The "Four Selves" Model

Hey, that's really pretty good!

The distinction between "sense of self" and "ego" could save a lot of misunderstanding, seems to me.

I find that quite interesting and very clearly written. On a first glance it seems quite accurate, though I never thought about it exactly that way before. Thanks for sharing.

Strangely enough, I have been on a breakneck tour of the novels of Michael Gruber-- a very skilled writer, who takes as the deep subject matter, states of consciousness, played out via thriller-type stories involving shamanism, Santeria, its Yoruba predecessors, ethnobotany, art, anthropology...

He's a consummate craftsman and clearly does tons of research on many disparate subjects-- string theory to the life and times of the painter Velasquez. And I would warn anyone with an involvement with Santeria that I suspect his skills could be triggering for some people. Maybe you, Ona.

Anyway, here's the strange coincidence...

… he reminded me that the Chenka do not have psychology, as
we think we do. No neuroses, psychoses, introjects, repressions, obsessions,
phobias, or megrims. It is all a matter of spirits, independent transcendent
entities who inhabit us in various ways. One of them is the little person in
the control booth who operates our bodies and observes the world through our
sensoria, and whom we are pleased to call our ‘self’. Among the Cheka, the
little person is something of a shift worker, knocking off for long periods while
others take control, sometimes several at once. The inner life of the Chenka
thus has to do with harmonizing the relationships among the various spirits as
they pass through the control room. These beings also have an existence in the
unseen worlds, of which the Chenka record several dozen, and a busy commuting
takes place among beings human and subhuman and superhuman. There is a whole
aesthetics involved in this dance, which I do not have terms to describe, but
it is the essence of Chenka existence, perilous and ecstatic by turns. I knew
this, of course, but I had thought that it was all imaginary. Or symbolic. Or [/b]merely
spiritual, which is much the same thing to 99.9% of people in our culture. It
did not occur to me that it was about as imaginary, symbolic, and spiritual as
quantum electrodynamics.[/b]

from Tropic of Night. An anthropologist trying to explain witchcraft to a policeman, after a series of horrific murders.

Hmm, googling 'chenka' yielded this: http://amelia-petkova.livejournal.com/19687.html

another fan!

i never heard of the guy. sounds like a good use of an otherwise not very useful college education, perhaps?
but i also recommend a personal account of the complex social drama that comes when one lives in a household of initiates in brazil, where the possessing spirits are part of the dynamic between rommates. told by an australian graduate student who spent time in such a house. the book is A Taste of Blood by Jim Wafer.
i often suspect my years in santeria had a huge impact on my more recent practice in relation to exactly this stuff you described kate, for who and where am "i" when there is this dance of entities whose presence affects thoughts, body, perception, emotion, etc. i will check out those books!

(Now that it's not 4:30 am)

How does this relate to the four selves document? No idea. And I can't speak for someone who is totally immersed in and fully literally believes in such a culture, as is implied in the description of the "chenka" in Kate's quote. In my own experience and the descriptions fellow mediums who work in similar ways describe to me, here are a few thoughts. This is from the perspective of people who work with possession, not just using vision, automatic writing or divination to communicate with entities which remain outside of themselves. Since possession work is designed for group ritual, I'll assume a group ritual context to keep it simple:

An entity can manifest partially or fully, on a continuum. In complete possession there is loss of personal consciousness, so I'll leave that aside. In the realm of partial, there is a continuum of how strong the interaction is.

For example, if an entity manifests lightly, one experiences the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the entity in ones body, but also maintains a clear sense of self (using the language in the essay: "I am Ona, and here is this entity Pomba Gira also in me"). One could also maintain the ego (perhaps the entity produces certain feelings, speech or impulses to action, but one might think they are stupid or embarrassing, and represses them). Mediumship training tends to emphasize letting go of this impulse to control the interaction, allowing anything the spirit says, shows, etc to be spoken freely. If it actually is unethical or not appropriate, those more experienced who are in attendance will chastise it, send it away or otherwise deal with it. So assuming one is in a healthy teaching situation it's NOT an excuse to act out harmful behaviors. Entities that encourage inappropriate behavior are not worked with, and that's also part of good spiritual development. What's considered appropriate depends on the tradition. So at a ritual for the orishas it would be inappropriate for the spirit of a dead person to show up, and the medium who manifested such would be taken out of the room and cleansed, and give further training to prevent that in the future.

