This is a retrospective of week 3 2024 (2024-01-15–2024-01-21). Here is the retrospective of week 2 2024.
I’ve been reading Consciousness In Jung and Patañjali by Leanne Whitney. I have also listened to the following podcasts with Leanne Whitney.
- Beyond the Five Senses: Leanne Whitney Interviews Russell Targ in 2005, New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove. People like Erwin Schrödinger, who perfected quantum mechanics, began to talk about entanglement. Entanglement is part of modern physics. The fact that the universe is multiply connected, or interconnected, is what allows this connection between elementary particles to occur, and is also what allows psychic ability to occur. There’s no separation.
- Leanne Whitney – Buddha at the Gas Pump Interview, Buddha at the Gas Pump (Nov 11, 2018). Carl Jung didn’t see how the philosophy he was working under just kept cutting him off at every turn with what he was actually trying to bring forward. He couldn’t see his blind spots. If we don’t realize that knowledge is structured in pure consciousness we’re going to just keep spiraling on this building up of knowledge at the expense of the knowledge that sits right in our heart, and in our gut, and in the field between us. The logical consistency that Leanne Whitney sees is quite literally the ground. If we leave the ground and are divorced from it, then we’re in trouble. In the silence, in that pure being, aliveness is felt. It’s embodied. The life is known, instead of being represented through a thought form, or a construct.
Most of our trigger points come through personal relationships. We can use our personal relationships as a means to be able to stay in our center, and engage from a place of calm equanimity. Sometimes we have to be fierce, but it has to come from a place that’s really grounded and centered, as opposed to reactive and all over the place.
Although science is brilliant at what it does, the embodied knowledge that Leanne Whitney is speaking of will never come through reading a science report. It must come through direct experience. There is no way, ultimately, to fully objectify consciousness. Science, as it stands now, is deeply embedded in our culture, which has a dualistic framework. It’s based on a subject/object distinction, and it does not acknowledge that perhaps reality, ultimately, isn’t broken down into subject/object. If you have a culture that is in duality, that is divorced from this ground of pure consciousness, you will ultimately have a problem. And that is exactly what we’re seeing. - #711 Consciousness in Jung and Patañjali with Leanne Whitney PhD, Shrink Rap Radio (Aug 17, 2020). Leanne Whitney studied Jung and yoga together for about 15 years. She was hitting blocks and wanted to go deeper and find out what those blocks were between Jung and Patañjali’s different theories and thoughts. In Patañjali’s system of thought consciousness is all there is. Pure consciousness allows for no metaphysical splitting of reality, and this ends up being the key difference between Jung and Patañjali. So, one can really surrender back into this notion that consciousness is all there is. We don’t have to hold on to it. It’s informing everything. We don’t need to hang on to it.
The way that Jung ends up articulating consciousness reifies humanity, but consciousness is all around us, within the earth, within the soil, in our air. We all stand on this beautiful rotating round rock and it has its own consciousness. We have to get really serious at considering looking at it that way. We can’t steal from the planet without our planetary body being injured. And right now, we’re sitting in an echo chamber of repercussions of how we’ve lived for the last century and more. Work is involved here. Nobody is going to save us. Consciousness is all there is and we’re it. And so all the work that we do on ourselves, and on how we relate into the collective, is going to add up. - Leanne Whitney, Jung, Patañjali and the Seat of Consciousness |476|, skeptiko (Dec 8, 2020). Jung and Patañjali have a lot of similarities. They are both interested in the healing of human suffering, but when you really look at it, Jung is mostly talking about the contents of consciousness. What Patañjali is ultimately pointing to is the ontic reality of pure consciousness, that the reality of our being is pure consciousness. So it can never go unconscious. Jung is, in other words, making a representation. What Patañjali does—what potentially his view does, and potentially can do—is that it changes the field of perception, the paradigm. Reality ends up looking quite holographic. Patañjali’s outlook allows us to take a comfortable seat in the body.
- Consciousness (Carl Jung & Patañjali) – Integrating East & West – Leanne Whitney Ph.D., Suma Gowda (Jun 26, 2021). If consciousness is the reality of being, and it’s singular and absolute from an ontological perspective, then the cosmos, or the world, can never actually go unconscious. We are whole, and if we miss that point we’re going to be in a particular silo of thought. If it isn’t rooted in this wholeness, then that system of thought can spiral us further and further away from the roots. The more we put our species as superior—not revering everything around us, all sentient beings and the planet herself—the more the Earth seems to deteriorate around us.
Ultimately, what we’re looking for is the flow of integration. We’re looking for bilateral integration between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere, between the mind and the body, between the imminent and the transcendent. Wholeness is already what we are. Pure consciousness is not violent to itself. It can’t steal from itself. It’s always in the awareness of its highest reality. It’s not going to be greedy on itself.
