week. She was only surprised when she found that the telephone was slightly out of place from where she remembered. We think of someone just as they call us, know that something is happening to a loved one many miles away. There is no scientific explanation for these common experiences but that does not make them less true.
More often we are visited by the Greater process disguised in the shape of the ordinary. An illness, a car accident, an unexpected meeting are prompts and hints that something more is going on. Not long ago I literally bumped into an old girl friend at an airport carousel. We had been out of touch for eighteen years; something unfinished was left between us. I turned around and she was there, suddenly transported across the miles and years. What was that meeting for? Why was this happening to me at just this moment? What was its meaning? Those are the question we should ask about every event that grabs our attention.
Without some point of contact with the Greater process, or whatever we call it, life becomes ultimately meaningless. Whether we espouse it in scientific laws, natural beauty, human relationship, religion or social activism, does not matter. What is important is a sense of something greater, more encompassing, less selfish and narrow—something of which we are a part. A pattern of belonging exists in the universe and it keeps trying to remind us.
We know the transcendent better as we become more whole—it slips away as we are lost in the byways of everyday life. With increasing awareness, we begin to connect all parts of ourselves in a gentle harmony with the way things are, with the flow of life. Then we take on meaning like ballast. No longer tossed around by the winds of fate, the water of life calms. Decisions grow simpler: “Is it right for me, my family and the whole; is this the direction of my life path, or is it a diversion?” Attunement with the Greater process brings peace and tranquility; life becomes richer and fuller.
The Deeper Process
The Greater process connects most closely with that which is deep within. That is why we so often receive guidance through dreams. Emerging out of the whole, the deeper process serves as the foundation for our individual being. Yet it is impersonal and often implacable in the demands it makes on us.
I imagine the deeper process as a tree, naturally ruthless, rooting deep into the earth splitting rocks, growing upward and outward regardless of hindrance. The deeper process is not careful of our feelings or our outer life; it just goes about its business of keeping us alive and growing. If our personality gets in the way, it will be pushed aside. If we do not learn readily then maybe a stronger wake-up call is needed.
Those who ignored more subtle warnings are often visited by overwhelming and unavoidable life crises. The deeper process first whispers in our ear, then taps us on the shoulder. Finally, if we still won’t listen, it gets out the baseball bat! I have seen a number of men who after years of empty relationship were shocked and overwhelmed when their partners left. Their self-deception was finally shattered by undeniable reality. Now they had to change.
Heart attacks, autoimmune disease, chronic undiagnosed fatigue, and even massive allergic reactions can be a wake-up call from another part of our being. A narrow and controlling man came to see me because of sexual problems. All he wanted was for me to help him get back his ability to have an erection. He had recently been diagnosed with scleroderma, a tragic disease that causes the whole of the skin to lose elasticity; his psychological rigidity was manifesting all over his body. Our work together helped relax the demands he made on himself and others, softened his approach to life. He began to accept that there were forces in his being that cannot be controlled.
The deeper process keeps us alive, preserving our physical and psychological well-being. But rather than simply maintaining the status quo, it pushes in the direction of growth and integration. If our life is blocked, so is our vitality. If we do not make the next step forward in life, we may end up literally unable to move.
We cannot escape the influence of the deeper process; it is ever-present and watching. Research shows that an unconscious part of us is constantly vigilant. When we are about to step off the sidewalk in front of a speeding truck, it pulls us back. Almost half a second before we are aware, some other part responds to important information from the environment. The conscious mind may think it is in control but it often functions to ratify decisions already made beneath awareness. Often, what we believe is informed choice is, in effect, agreement, or disagreement with the deeper process. We forget that the deeper process emerged first as the carrier wave of our identity, long before the self came on the scene. It naturally takes precedence.
Dysfunction and Misunderstandings
In infancy, the deeper process is eager to get the different human systems up and running—moving, talking, relating, and learning. We are like vacuum cleaners; we take everything in, into our mouths and into our souls. Much of what we ingest is nourishing; it becomes part of us. But some energies and experiences are overwhelming and toxic.
Everything sinks downward. The unconscious becomes the repository of all that has fallen out of awareness—the good, the bad and the ugly. It does its best to make sense of it all, but oftentimes fails. Then certain elements have to be partitioned off, hidden away or awkwardly cobbled together. This gives rise to strange misconceptions, like the one at the root of Bob’s depression. We knew it had something to do with his father’s death when Bob was four years old, but he did not consciously remember any details. In a hypnotic regression it began to make sense.
