Human from the viewpoint of the transpersonal psychology

The principally new stage in the development of the psychoanalytical points was the transpersonal psychology. Its emergence was connected with the discovery of LSD the strong hallucinogen allowing to penetrate the subconscious as deep as it hadn’t been possible before. The LSD-research gave out a lot of flabbergasted facts concerning human psychics. These facts confirm rather not Freud’s but Jung’s theory of unconsciousness. Even more, they may be treated as an indirect evidence in favor of some mystical and esoteric views. It turns out the human unconsciousness contains, for instance, the memory of past lives, that of family including the whole generations of ancestors, nation’s or even race’s and species’ memory. Probably it would be premature to speak of the direct confirmation of the corresponding mysticism conceptions but these facts at least allow to state that the corresponding ideas were not the only invention of ignorant priests (as some modern scholars sometimes are inclined to think).

The founder of the transpersonal psychology is the Czech-American psychiatrist S. Grof who was engaged in the LSD-investigations for many years: at first in Czechoslovakia then in USA. According to his theory the unconsciousness is represented by three main levels:

n personal (elements source of which can be found in the present individual’s life after the birth);

n perinatal (elements which emerged in the period of the embryonic development);

n transpersonal (elements unexplainable in the frame of neither personal nor perinatal levels, such as the past reincarnations or ancestors memory).

The personal level is the most superficial one, the theory of Freud deals namely it. The third is the most mysterious and nothing for sure can be said of it. Grof tried to speculate on it and to create some universal picture of reality, going of it. But all these speculations are nothing else as metaphysic hypotheses. They all can be reduced in short to that the psychic is the common universal base for all reality. This idea isn’t new (look the chapter dedicated to the Eastern philosophy), the novelty suggested by Grof consists in pointing out parallels with some theories of the modern physics, such as the Bohm’s theory of implicit and explicit orders of reality, the conception of the ramifying Universe etc.

The purely scientific novelties suggested by Grof concern mainly the second the perinatal level of the unconsciousness. Here Grof discovered four so-called perinatal matrices connected with the period of the embryonic development and the process of childbirth. The first matrix is referred purely to the embryonic development, when the embryo develops and accumulates information, knowing no troubles and calamities appropriate to the later stages. The information accumulated during this period compounds the base on which all the future recollections concerning a calm and careless periods in life, similar to the life in a paradise, when one has no need to earn for living and think of one’s future, are superimposed. The base itself is like a recollection of the Eden lost forever. Troubles recalled by the remedies used by the mother in the pregnancy period are perceived as mysterious monsters threatening to the embryo, trying to strangle or to devour it. Thus the first matrix united all reminiscences of mysterious and irrational phenomena in the memory of a human. The second matrix is referred to the period directly preceding to the process of birth. The Eden has been over, the birth cramps are going. The embryo feels a terrible compression and discomfort. There is no way out but the only compression. Accordingly all the recollections about the periods of despair and hopelessness, of impossibility to change something in the events go are put into the frame of this matrix. The third matrix is formed by the process of birth itself. After the compression period suddenly the way out appears. The way is hard and difficult, connected with many dangers. But it’s a way after its complete absence. The process of birth is perceived by the embryo as something explosive (especially in comparison with the previous stage). It’s experienced as something like a deluge or conflagration, a death battle or earthquake or something similar. Accordingly all living experiences of this kind, all memories of natural calamities, conflagrations, wars and fights are connected with this matrix. The fourth matrix the matrix of death and resurrection concerns the after-birth moments when all the dangers of the previous stage are over and the new-born child can breathe in with its own breast and relax after the hard and dangerous way through the bearing canal. All the periods of free peace creativity and “rebuilding after the war” are referred to this matrix.

All human memory is distributed on these four matrices. One of them is dominating in the individual psychics where different types of human temperaments, perception and even world outlook and cultural artifacts come from. The humans whose psychics are dominated by different matrices are difficult to understand each other.

Date: 2014-12-21; view: 1222