Pure consciousness has no alternative but to show itself. It’s showing itself in the degradation of the planet. If we steal from our home, we will have no home left. If we don’t all understand that consciousness is informing all of it, then we’re left with the struggle of materialism, and perhaps the loss of our habitat, because it’s an egoic fight with a power that is way greater than egoic power.
So, in order to have a cultural shift, or a paradigm shift, we have to open up into these ideas. The metaphysical foundation of a culture, or a system of thought, is really important. And orthodox science doesn’t really acknowledge its own metaphysical foundation. - #37 Pathways to Higher Consciousness with Dr. Leanne Whitney, Ph.D., The Metaphysical Mentor Show with Michael Philpott (Jul 30, 2021). Leanne Whitney feels most confident talking about her own experiences. Yoga is a mind-body practice. Yoga is encouraging and inviting everybody to trust and deeply have faith in the field that supports. What we’re looking for is the flow of integration where the mind-body unity is understood and we can take a comfortable seat in the body, and also where we’re integrated to the field that in-forms everything. Some people call it pure awareness or pure consciousness. Integration points us towards what we’re looking for. We want to make sure we’re differentiating the pieces and clearly seeing them, and then we want everything to be linked. We want a coherent narrative.
Depth psychology at its best looks at those aspects of ourselves we don’t know. When there’s lots of affect, lots of emotion, you know a complex is getting activated. These are markers to look for. One common theme is the fear and the terror that’s being held in the body. Most of the time, if not all of the time, the clients of Leanne Whitney have had attachment issues, or early childhood wounding within the family, that there was a parent who had not processed their own distress or trauma. There’s lots of intergenerational trauma going on. We are nature, we are of nature. We have to have the right ingredients in the soil, and we have to have the right atmosphere environment, metaphorically speaking. So personal work ends up becoming community work. Relationship is what we need. A lot of wounding comes through relationship, and so healing also comes back around through the process of relationship. That’s a beautiful wholing, so to speak. There’s about 35-40 percent of the population that’s walking around with insecure attachment within their family of origin, which means that there is lots of stress going on in their nervous system, or their nervous system is shut down in many ways. They shut down from relationship because of traumas or distress.
Leanne Whitney loves to teach yoga philosophy and yoga psychology. Patañjali is saying, “bring an end to your violence, to any of your lying to yourself or to other people, do not steal, always walk with this vertical connection, because consciousness is all there is.” So stay open to the source. Always walk in the awareness that consciousness is all there is. And don’t be greedy. If you try to own more than just you need to light up whatever is right in front of you, then you’re going to get yourself in trouble because now you’re bounding and grasping after it.
Wholeness is what we look for on the horizon. But through the lens of yoga, wholeness is the thing that we already are. What we want to look for is the thing that has broken us off from the wholeness. What is the thing that caused the split? What is the thing that caused distress, the irritation? And that makes also healing much more palpable and present. It’s already here. It’s more like clouds moving away from the sun, because the wholeness is already here. We just want to keep looking for the pieces that have broken us away from that holistic vision and that groundedness, the holistic experience of being one with the Earth and all her sentient beings, and all her people.
Psyche means soul. Psychology by and large should be treating soul ailments. The psychiatric industry pathologizes mental and emotional states that may very well be a reaction to an illness in culture. We have to spot where the breaks are in the culture and what is distressing people. - The Union Of Yoga And Carl Jung with Leanne Whitney, MindThatEgo (Sep 2, 2021). Pure consciousness sitting in its own nature, and consciousness moving with the contents, are in sync. The thing that’s happening in the body and in the front of our eyes is in sync with the thought forms. When we get in enough sync, we begin to understand suffering is a marker. It happens on a personal level. We can read about it in textbooks, but the experiential piece is really what carries the weight. The complexity here is trusting the wholeness, that my center really does hold this energy of tolerance, of compassion for self and for others. We could just say love, that love is our essence.
We want to move towards our fear, to see through the fear, to pull the threads of what created that fear in the first case, because fear keeps us from experiencing the centeredness, and the love, and the interdependence with all humanity and the world.
We want to pullback every projection we have out there because consciousness is all there is. A baby in its mother’s womb is inside water. It’s having this particular experience. And then it gets birthed into a completely new world which has to do with gravity and oxygen. So we leave one mother only to be inside the womb of another. When we get to the heart of mother nature, and we learn the language of human nature, these things are completely working in sync.
For Jung, consciousness relates to an ego, and Leanne Whitney feels that’s one of the fundamental errors, or points of concern, in Jungian oriented depth psychology. In the end, Jung’s idea of consciousness is very conceptual and very linguistic. Concept and verbal language aren’t the only ways of knowing. Non-conceptual and non-verbal are also very valid ways of knowing the world.