Bobby had been naughty and his father had got annoyed. Later that day there was this commotion downstairs. An ambulance arrived and Bobby was told to stay in his room. He came out, saw his aunt sobbing and knew something terrible had happened. His father never came back and Bobby was told Dad had died of a heart attack. It was obvious to little Bobby that he had caused it—his naughtiness had attacked his daddy’s heart. Daddyhad died and gone away forever because of him.
This childish misunderstanding caused a severe blockage in Bob’s life energy. Some part of him believed that to be vigorous, energetic and alive was to be naughty—and naughty was very dangerous as it might kill those he loved. Reconnecting this hidden experience to Bob’s adult self, created a new way for him to be. He could be more himself.
Whatever the task, the deeper process never gives up its attempts to make us whole. Whatever lies undigested will be regurgitated whenever there is the slightest chance for change. That is why we become emotionally ‘triggered’ by certain situations. Semi-autonomous patterns take over our thinking, feeling, and actions. Automatic, primitive urges—far different from our conscious wishes—catch and bind us. Our reaction to particular situations gets way out of proportion.
Such are the compulsive responses that catch us off guard. Someone cuts me off in traffic and I respond immediately with a burst of anger. If I completely let go, I might succumb to road rage and do something stupid. Looking at it later, I tell myself I ‘lost it.’ I try to think of some convenient rationalization that makes me look and feel a bit better—I was stressed, the other guy was a jerk, and it was the last straw. The whole thing quickly fades from memory.
What actually happened is that I was gripped. For a short time some other part of my psyche had taken control and I was not myself. That part is a disconnected aspect of the deeper process intruding into my inner and outer life. In Jungian terminology this is called a complex—a semi-autonomous aspect of our psyche that takes over when triggered.
Why this happens is complicated. At one level it simply reflects my obvious dissociation and disturbances; it shows I am not whole. At another level, it is an attempt to have something change. The compulsive reaction recreates, on the outside, a situation that parallels an unresolved issue that exists deeper within. It is an opportunity, a crisis that hopes for a different and resolving outcome.
As that person raging in his car, I may be re-experiencing some of the powerlessness I felt in the face of an intrusive parent. I may be forced to confront my overbearing childish sense of entitlement. I may be replaying anger at the world that never gave me what I needed. If I catch this hint from within, something may reconnect; its intent has been realized. If I ignore the invitation to awareness, it will surely re-present itself at the earliest opportunity.
Our cyclical, disturbing patterns are no different from recurring dreams. Whenever a dream or nightmare perturbs us, we are actually being invited to notice and do something. Ignoring that invitation, the dream will recur. Once a repetitive dream is worked with sufficiently, once the message is received and acted on, the dream will never present itself in the same form; the pattern has changed.
As a young child I was tormented by a nightmare that came again and again. In it, the lines on my pillow stretched out into the infinite darks of space, never touching, never connecting. This was during a period when I would wake at night to the humiliation of a wet bed. I now recognize that dream as an early attempt to understand why my parents could never make real contact with each other. In the dream I was desperate for those parallel lines to simply touch, to come together finally—but they never did. Over the years, as I accepted the reality of how my parents were together, the dream faded.
Night dreams mostly do their work without conscious help. The twilight descent into realms of unconsciousness puts us back together; without it we get sick or crazy. All the stages of sleep, from dreaming REM to the deepest recuperative sleep cycles, are absolutely essential. The inner and outer processes become quiescent during this time, allowing for maintenance and repair.
The deeper process is always awake in itself; we are always dreaming. Many times during a day we graze the edge of the unconscious—pondering, daydreaming, musing, and drifting. Mostly we shake ourselves awake and erase those images from memory. We forget to recall that we have journeyed elsewhere.
When the deeper process is present in awareness, it swirls and flows with strange thoughts, snatches of songs and half-remembered stories. Images arise from the back of our minds—magical, primitive, evocative, even scary. If these turn against us, we are without recourse. We cannot shift an irrational fear through wishing; obsession grips us against our will. The deeper process has the power to make us sick or well, fearful or confident. When it is our friend, when we know it intimately, anything is possible.
