Ernest Lawrence Rossi

"The world hangs on a thin thread

And that is the psyche of man."

Carl Jung in A Matter of Heart, the movie.

Carl Jung’s well known words about the significance of the human psyche and consciousness have been repeatedly challenged in the final century of this millennium. Rather than celebrating and continuing the exploration of all possible opportunities for facilitating the human psyche and consciousness, our century seems to have taken a perverse delight in baiting what has been called "the conceits of consciousness." Many of the most famous apparent paradoxes of our century such as Bertrand Russell’s paradoxes of logic and Godel’s incompleteness theorem, Turing’s halting problem, and the uncertainty principle in quantum physics have been interpreted as degrading the significance of consciousness as a supreme value. The mathematician, Morris Klein (1980), did a masterful job of summarized this doubting zeitgeist of our century in his book, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty.

Neuroscience continues to emphasize support for the view that our fate seems to be determined more by unconscious processes rather than consciousness. During a lifetime of research the neurobiologist Benjamin Libet (1993), for example, determined experimentally that human consciousness is usually about half a second behind the brain’s "readiness potential" that determines how we will behave. Tor Norretranders (1998) prize winning book, The User Illusion, recounts recent arguments from the scholarly and famous that imply how Libet’s research supports the view that consciousness is indeed a thin, fragile thread of human affairs that is riddled with error and illusion. With all this one wonders whether consciousness can get anything right. Indeed, the question is: Why has consciousness evolved at all? Why aren’t we zombies with no consciousness? What good is consciousness? What does consciousness do?

A ray of hope for understanding the significance of consciousness in the new millennium comes from an incredible book Memory: From Mind to Molecules (1999) by Larry Squire and Eric Kandel who are both leading, senior researchers in current neuroscience. This new understanding of the role of consciousness follows from theory and research on the distinction between what is now called "declarative versus nondeclarative memory." Declarative memory is the conscious recollection of information about places, objects, and people, while nondeclarative memory encodes the unconscious performance of information about perceptual, motor, and cognitive skills and habits. You use conscious, voluntary, declarative memory to tell your psychotherapist the story of your life. You use unconscious, involuntary, nondeclarative memory to automatically balance and peddle your bike without thinking too much about it. Nondeclarative memory is not the Freudian unconscious that is a psychologically motivated suppression of unpleasant memory. Rather, the nondeclarative is more like the automatic stimulus-response learning of Pavlov’s classical conditioning. Now comes the important part for Jungian psychology. Both declarative and nondeclarative memory are located throughout the brain in the same sensory, perceptual and motor systems that originally encoded them. Musical memory, for example, is encoded in the auditory pathways of the brain while visual memory would be encoded in the visual pathways. Conscious declarative memory, however, requires an additional brain loop. It is this extra loop to the hippocampus of the brain in the creation of declarative memory that may account for many of the special qualities of human experience that could provide us with clues about why consciousness evolved. For one thing, this extra brain loop in the hippocampus of the brain functions as the site where short-term memory (a few minutes) is converted to the typical long-term memory that we talk to therapists about. The hippocampus and its associated components in the medial temporal lobe of the brain apparently bind together the sources of our scattered life experiences into a single fabric of long-term conscious declarative memory that becomes the thread weaving our personal identity. This inclines us to the view that the hippocampus and its pathways to the prefrontal lobes of the brain (associated with thinking, planning and foresight) may be intimately involved in facilitating the dynamics of self-reflection, self-awareness and an integrated view of life. It is now but a short step to wonder whether the hippocampus is of essence for Jungian psychology. Is the hippocampus at the hub of the traffic circle of the transcendent function that integrates a meaningful interaction between consciousness and the unconscious in the process of individuation?

We need one more crucial link to connect consciousness with the hippocampus and the dynamics of Jungian psychology. What attracts consciousness? In a word: Novelty! Squire and Kandel (1999) review research with newborn human infants that documents how a colored image – say a blue square, for example, - will attract and hold their attention for a while until the novelty of it wears off. Then substitute a red square and their attention is again immediately fixated until the novelty of it wears off as well. We now know that novelty, environmental enrichment and pleasurable physical activity can evoke states of psychobiological arousal that lead to the transcription of genes, their translation into proteins and neurogenesis (making new brain cells) in the adult human hippocampus (Kempermann and Gage, 1999). Anything that is experienced as new, different, changing or surprising in any way immediately attracts the weaving thread of consciousness for its encoding in the fabric of declarative memory by the hippocampus. We propose that this type of neurobiological growth at the cellular-genetic level is the anatomical basis of what Jung (1966, 80-89) called "The Synthetic or Constructive Method."