We never want to take ownership of consciousness because consciousness is all there is. We definitely need a functional organizing principle—being able to discern is critical—we just don’t take ownership of it.
Suffering doesn’t happen to us, it happens for us. It happens for us as individuals, and as a culture. And that’s why the clearer we see these things, war, or racism, or anything like that becomes so absurd. The key coloring of the mind is this idea that wisdom is also seeing. It has to do with pure consciousness, which is pure perception. So if something is not being perceived, or being inaccurately perceived, that’s where the misunderstanding is. Unraveling where those misunderstandings are is Patañjali’s version of shadow work. Where are the imprints and binds? We want insight into it. We want to see it. We want to unbind it. And we want to integrate it. Those imprints, those habit patterns, create silos of thought. All what we are hearing is what’s inside our imprints and our habits of thought.
Yoga ends up being a stronger psychology towards healing. Still the mind, unbind the concepts that you have, take a comfortable seat in the body, and let pure consciousness show itself. Put your thoughts in accord with the wholeness and the totality of what is, while taking a comfortable seat in the body. Get to the place of healing.
Value has become so abstract. We take the vitality out of life force and then make it something abstract.
Leanne Whitney is a strong believer in morning practices, to just be with oneself and have gratitude for one’s breath, and to create the sacred space and intend the day. To just really sit and visualize coherence of your own heart, and then a heart connection with other people. Simple practices like that can help us enormously. - Authentic Self w/ Dr. Leanne Whitney | E003, Rational Mystic (Jun 11, 2023). Science is a tool. The kind of results we’re going to get in a lab depends on how we show up as scientists and what questions we ask. As long as we pose the right questions, we can really use our science to keep aiming us towards what Leanne Whitney calls authentic power. It’s the power that’s coming from pure consciousness, ultimately, not through a cultural construct of me and you, and us and them. We are one human species, and we are sentient amidts a plethora of sentient beings on a very wise and informative Earth.
Pure consciousness sits in itself. There is no other. Pure consciousness is the base of everything that flourishes from it. Nothing can every be outside of reality. It’s still all folded within reality. But it can get strained, and that’s exactly where we are right now. There’s coherence, and evil, or the shadow side of things, really falls into what would be the incoherent category, which ends up being the noise. And the more we learn how to differentiate the signal from the noise, or the coherence from the incoherence, the more we are going to be living as human beings in a totally different way. Now, we’re in an incoherent loop. We think that we have primacy over nature, that we could build something artificial, when, in fact, it’s the apple, and the banana, and the pure water that makes our system run.
We have to keep our discernment—radical discernment. Yes, trust, but never give your power away—never! The Guru is within. Do not give your power away to a Master that’s outside. Receive the teachings, but stay aware.
Make sure you’re doing the work. Silence the mind and drop into the heart. Breathe. Slow down. Perceive out of the heart center, and reality can change. The heart center has to be opened, has to be in balance. The breath has to be flowing really well throughout the whole system. There’s no way to game the system. The vertical connection is everything in yoga. Our feet are planted on the earth and we’re rising up to pure consciousness. The horizontal axis is our culture, our family. Without the vertical connection we’re so topsy-turvy on the horizontal axis.
We definitely have a need of balancing both the left and the right hemispheres of the brain. All sorts of implicit knowings come up from the body up into the right hemisphere. Neuroception is happening in the body twenty-four seven. Our organs are talking to each other. So we truly want to be receptive to a vast amount of material that we have completely cut ourselves off from.
Find safe spaces, find safe people, find safe communities, because this is about relationship. We have to bond with each other, we have to trust each other, we have to build communities where we can be in our bodies and feel safe, and not feel like we’re constantly running from the fraud and the lies. Part of yoga, the deep philosophical basis, is ethics, it’s non-violence, it’s truth, it’s non-greed, non-stealing.
The first question for people to really ask themselves is, “Do I feel safe?“ Am I born into a family that allowed me to come into my body and feel safe? Did they usher me into the culture, in the collective, in a way to feel safe? And to the degree that the answer is yes: “How am I serving the world?“ What is my alignment into my authenticity and how I serve the world?
I started reading the following book:
- Stephen Porges and Set Porges, Our Polyvagal World: How Safety and Trauma Change Us. How safe we feel is crucial to our health. When we feel safe, our bodies prime us to heal faster, and to feel more alive. Trauma and pervasive stress make us more susceptible to illness. How we feel at any given moment changes how we respond to the world. Doubting our own experiences can lead to depression, self-medication, and suicide.
I added the following books to my reading list:
- Peter Francis Dziuban, Consciousness is All: The Magnificient Truth of What You Are.
- Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness.
- Ashley Bernardi, Authentic Power: Give Yourself Permission to Feel.
- Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics.
- Gary Zukav, Universal Human: Creating Authentic Power and the New Consciousness.