The Inner Process
Waking each day, we emerge out of deep sleep into an in-between place of shifting thoughts and dream-like images. We are crossing the border between the deeper and the inner process. One begins and the other ends at a fuzzy boundary where experience exists in a kind of twilight awareness.
Take a moment some morning as you wake. Without moving, review what is swimming past your inner eye. You may notice that it is a strange mixture of dream and thought. If you begin to think about some outer concern—say, what you have to do later—then your awareness is drawn towards waking. If you begin to slide back into your dreams, before you know it you have drifted off for a few minutes.
Staying in that state, you can recapture unremembered information, be taken by an unusual idea or suffer from an anxious preoccupation. It is a place of choice and choicelessness, of the real and the phantasmagoric, the benign and the frightful. Evoked in therapy through imagery or light hypnosis, it is used to find what is lost, hidden, or inarticulate. Like casting a net into the sea, strange beings of many shapes get drawn to the surface—the surface of our inner process.
The inner process creates the sense of who we are—all those ideas, expectations, subjective feelings and intuitions that are close to the bone of our identity. These are our self-concepts, our feelings of self worth and bodily experiences that fuse together into that insistent yet amorphous inner experience of personal identity—the self. The self is not a thing or even a being. It is a wave-like work in progress, a compromise between what is, what has been, and what may arise.
When a client enters the office I sometimes ask, “How are you?” This is both a trivial and non-trivial question. The answer tells me not only how they are feeling but who they are at that moment. If I get the superficial reply, “Fine”, I may ask the same question again but with different emphasis: “How are you?” I usually get a more penetrating response. If I want to keep pushing inward, I ask the more difficult question, “How are you?” The person will hesitate momentarily. I notice a switch of awareness, an inward search. The answer will be unforeseen, reflecting processes closer to the sense of self.
All experience is measured against existing core aspects of “selfness”. Each is assigned a feeling tone—a judgment of value, relevance and connection. You tell yourself, without words, whether what you experience is more or less ‘like you’. As happenings intrude from the world—or from deeper—some will be ignored or rejected while others are welcomed and connected to what already exists within.
Think of something you did or said that was humiliating. Maybe you can still feel the hot flush of embarrassment. That bodily reaction tells you that your action still does not fit comfortably with who you think you are. You would rather it never happened; it activates your defenses.
We are all defensive; we absolutely need a protective boundary around our fragile self. Like a middleman, the inner process lies between the deeper and outer. Influenced on all sides, it seeks to create an equilibrium of opposite and impinging forces. Its task is to sustain a sense of identity that works in the world, yet is open to the riches and appetites that bubble up from beneath.
No wonder our self experiences confusion, conflict and doubt. At any moment, we may be trapped between the ‘shoulds’ of outer responsibility and the ‘wants’ of our deeper needs—between deferred gratification and insistent entitlement. The self is a precarious balance of compromise and coordination.
The Self in Relationship
Think of the important experiences that have contributed to your sense of who you are. They almost certainly are experiences of relationship. Who were the influential people and groups in your life—family, teachers, mentors, friends?
When our self is developing, we seek guidance and companionship, and some way to define who we are. Belonging helps; it bolsters an inner process that is immature and sensitive. Connecting with others, we begin to find out who we might become. Adolescents need peer groups to try on different personalities. Adults gain identity from work groups, church membership, community or political affiliation. We all need to belong; we all need to define ourselves. But we also must grow beyond belonging, beyond definition.
We grow through relationship, particularly relationship with ourselves. It takes time and courage to face and know who we are. For many, solitude and aloneness are mixed up with loneliness—an intolerable sense of being incomplete. So they seek completeness through others; they are compelled into relationship. Yet it is only when we can tolerate, accept and appreciate ourselves alone that we enter into healthy connection with others.
True relationship requires that we come to it as whole as possible. When two or more relatively intact people join, something extraordinary happens. There is a synergy, a vitality that takes the participants beyond themselves into the transpersonal. This is the sacred meaning of marriage.
Because we are not yet whole, because parts of our being are not in agreement, we have difficulty being whole-hearted in relationship. Mostly we look for a connection, a relationship that can soothe the hurts that have not healed. Seeking to feel more complete, we use the other person to fill in the gaps, the empty places inside. Unless we face our inner demons, do our inner work, our brokenness will be reflected back by whomever we are with.