One result of this training to allow the entity to manifest freely, without egoic editing, is that the practice gently undermines the ego's desire to control everything. One becomes more openly attuned to the presence of the entities (spirits, deities) without trying to run the show. The point of this from the perspective of such traditions is to allow ones life to be guided by the wisdom and teaching of *selected* guardian spirits or deities, to improve your life.

In a deeper possession (but not full loss of consciousness), the person may have a faint sense of who they are and a fairly coherent witness-type state, as if watching what is going on from a great distance while the body, emotions, speech, etc are operated by the entity. There is often really very little ability to control anything in this level of possession - it's like fighting a current in a river to try to break out of it and the deeper it goes the less there's anything to do but watch from that faint spot on the bleachers far away from the action.

Just some initial thoughts. What an interesting combination of subjects.

Wow, fascinating stuff Kate and Ona. Love it and how we segued into this from the thread topic... cuz they clearly do connect, in some important but complex way.

Since I was a teenager I've worked with Roberto Assagioli's Psychosynthesis model. He was somehow associated with depth psychology but younger than Jung and Freud. His model is very similar to shamanic models with unconscious, midconscious, and superconscious-- underworld, human world and upper world, and he saw his approach as integrating Freud, Adler and Jung with each other and with transpersonal traditions like Advaita.

Our "ego" is that mainstay personality that we keep coming back to, It's surrounded with other sub-personalities in all three worlds, some of which are closer to "us" and some further. Psychosynthesis is a process of integrating them skillfully (and some of them are distinctly transpersonal-- the Witness as well as more feeling based superconscious forces like Love etc).

Anyhow, I've worked with it mostly in terms of integrating unconscious and midconscious stuff so's to be less blindsided by different sub-personalities. And approaching life this way definitely loosens the whole "ego as controller" thing, because while the more peripheral sub-personalities draw closer to consciousness, the ego sees itself as more contingent and porous to these underworld and overworld forces, as well as others in the mid-world. Different subpersonalities start to appear against a more open background as consciousness differentiates itself from them.

It's interesting how this stuff comes out in Jung and Assagioli, how ambiguous they are about the status of these entities. Anyone who contacts this stuff has to admit that the traditional model speaks to the autonomy of these forces in a way that an "it's all imaginary" reductionism can never do, as that's a kind of control-fantasy of ego. But I think the modern element of skepticism is interesting too, kind of suspending judgments of these beings' status. After all, from another point of view, all "personalities" are empty and impermanent-- or else they wouldn't be able to interface with anything else, and everything would be jammed up and frozen. It's empowering to integrate more and more of these elements. It's humbling to realize that "I" am just another empty, impermanent flow.

Well, the connections may not be clear and linear-- and I stayed up until 4:30 Saturday am thinking I'd finish the book, so I was in a semi-altered state!-- but it struck me as interesting and amusing how much of the 'latest scientific' thinking is a restatement in language more familiar to us of the oldest 'science' [i.e., derived from methodical practice, expecting results] of all: shamanism/magic.

M. Gruber says it better than I can, here [same book]--

“So, I ask you, what would you do, with your marvelous brain, all those centuries? No books,
no writing, few man-made things, little pressure from the environment, no
television or radio, no newspapers, only the same hundred or so people to talk
to? I think you would play with the environment, [/b]Homo ludens, after all, and you would become intimate with it. You
would invent art, to symbolize this. You would develop an intimacy with your
environment so deep that we the children of industrial civilization can
scarcely imagine it, an intimacy deeper, perhaps than we have with our lovers
or our children, perhaps even deeper than we have with our own alienated
bodies. They would be [/b]participants in
an environment that was alive in the same way that they themselves were alive,
whereas we are merely observers of an environment that is dead. All the little
particles, yes? Yes. And another thing we would play with would be the most
interesting thing in our environment, which is the human mind, our own minds
and those of others. And with this, very slowly, centuries and centuries,
remember, a technology develops. This technology is based not on the
manipulation of the objective world, as our own is, but rather on the
manipulation of the subjective world. Now you may be familiar with the
statement by the British scientist and science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke,
in which he states: any sufficiently advanced technology will appear to be
magic. Just so. And what I am proposing is that among traditional cultures
there is a sufficiently advanced technology of which we know very little, and
what little we do know of it we denigrate, yes? And for want of a better term,
we call this magic."[/b]

The crucial word, and ability, by which the dilemma of the story is resolved is 'participation'.

