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16 SPIRIT AND THE MIND
outer material world and that pleasure is preferable to pain . . . by virtue of mind’s thoughts, which capture and isolate a segment of reality in a symbol or concept so that imagination and fantasy can work their magic distortion—including the creation of a false self- image called ego, an image which perpetuates the delusion that I am separate from other . . .by virtue of the brief periods of its apparent success and mastery over the outer world . . . by virtue of all this, the mind seduces consciousness, luring it into its domain of duality, intoxicating it and obstructing it from realizing its boundless nature.
But there is a special higher aspect of mind, wisdom consciousness,8 which intuitively grasps the nature of pure Universal Consciousness—a divinely inspired spark of mental activity which is aware that its most fundamental objective is to merge back into the source from which it was born.
In the preceding e-merging-into-duality process, consciousness moves successively through many stages of mind—first through primitive stages centered mostly in body awareness and concrete survival-oriented thinking; then through lower psychological stages (lower mental consciousness)8 and on to awareness of subtler feelings and more abstract thinking—including an awareness of Maslow’s higher aspirations and yearnings (higher mental consciousness)8—allowing for a greater range of conscious activity and freedom, but also binding man by a more highly developed sense of separate self.
Psychiatry has contributed much to our understanding of the different developmental stages of the lower mental consciousness of mind, such as Freud’s psychosexual stages, including the oral, anal, phallic and genital stages. With each new stage, man develops a characteristic self-image with which he identifies—unaware of the true boundless nature of pure Universal Consciousness because of: (1) ignorance—the mind isn’t evolved enough to grasp the possibility or hasn’t been exposed to it; (2) bondage—the mind intellectually knows but hinders direct experience by trapping consciousness in it’s (mind’s) senses, desires, pleasures, pains and ego so that consciousness is not free to expand; and/or (3) fear—the mind intuitively knows that in the process of transcendence from ego- directed to Universal Consciousness it must relinquish control, even sacrifice itself, and recoils in fear.
Yoga clearly describes the dynamics and mechanisms by which