Many try to side step the demands of inner work by focusing on outer achievement and success. No matter how effective we are in the world, regardless of how creative or artistic, if our inner process is not resilient and whole, we will still feel lost. Do you pay enough attention to what is happening inside? Do you allow yourself to be distracted by external concerns that have little real substance?
I mentioned a wealthy client, Jason, previously. In therapy he could never sit still. He would pace around the room, peer at objects on my shelves, comment on my decor. At some point in our conversation he would inevitably introduce some oblique comment that reminded me of how many things he owned. He was so terrified of stopping and looking at his life that he had to keep on the move like a restless animal. Distorted, far out of harmony, his inner experience was torture. Nothing on the outside could protect him from his suffering.
With maturity, for most of us, our sense of self becomes more substantial. We are less often tormented by doubts and fears. As experiences come together there is a smoother flow, a clearer stream. The inner process does its job with less complaint. We move outward, explore the possibilities and complexities of our world. The outer process has inner support, the foundation it requires.
The Outer Process
The inner and outer are designed to work in tandem. Without an inner self, without a sense of valuing and feeling, the world is a barren wasteland of empty activity. Then again, without the stimulation of the world, the abrasion and incarnation of the physical, our inner feelings become a stagnant pool. An emotion is incomplete if not expressed; thought demands action. The outer life is a container for our desires and creative impulses. We need it to live and grow.
The substance of our lives is lived in the material world; we are born into a body, subject to physical forces and needs. That body has to be nourished and cared for; without it we cease to exist. Life demands that we be active, move, work and make things happen. There is no alternative. How we accomplish all this, the style and manner of our being in the world is the work of our outer process.
Each of us is a composite of the specific and the universal, the unique and the commonplace, the individual and the general. Born into a human form, like other human forms, we are designed to see, hear, feel, move, and talk, in a similar way to all other humans. Our family and culture shape us to conform to what is ‘normal’. We are enjoined to pay attention to certain ‘essential’ things, to dress appropriately, to be productive and efficient, to see the world as others do. Yet each person is different from every other being that ever existed. I am unique, you are unique, and we can never have exactly the same experiences.
We enter this collective world with our own style of being, our own characteristic nature. Some personalities are tough, extroverted, outgoing. Others are sensitive, introverted and retiring. The same event, the perception of that event, will never have exactly the same meaning to two different people. So each new life brings with it both innovation and the potential for conflict and misunderstanding. A domineering executive may become disgusted with her sensitive daughter who prefers homemaking and dolls to intellectual pursuits. Quiet, sedate parents may have no idea how to cope with a lively, vital five-year-old boy—especially if he is so unlike the well-behaved child that came first. He is likely to be a problem, be labeled as hyperactive and medicated.
Too often parental expectations and a child’s way of being diverge—a clash between how the child is and how she is supposed to be. Her relationship with the world is endangered and issues of success and failure grow large and insurmountable. The child has a hard time finding her own sense of direction, her own pace of working, or a way of life that fits.
Dawn could never adjust to the parental mold. She was too big, too un-ladylike and too ebullient. From the earliest age she loved to draw on every surface with any crayon, marker or pencil that came to hand. She remembers at the age of three being sent to her room for marking a wall—all drawing materials forbidden. At seven she brought home some precious paintings from school. Her mother said, “How nice”, but the next day Dawn found them crumpled in the garbage.
Her parents were not mean or nasty—they just had no idea who she was, or why certain things were important to her. She came home from summer camp at age thirteen to find her room redecorated with flowery wallpaper, ruffles on the bed and her soft toy companions disappeared. She hated it all. But what was she to say when her mother was so enthusiastic and smug?
When I saw her as an adult in her thirties, Dawn’s creativity was blocked. She had escaped the claustrophobic home to go to art school. There every painting became a torture of self-doubt. Now married, with a growing child, she had time to pursue her artistic dreams. Constantly self-critical, she could not complete even one finished product. The cycle of creativity—inspiration, expression, action, accomplishment—remained unfulfilled. No matter the inner desire and urgency, her outer process would not respond. Dawn was unable to find the connection between her inner vision and her outer competence. She kept getting in her own way.
Did you fit in your family? Did they recognize and appreciate the unique contribution that you bring to the world? It is the subtle and often unspoken attitudes of adults that influence how a child will be in their outer life. Doors are closed, never to reopen. The gulf between inner nature and outer achievement becomes an impassible dangerous chasm.