Now we all know that "practice makes perfect." Making an active effort to consciously rehearse any behavior, whether an outer activity like sports or an inner focus as in memorizing a poem, leads to a voluntarily turning on of "activity dependent genes" in the extra brain loop of the hippocampus leading to the formation of new proteins, brain cells and their interconnections. Consciousness may be the fragile thread of civilization from an outer perspective but it is more like an intense laser beam focusing and fusing the biological basis of human experience from the inner perspective. Is this why we have consciousness? Is this why we have an inner life of psychological experience? The sensitive but highly focused consciousness on inner dialogue with the novel and numinous emergent figures of our dreams and fantasies that Jung calls "active imagination" is a way of engaging and facilitating the psychobiological basis of healing and individuation. From a psychobiological perspective this is what consciousness does best: it turns on gene expression and neurogenesis in our daily work of building a better brain (Rossi, 2002).

This psychobiological perspective on activity dependent gene expression, neurogenesis, and the growth of the brain has profoundly deep implications for understanding the relatedness of creative experience in all times and cultures. For the ancient Greeks the creative consciousness was described as the activating force of a daemon (demon) driving human experience whether we liked it or not. For Buddhism the Zen koan was developed as a way to activate and intensely focus meditative consciousness to facilitate heightened states of arousal called "satori" or a more mini "kensho." Ritual, music, dance, drama and story telling in all cultures are means of focusing attention and arousal to evoke the sense of wonder that nurtures imagination and psychological transformation. In 1855 James Braid, wrote a book called The Physiology of Fascination and the Critics Criticized wherein he described fascination as the psychophysiological basis for focusing attention to facilitate healing by hypnosis. The experience of fascination, mystery and the tremendous were summarized in the word numinosum by Rudolph Otto (1932/1950) to describe the heightened psychobiological states of arousal that are characteristic of all original spiritual experience. For Carl Jung the experience of the numinosum became the essential driving force in human motivation and the process of individuation.  We now propose that heightened experiences of numinous consciousness  can drive gene expression, neurogenesis and the growth of the human brain.  This conception of the role of salient experiences of consciousness and free will in evoking the deep psychobiology of gene expression is well expressed by Ridley (1999).

“It is time to put the organism back together again.  It is time to visit a much more social gene, a gene whose whole function is to integrate some of the many different functions of the body, and a gene whose existence gives lie to the mindbody dualism that plagues our mental image of the human person.  The brain, the body and the genome are locked, all three, in a dance.  The genome is as much under the control of the other two as they are controlled by it.  That is partly why genetic determinism is a myth.  The switching on and off of human genes can be influenced by conscious or unconscious external action [p.148] ... genes need to be switched on, and external events—or free-willed behavior—can switch on genes [p.153]…Social influences upon behavior work through the switching on and off of genes [p.172]…The psychological precedes the physical.  The mind drives the body, which drives the genome [p.157].”

It is not always easy to recognize the significance of heightened states of consciousness and neurobiological growth in everyday life. Here are two dreams of a young woman we shall call Davina (Rossi, 2000, 2002) that evidence the types of psychological experience and symbolism that suggest she is experiencing numinous states that may be associated with neurogenesis and the literal growth of her brain.

Can we find a context for understanding this dream that will explain the association between her current psychological problem with her parents, the symbolism of light, and the world’s religions? A previous dream suggested that Davina was now able to relate to her parents with more objectivity and warmth. In this dream we see a similar theme in that her parents give up their frightening skeleton aspects and pray for forgiveness before the "great symbol of religion. Resolving her problem with her parents is associated with the blinding light and a sphere representing all religions of the world.