It interests me, the sequence of skills that result in becoming fully-awake, functional human beings: quieting the mind to the degree of being dispassionate about what we 'are' and how we 'must' act-- the first skill, shamatha; and then being capable of total immersion [participation, at a previously inconceivable level-- or intimacy] vipashyna; then the bodhisattva life of practicing intimacy, moment-to-moment; eventually, the rumor I've caught indicates: nothing left but the Light itself...

I find it helpful to look for the largest possible context; in this respect, I find science rummaging around in the entry hall of evidence, of material objects and mechanical forces; the further reaches seem to be spoken about mostly in older spiritual traditions. A few generations back, what these exotic traditions conveyed was translated into a kind of German Romantic Western spirituality, with a lot of adventitious Christian stuff mixed in [Guru as Savior, for instance; samsara as 'the world', nirvana as 'heaven']

Our generation seems to have taken on the task of trying to re-translate, pick out the essential and lose all the adventitious stuff-- but we are in danger of being limited by our understanding of science [which is so 20th century!] and introducing inaccuracies and preferences of our own. The keys seem to be: wise and informed teachers; and dedicated practice. The latter seems to depend on really coming to grips with the fact that we literally have nothing better to do. Unfortunately, this can take quite some time! [said the grizzled old broad]

It seems also quite possible (riffing off of Chris's last post) that one can inadvertently allow the ego to intermediate and "own" even transformative experiences, thus undermining them. I liked what a lama told me in a conversation a few weeks ago, that letting go entails letting go even of the idea of letting go. If one is attached to any attainment, experience or process, there's still letting go to do.

The connection is that various traditions have enumerated x number of 'selves,' 'bodies,' 'possessing entities,' 'tutelary dieties,' 'guardian angels,' etc., etc. A current formulation lists demarcated states of consciousness; people who believe in graphs talk about alpha, beta, delta, theta, and others, perhaps?-- I'm not so current.

In broader strokes, describing the appearance of multiple selves, we have Walt Whitman: "...I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself: I am large. I contain multitudes."

Truth is, I can relate to the elaborate 'art/science' of archaic modes of playing with these things; it's what I do for fun...

"While it's quite possible to get somewhere with practice pretty
quickly, there is a sort of breathless rush to claim status that is
troublesome."-- cmarti

Yeah, that rush to claim status is both troublesome-- and interesting. It interests me that it is common to think that the PURPOSE of a process is to come to the 'successful' END of it. Very strange, isn't it?-- this holds even for processes that are agreed to be extremely pleasurable. That's the first level of remove; the second is the 'claiming status' part: ie., proving to others that one has successfully concluded [regardless of the truth of the claim]. These are very strange times, and we are strange people!

... It interests me that it is common to think that the PURPOSE of a process is to come to the 'successful' END of it. Very strange, isn't it?-- this holds even for processes that are agreed to be extremely pleasurable. That's the first level of remove; the second is the 'claiming status' part: ie., proving to others that one has successfully concluded [regardless of the truth of the claim]. These are very strange times, and we are strange people!



-kategowen

It is interesting, but it's a bit naive to think it strange no? Whether I am trying to please my dad (and avoid shame) by getting straight A's (which requires finishing my assignments on time) or please my boss and avoid a scolding by finishing my work correctly and on schedule, or even making food for my restaurant clientele that better be delivered to their table in a timely and delicious manner (to avoid my business failing and customers yelling at me), most of our projects and activities are tied to getting things done on a schedule (to avoid punishment) and doing a good job (to avoid punishment).

Except for perhaps some few of us who were raised on communes by gentle parents and only played non-competitive games as children, and have never had to participate in typical western society, that's just how we learn to play the game isn't it?

So letting go of THAT could be quite scary and befuddling for some, perhaps a great relief for others. Perhaps quite nearly impossible for others. My own teacher actually spent some specific time making me look deeply into these tendencies, as I had excessive tendencies to being very driven and achievement-oriented. That made for some painful work and some real rethinking of what I assumed was necessary and true, and I really appreciate that. I'm not sure I would have even thought about the potential traps of that or not.

Sometimes these things just teach themselves in time, too.

I suspect letting go of being an infinite exercise.


-cmarti

You reiterate that often enough I think you may have a chip on your shoulder about it or an ulterior motive.

hee hee