As outer concerns take over more and more of the person, as unawareness grows, evil can gain a foothold. I am reminded of a mother who ignored her intuition, ignored the evidence of her husband’s obsessive interest in their daughter. Many years later she learned of the sexual abuse. Her regrets still haunt her.
That mother was busy, constantly cleaning and tidying. Her outer process had colonized the whole of her life and attention. If doing is given too great a domination, it takes over—anything other than endless striving hardly registers. Is this your life?
Facing Outer Reality
I am not suggesting that our attitudes simply control outer events. At times in our lives we are faced by overwhelming situations. Therapists see more than their fair share of the harsh side of living, the shadow of humanity. Ordinary people are suddenly blind-sided, smashed into by unforeseen events: a young child dies, a mother develops cancer, the family home is burned to the ground.
These things happen—and happen often and unexpectedly. No one is immune. It is no use pretending that you and I are special or protected, that disaster only strikes others. We are often too scared to look life’s dark side fully in the face, so we use partial denial, subtle avoidance to make it more palatable. This is the normal ‘manic defense’ that allows each of us to carry on without succumbing to terror or depression. How could we drive a car on a highway if we kept remembering the high probability of being killed? Somehow we have to live with the awareness that bad things may happen to us.
Avoidance of inevitable truths, frantic and vain attempts to achieve security cause the outer process to go awry. We have to confront a stark fact: we are not in control. Events happen, the world changes, disaster strikes, and we all die sometime. Life will kill us sooner or later. If we cannot control and we cannot avoid, then how should we respond to life?
If we live on the surface, in only the outer shell of life, then there is no answer. As we connect with all dimensions of our being we begin to see a glimmer of light. That light is the luminous flow of connected wholeness. This is not the fragile flicker of belief or faith, serving as a bastion against life’s perils; it is a matter of experience. Only experience is certain—not just experience of parts of ourselves, but that of everything altogether.
Peter had dedicated his life to spiritual practice. He had traveled to India, meditated in remote places and lived in an ashram for many years. Now in his late forties, his spiritual teacher had told him it was time to find his feet in the world. For all his spiritual journeying, he was still incomplete; he had not entered fully into the work of this world. He returned to the US to learn computing and face the stress of starting his own business, to fulfill a neglected aspect of life. Now he could bring his calm insight into every contact with customers and into every minute of each day.
Life is a moment-to-moment affair. Embedded within each moment is the possibility of manifesting life’s essence, its wholeness—the Greater process. When all our processes reconnect back to the Greater process, the circle is complete; experience becomes imbued with meaning and light. Drudgery and boredom, fear and strife are symptoms of our disconnection. Vitality and enjoyment are our true inheritance
Living in Process
Being human is not simple. Exploring our humanness cannot be simplistic. We are creatures of many dimensions, distinct, yet part of a greater whole. We live simultaneously in many different worlds and we have to pay attention to the requirements of each of these worlds.
The outer world is the landscape of our life, a world of material reality that constantly impinges on us. The texture of our outer experience, our outer process, influences how we respond to what happens to us—and what we do about it. We have to act. Through action, a difference is created whose ripples extend out into the future; every deed changes the universe.
Being in the world is a sacred responsibility, a duty to become increasingly aware of the consequences of everything we do. It is not enough to think of our own interests or those of our family and community. We have to realize the interconnectedness of the universe, act as if each moment is of ultimate importance. That only becomes possible if we remember that we are human beings.
This remembering is the inscape of experiencing, the ‘innerness’ of who we feel we are. Feelings, values, choices, decisions are the essence of this inner realm of subjectivity. “Know Thyself” was written over the doorway of the Delphic oracle; there is no better advice. So how are we to follow that advice? The answer is to become aware of what is happening within—not just occasionally but often, every moment we have a chance.
Knowing who we are means not succumbing to self-deception, not giving in to egotism and inflation or even its opposite—feelings of inadequacy and false humility. Balance is everything; a realistic and honest view of who we are and what we are capable of is an essential gift. Whenever we entertain a distorted view of ourselves, either too much or too little, we lose our center. The negative voice that criticizes our selves or others acts out of fear and defensiveness. It closes us to love and connection.