The association of light with spiritual awakening and a moving out of one’s parental world is actually a universal theme. Christ, who is spoken of as "the Light of the world," said that those who followed Him had to leave their parents’ world behind. Gautama Buddha (the Enlightened One, the Illuminated One) had his religious awakening when he went outside the confines of the wealthy home of his parents and became aware of the world’s ills in the form of sickness, age, and death. Moses saw God manifest as a burning bush (bright light) on Mount Sinai and received the Ten Commandments, the foundation for a new world of relations between humanity and the divine.

An original religious experience can be described psychologically as a state of heightened consciousness (Bucke, 1901/1967). When figures like Christ, Buddha, and Moses experienced their moments of enlightenment, the psychological view would hold that their minds were flooded with a more penetrating understanding of the human condition. These moments of heightened consciousness can be equated with the high points in the experience of mystics as well as those moments of peak functioning in everyday life. Insights gained in these creative moments are then codified or communicated to others in the form of creeds, dogmas, rituals, or philosophies of life. These moments of intense consciousness (light) provide insights that enable us to break out of the Old World of our ancestors into the New World of our own original psychological experience.

There is, however, much confusion between (1) the original religious experience as a heightening of consciousness and (2) the creed or dogmas that are later formulated to codify the original experience. The creeds, rituals, dogmas, etc., have an important function in preparing the mind of the disciple to have his own original experience. More often, however, the essence of religious experience–the heightening of consciousness–is forgotten and the creeds, rituals, and dogmas are adhered to as ends in themselves when people become bored with these outer forms, the institutionalized religion frequently losses its essential functions. Churches and temples become places where people socialize rather than pursue the inner work of developing their consciousness.

Davina is experiencing an unusually intense state of consciousness, a kind of original spiritual experience, in this dream. So intense is the light that it is blinding and she is afraid of it. She is so afraid of the light–what awareness might reveal–that it takes the combined influence of her husband and Dr. R, in the form of a giant skeleton, to force her into facing the light.

During this period Davina continually pleaded with me to help her shut off the dreams, visions, and fantasies that were terrorizing her. It was curious. On the one hand, she was an unusually courageous and intelligent young woman who was forthright in "calling a spade a spade." On the other hand, she was childlike in her need for protection from the terrors in her own mind. I certainly would have liked to help her turn off the frightening imager, but I did not have the ability to do that. Instead I could only encourage her to persist in her courageous efforts to face the light, to become more and more aware of the meaning of the terrors of her mind. Only in this way would she free herself from them.

It is evident from the imagery of this dream that there is something implicit and autonomous in the process of consciousness struggling to cope with the "panic-stricken, lonely" state that led to face the light in this dream. She is drawn into the light of the eye "as though the blinding light was pulling me like a magnet." This is reminiscent of the "mysterious power-force, like a strong current" in the ocean that pulled the ship of her parents’ world to its destruction in an earlier dream (Rossi, 2000). Could we say that these power-forces are metaphors of the role of "the unconscious" (that is, pre-conscious implicit self-organizing processes) in the evolution of consciousness that has described in mythopoetic detail in the classical literature of depth psychology? Psychological and spiritual awakening is, at least in part, an autonomous growth process involving the pain of separation from the known world of one’s parents and culture and the labor of constructing a new phenomenal world to be shared in with one’s peers in the theater of consciousness. This leads us to believe that psychological growth and spiritual awakening emerge out of inner emergencies of pre-conscious implicit processing on deep psychobiological levels. New developments in the evolution of awareness are usually signaled by implicit self-organizing dynamics, which must be facilitated through the active work of self-reflection, inner dialogue and self-actualization in the theaters of dream, consciousness and culture (Rossi, 1996, 2002).

Here is another dream that develops this them further at the very end of Davina’s therapy.

Quite unexpectedly Davina now became pregnant. Because of the excitement of the event she did not write down this dream, which she had just before she knew she was pregnant, but I recorded it just as she told it.

