Edward’s Diary Entry 124: More Mind Stuff...

There’s a huge mix-up with the modern theories of mind – even from great thinkers like A.R. Orage, who was one of Gurdijieff’s “star” students... let alone mainstream psychology, with its countless theories. Orage used this diagram, left, of the human psyche, which receives impressions from the external world through 7 channels of Sensation (below), which are classified by the Emotional or feeling function as pleasant or unpleasant, and deposited as images in Memory, with Imagination being the ability to recall Images from Memory and combine them into new forms, and Thought being the classification of images by their likenesses and differences. With Thinking pre-supposing Imagination, Imagination Memory, Memory pre-supposing Sensation, and Sensation an external world as the original source of sense impressions. But these processes, he says, are mainly Unconscious at present (shaded parts) and the aim of real education is to make them increasingly Conscious.

This may very well be true to a certain degree, but if the process is mainly Unconscious, how are we supposed to “make it more Conscious”? Where does this “Consciousness” come from in this diagram? I can’t find it. Normally, in so-called “esoteric groups”, some big boss-man or teacher points things out to you, give orders and tells you what to do… And presto! like magic, “Consciousness” is supposed to appear on the scene! That can’t be right, can it? So a student of one’s own mind will see that things don’t work exactly like this. The only thing that really works is the D-I-Y method, doing it yourself: going inside and seeing how your Mind really operates. But for that, of course, there has to be a willingness and some degree of preparation…

And once again, any diagram that represents the so-called Mind as a “self-contained” unit cannot depict the real situation, just like the pictures of the body that we are normally presented with. Because living bodies are connected to every other living body and every other living thing – both animal and plant – by the invisible medium of AIR, not to mention by the element of EARTH itself, which is present in every cell in the body. So “self-contained” diagrams don’t even work for Bodies, let alone MINDS. Minds are connected by Consciousness or Awareness, to lesser or greater degree. Awareness (Chitta) is the natural medium of the Mind, and probably its Source.

So this division into Conscious mind, Unconscious mind (and/or Subconscious mind) makes room for all kinds of tricks and/or treats, and again negates the existence of a Source or Energy or Fuel for the Mind itself, which comes from inside the Mind of Man. If there is no Source, there is no Mind – as when the Body gives up the ghost and dies, thereby disconnecting Mind from its Source and dispersing it into the recycling bin. Whatever else there may be, we don’t know, do we?

And diagrams like this do not explain much, as they only take into account “normal” activities in our civilised state, without much Mind-Training, which, we have to say, is what Orage was really interested in. So what about all these other “functions”? Where do the following come from? 1) Intelligence, i.e. Problem-Solving Capabilities; 2) Creativity; 3) Imagination, Imagery, imaging… 4) Fantasy; 5) Ideas; 6) Inspiration; 7) Intuition; 8) Wisdom; 9) Understanding 10) Joy, Bliss and Ecstasy; etc.  Are they important? They are all supposed to somehow “occur in the mind”, but how? From sense impressions? No, they have to be interpreted and classified first; impressions are just raw material. From our ancestral sack of Memory (manas)? No, in our view, Memory is all past input through the sense organs, and variations of these inputs within the Mind. From Awareness (chitta) or pure Intelligence? Maybe that’s it…

So there’s no other remedy – if you don’t want to go crazy and waste your time. You have to go inside the Mind and look around, and that’s a tough task, isn’t it? And yet, it has to be done.