The inner world needs connection, needs the richness of relationship. It keeps us supple—essential exercise for the heart. So every time we reach out and feel that connection, whether it is with a person, a work of art or nature, something is added to our inner experiencing. Not just love or attraction but also dislike, disgust, even hate are all good exercise if we stay aware. We should never hide from the experiences that seek us out. Every feeling or urge has something to tell us about who we are.
The inner and outer processes are personal to each of us. They create our individual experience and make up the texture of our distinctive way of being and doing. The deeper process belongs to the unconscious dimensions, the fluid and formless underworld—the natural and impersonal world of nature.
In the same way that every living being grows into a particular form, so nature shapes us beyond our will or awareness. When experience arises out of this realm it feels other; it does not belong to who we think we are. Our dreams are filled with narratives that seem foreign to our waking concerns. Images and urges, creativity and invention surge into consciousness, beyond control or conscious intention.
How are we to relate to that impersonal aspect of our being? In the previous chapter I suggested that the deeper process responds to trust and respect; it requires that we make the effort to listen deeply. Rather than discarding or discounting the subtle prompting, we should welcome them with awe and curiosity. We have to pierce the veil of obscurity that shrouds our dreams—write them, paint them, look around in the world for objects and experiences that match the images.
There is a technique in hypnosis called by the formidable name, “idiomotor signaling.” In essence, while a person is in a hypnotic trance, the therapist can ask the unconscious, deeper self of the client to signal “Yes”, “No”, “Maybe”, by small, movements of different parts of the body, most often the fingers. The client is seldom fully aware of these movements, which are clearly observable. So I might help a client in trance to explore deeper blocks to physical healing by asking simple yes/no questions: “Is there some hidden reasons that X cannot heal? Are these reasons physical? Are they emotional? Do these reasons come from experiences earlier in life?” In this way I begin to ferret out the agenda of the deeper process.
This technique clearly shows how our unconscious has access to all sorts of information and memories that are normally unavailable to consciousness. “We know much more than we think we know,” as Milton Erickson, the master hypnotherapist, would say. In actuality, the deeper process is signaling all the time through subtle movements, changes in the way we feel and responses to the energies and atmospheres surrounding us. You might say that the unconscious keeps up a silent running commentary about everything that goes on.
Tuning in to this communication requires that we sense our body and notice minute shifts and changes as they occur. With practice, most can discover their own way to access an inner knowing. Then we realize the wisdom, power, and knowledge of our deeper process. It is waiting for us to get in touch.
That can also be said about the Greater process. But rather than a natural impersonal aspect of our being, the Greater process is transpersonal—beyond and greater than individual experience. The quality is different, more refined, encompassing and complete. While we sense the deeper process as organic, visceral, downward, and obscure, the greater process is experienced as up and out, light, bright, impalpable and enlivening. Unexpectedly interceding in our everyday experience, a new life within our life, it takes us out of our limited selves into something greater.
The more a person attunes with the Greater process, the more that person seems complete. I think of that state as single minded, whole-hearted and utterly embodied. A person who is ‘all of a piece’ carries a personal presence of coherence, serenity and flow. Whatever we do to increase that alignment of body, heart, mind, and action increases our ability to be present. The flowering of presence is the Unitive experience—merging with the transcendent.
For a few saintly souls, this state may be relatively permanent. For most of us it is at best transitory. We catch a glimpse of how we could be before returning to our normally dissonant mode. Living in tune with the Greater process is the goal of religion, of spiritual disciplines, of the right path in life. It is the Way of Taoism, the Dharma of Buddhists, surrender to Allah in Islam, the path of beauty for the Navajo Indians, the grace of the Holy Spirit, the influx of the Life Force. With many names and many faces, it all leads in the same direction—toward wholeness.
Scattered throughout the spiritual literature of the world are hints and clues on how to connect with a Greater reality. Certainly we cannot command the transcendent; it is far beyond our wishes, desires and spiritual tricks. To believe we can entrap enlightenment through any particular practice is like a leaf trying to capture the wind. The greater process manifests when we are ready and when we have created enough space to experience far beyond our ordinary thinking and feeling. It is waiting for us to be able to surrender.
To do this, we must grow more fully into ourselves. We invite the Greater process into our lives by becoming the most we can, by connecting all the dimensions of our being. As we become more of whom we are, we become more than we are.