This healing dream certainly describes a numinous experience of psychobiological arousal of the highest order. Several classical signs associated with a state of heightened consciousness and spiritual development are present: (1) blinding light, (2) a sense of awe, (3) a sense of being at the center of things with God, spirit, or life force, and (4) a sense of well-being following the experience of the center. In a pioneering volume, Bucke (1901/1967), a Canadian psychiatrist distinguished several stages in the development of consciousness. In modern terms there is simple, non-declarative consciousness, by which both animals and humans are conditioned in an automatic stimulus-response manner by the circumstances of their physical experiences of the world; a naive realism. There is the more complex, declarative, self-reflective consciousness, by which humans become capable of treating their own mental state as objects of consciousness. It was one of Bucke’s basic ideas that humans are in a perpetual state of evolution in their states of consciousness. He believed that "the large number of mental breakdowns, commonly called insanity, are due to the rapid and recent evolution of those faculties¼ " From Bucke’s point of view then, Davina’s need for psychotherapy would be understood as an overly rapid development of consciousness. She broke down because the changes and developments took place so quickly that she could not assimilate them. Her current growth experience has enabled her to play a more active role in choosing how she would like to participate in co-creating these developments. The heightened state of psychobiological arousal she experiences as stress in this dream is transformed by what Otto and Jung would call an experience of the numinosum and what Bucke would call a moment of "cosmic consciousness." The correspondence between Davina’s state of heightened psychobiological arousal in this dream and Bucke’s description of cosmic consciousness is supported by the following comparison.

The experience of the blinding light in this dream is analogous to the earlier dream reported above. At that time (five months earlier), however, Davina was afraid to face the light. When an attempt was made by the combined image of her husband and Dr. R to force her to face the light she just awakened from the dream. In her current dream, however, she is able to face the light, which is now more clearly articulated as a face with emerald eyes. And, even more important, she is able to maintain enough control over herself to get a message. She is now able to relate effectively to a numinous source within. She is to create beautiful things through her writing, painting, and childbearing. This certainly is a consummation much to be desired. Five months ago her consciousness—her ability to relate to her inner source of creativity—was too weak to contain the numinous experience. Consequently, though the inner growth process was proceeding, there wasn’t much noticeable change in her outer daily behavior. At this time, when she does have the strength to co-create and express the numinous experience, there are observable changes in her behavior. She is writing, painting, and relating to others in a self-actualized manner. And, she becomes pregnant!

Are such dream experiences really to be understood as evidence of an association between the numinous, neurogenesis and the growth of the brain? A recent review of the clinical and experimental data supporting this view (Rossi, 2000, 2002) suggests an affirmative answer. From this perspective the entire human endeavor in culture, art, drama, dance, music, literature, meditation, religion and education as well as psychotherapy could be understood as an effort to optimize the biological growth of our brain! Virtually all the human arts and rituals of all cultures in all times have, without realizing it, of course, been trying to focus attention and heighten psychobiological arousal to optimize neurogenesis and the growth of our consciousness and skills in relating to ourselves and nature. We are continually engaged in natural processes of facilitating the physical growth of our brain wherein we are creating ourselves whether we realize it or not. A vast amount research will be required in the new millennium to explore this new neurobiological perspective of the role of consciousness and the numinosum in optimizing the human condition.

References

Bucke, M. (1901/1967). Cosmic Consciousness. N.Y. : Dutton.

Kempermann, G. & Gage, F. (1999). New nerve cells for the adult brain. Scientific American, 280, 48-53.

Jung, C. (1996). Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. N.Y.: Pantheon Books.

Klein, M. (1980). Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty. N.Y.: Oxford University Press.

Libet, B. (1993). Neurophysiology of Consciousness. Boston: Birkhäuser.

Norretranders, T. (1998). The User Illusion. N.Y.: Viking.

Otto, R. (1923/1958). The Idea of the Holy. N.Y.: Oxford University Press.

Ridley, M.  (1999). Genome:  The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters.  N.Y.: HarperCollins.

Rossi, E. (2000). Dreams, Consciousness, Spirit: The Quantum Experience of Self- Reflection and Co-Creation. Phoenix, Arizona: Zeig, Tucker, Theisen Inc.

Rossi, E.  (2002).  The Psychobiology of Gene Expression: Neuroscience and Neurogenesis in Therapeutic Hypnosis and the Healing Arts.  N.Y.: W. W. Norton Professional Books.

Squire, L. & Kandel, E. (1999). Memory: From Mind to Molecule. N.Y.: Scientific American Library.