The Objective Truth of the Psyche
Edited extract from a talk to the weekly meditation group, Highgate, London - 2 September 1981
To see things rightly and truly one has to have reached a very objective state of mind. The true spiritual and cosmic state of consciousness, in which one is able to be objective, overcomes the distortion of the psyche. We live in the psyche; we actually live in a psychic plasma and as water bends light, as a prism refracts light, so the psyche bends our perception.
The human psyche consists of self - that’s its emotional centre. My self is the nucleus of my psyche. And all of us are like an orb of self at the centre of the great psyche that surrounds the earth. So, looking at the psyche terrestrially, we can say the self of the whole human race represents the solidness of oneself and the atmosphere around the earth represents the rest of the psyche. We are an orb of solid self and around it there’s a more ethereal self in which we think.
When you look at anything you are looking at it through the psyche - from a position of self. Your self emanates through your surrounding psyche, invades it and determines how you see through your personal psychic space. You have to clear that space to see things objectively.
If you are heavy with self, then the psyche you are seeing through will be heavy with subjectivity. You have heard the expressions: to be objective and to be subjective. If someone says you’ve got to take an objective point of view, it means you’ve got to take the self or subjectivity out of your perception. You have to represent things exactly as they are and not from the point of view of your self. That’s how we work efficiently in the world. To fix something you have got to look objectively at it; that’s how a tradesman works. But when he goes home, or as soon as he meets a friend, he starts to introduce his subjectivity into everything - subjectivity being self; and his self being his past.
All you consist of in your subjectivity is what you’ve experienced in the past. So, if I mention a river, you’ll get a picture of a river and when you look at it you’ll find you go in your mind to somewhere you’ve been. The mind is able to throw up a nebulous picture of a river but you can’t give it shape without bringing up a connection to your past. You will add subjectivity to it. You’ll give it self, which is your past.
The only reason you are here with me is to get rid of past and self - to get rid of your subjectivity. Then you have the ability to see things exactly as they are. That objectivity is what spiritual or cosmic consciousness provides.
To clear the psychic space around us we have to withdraw from the self, from the past. We have to withdraw inside ourselves. Since we were born our parents and teachers have taught us to project ourselves out into the world as a personality. It is natural to go outwards as a personality - that’s all the personality consists of; if you were alone on a desert island you’d soon lose it. So as you withdraw, and you start to lose your personality, you feel lost because there’s nothing you can relate to, no-one to air your knowledge to and nothing to show off about. As the personality drops away, you’ll be more real. But if you are dependent on it, you’ll be frightened because you are so used to reaching out and hanging on to the rim of the world to support yourself. And not just yourself: You hold on to sustain the nucleus of self in us all, because the personality loves to attach itself to other personalities. But when you come to me I say these emotional attachments are selfish and we must let go of them. I say: Let go of the world of the personality.
Now feel what it’s like to sink deep inside yourself. Go quiet. Go still. Go into the great, wonderful world within. Draw back from the psyche, across that ethereal region, which is your mind, into the self, which is the sinew of the psyche. Pull back from the psychic sinews. Pull back into your body. Stop living out on the rim of the world, with your eyes out there, your ears out there. Come back into your body.
As you withdraw, the space around you, the actual space, is clearing. You start to see more objectively and the less the world is able to coax you out; the less your myriad problems are able to coax you out.
For a while you push against the tremendous projection that goes on in you all day. And you will start to think, because the mind is still open to the echo of what’s been going on all day. The mind has got to stop so you can pull back into the self.
The nucleus of self is very heavy and its outer edges are filled with callus and very inflexible. The self has been going out so long it is determined not to let you go further into yourself. So you feel a certain discomfort, a threat, an inertia - ‘What’s the good of it?’ - because you’re going against the very nature of the personality. But when you get past that outer band of inflexibility, when you get inside the outer projection, it starts to break away.
All the time your space is clearing. What used to entertain you no longer entertains you, because mostly it was talking about the past. And then you discover a virtue. There is always virtue in anything that’s true. The virtue you discover is in yourself and it is everlasting. It is real. It is something you can’t describe, or hold all the time, but now and again you hit it and go 'zing’ - right down to your deepest chord. This is the process you follow until the magnificent instrument you are can see and hear objectively, and know everything that it is necessary to know.
To withdraw from the world rightly is not to isolate ourselves from the world, for that is a selfish action and achieves nothing. To withdraw rightly is to see the world objectively. And it is not just a mortal objectivity, able to cope effectively with the problems and challenges of the world. It goes beyond the mortal into an immortal objectivity. That’s what you are striving for. The true knowledge of immortal objectivity acknowledges the divine. The very self that you have clung to resonates and responds with the beauty, creativity and fullness of love that is the divine itself. That is immortal. And it is you.
But as you pull back from hanging on to the rim of the world, the heavy stuff of the self is going to continue to resist, and the world will help it, through your relationships, parents and friends, accusing and making you doubt what you’re doing. And you will get distracted. Then you have to battle with yourself and it’s always painful. It can take a long time to get back to the nucleus of self that I am. The self is two million years old! All that past - that’s how thick and deep and massive and heavy the self is in us.
We all carry with us the terrible past of man, which is so ugly and terrifying - especially in the night, in the darkness, where the light of consciousness is represented by silence. The silence is there to reassure us. But still the self is frightened - frightened of living, for this is an alien place. Everyone is frightened of living because we are aliens in the external world, driven by our personality to hang on to the edge of the world - so fragile, so mortal.
Our true place is back inside the body. Go in there and discover why 'the kingdom of heaven is within you’. You must go home. You must find the root in yourself. If we have the root of immortality inside of us, which is the good, we can forget the bad when it comes. In the psyche the good and the bad come in waves. But if the root of us is the good we can shake off the suffering.
The psyche covers over the knowledge of our own immortality. It projects us out into the world and cuts us off from the only truth we have - cuts us off with disappointment, mediocrity, failure and death. And still we go on, because we know deep within us that we are immortal.
The New Science of Practical Truth