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14 SPIRIT AND THE MIND
Freud. From his studies of highly developed and creative people, he defined a transcendental level of human experience, which he called the “peak experience.” This was a powerful transcendental state of consciousness in which the individual experienced a sense of heightened clarity and understanding, intense euphoria, and an appreciation of the holistic, unitive, and integrated nature of the universe and one’s unity with it. It was his hope that studies of peak experiences would ultimately help to bridge the gap between the relative and the absolute and establish a truly scientific basis for experiences of unity and eternity. He believed that the human being could live fairly consistently at this higher level of awareness, could “live casually in heaven and be on easy terms with the eternal and the infinite.” (1971).
Although psychology was becoming aware, then, of higher states of consciousness and that our essential identity lies beyond the limited Freudian view,5 the relationship between mind and consciousness remained unclear in the literature until the recent (late 1960’s) emergence of transpersonal psychology. Suddenly the stages of development staked out by psychology were defined as lower levels of consciousness, and their relationship to higher mental states— including the psychic dimension relating to “psi” phenomena, the siddhi powers of yogis, and the supramental and highest spiritual states of samadhi (Hinduism’s mergence with the undifferentiated) and nirvana (Buddhism’s egoless state)—was clearly shown. In elucidating a hierarchy of consciousness, transpersonal psychology also clarified what’s at stake for man to move from his predominantly mental stage to a spiritually-oriented state of consciousness which includes and transcends the mental.
However, mainstream psychology still doesn’t recognize this work and fails to understand the relationship of these higher states of consciousness to the “normal” and “abnormal” mental states with which it most frequently deals. It has difficulty integrating the information and techniques it is slowly learning from such diverse fields as acupuncture and hatha yoga, which deal with a subtle energy, relatively unexplored by Western science but understood by yogis to be very much related to the evolution of higher states of consciousness.
Our concepts aren’t fundamental enough, for instance, to allow for a clear understanding of the interrelationships between the subtle energy flow of acupuncture and that of Western bioenergetics; or