The Meta-psyche

What is the psyche?

Our human mind is equipped with a psyche. That raises questions: is the human being unique in this? Do animals also have a psyche? So let us first take a look at the word itself: where does it come from and what does it mean?

Originally, psyche (ψυχή) comes from Greek and means ‘soul’ or ‘life principle’. In the time of Homer, psyche referred to that which leaves the body at death and had no psychological meaning. Later, in Plato and Aristotle, psyche was understood as the bearer of inner life and of perception, from which feelings, thoughts, attachments, and desires arise.

Greek also has nous (νοῦς), which denotes intellectual insight and the capacity to know. This does not refer only to reason or common sense, but to the ability to recognize truth immediately, comparable to what in Sanskrit is called buddhi. It is the intuitive understanding of which we are capable when our mind is clear and healthy.

Furthermore, there is pneuma (πνεῦμα, originally pronounced as pnefma), which means ‘spirit’, but in the sense of ‘breath of life’. For the Stoics, pneuma stood for the life energy that permeates everything. It is subtler, more spiritual, and more universal than the individual psyche; in Christianity it is therefore called the Holy Spirit. Literally, pneuma means ‘breath’ or ‘wind’. When we one day “give up the ghost,” it is our pnefma that returns to the causal universe; our life-breath in this life then ceases. Interestingly enough, for Homer this cessation was precisely the departure of the psyche.
You see, terminology is subject to change.

Modern psychology has greatly narrowed the concept of the psyche to the range of emotional and mental processes: a vulnerable, influenceable system of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that can be dysregulated by trauma, conditioning, or neurological factors. What remains is a cramped view of the grandeur of our psyche, as if it arose exclusively from brain functions. People observe the mind as though it were a television, trying to understand and classify forms, colors, and sounds, without knowing how they arise or what causes them.

The beautiful thing is that we as human beings also possess a meta-psyche, although this is rarely acknowledged. It transcends our colored, influenceable psyche. The meta-psyche is not a psychic function. Nor is it an inborn character trait. It is not a field of consciousness that can be disturbed, but our reflective capacity itself: the neutral Observer that contemplates our emotional and mental stage without being one of its players. It is not a new layer within the psyche, nor the intuitive capacity to know (nous), nor the spiritual life principle (pneuma). The meta-psyche is That which can observe these functions without interfering with them: a reflective, neutral consciousness that sees all thinking, feeling, willing, and functioning arise and disappear. Whereas psyche in our time stands for our inner life and its colored perceptions, and nous for our intellectual capacity for insight, the meta-psyche is the condition for reflection in the Now: the silent ‘eye’ from which everything is seen and that cannot see itself. It is not content, not a property, not a process, but our capacity for self-observation and for observing everything ‘that is’ around us, without more.

In waking sleep

As I wrote in Fish out of water, we human beings are like fish living in the ‘psychic water’ of moods, tendencies, thoughts, and feelings, without being aware that we are in that ‘water’ at all. Our inner life, with all its shifting states of mind, feels normal and self-evident. We do not experience it, with all its mood swings, as something that permanently surrounds us and drives us in many directions. Thus many shifting moods come over us, which we mainly notice when we experience them as negative. We are also convinced that we have no choice in this. But is there more than all that ‘wetness’? ‘Above water’ there exists another realm of life, in which the movements of our changing emotional-mental states can be observed purely and in silence.

In the Fourth Way of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, being in the psychic ‘underwater’ state is called ‘waking sleep’. This is not dream sleep such as we may sometimes remember from the night, but a state in which we are active in the world without being conscious of our own consciousness. We think we are awake, but without noticing it we react to triggers from outside: we follow automatic patterns, habits, and identifications instead of being self-reflectively present in what we do and in what is happening around us. So we lack self-reflection in the Now and are only very rarely in a feeling, observing awareness of ourselves in the situation in which we find ourselves.

On Zelfkennis Nu, our human ‘story’ is described as the sum or composition of our experiences, memories, and interpretations of the world since our birth. This creates a psychological identity in which we deeply believe and against which we measure ourselves. This narrative ego-identity is not reality, and certainly not a fixed one. It is a mental illusion made up of experiences, feelings, interpretations, and expectations. It binds our many little ‘I’s together into what we think we are, into a kind of ‘life script’ in which we believe. But it is completely illusory and therefore not true. This ‘story’ we have made of our life strengthens our psyche and feeds the suffering and other undesired consequences that may arise from it. As soon as we are in the Now—observing from the meta-psyche—there is no illusory self, no past or future, but only the situation as it is. In that state there is relatively much peace and clarity, and we realize (with our nous) that our automatic reaction to that reality often contains no truth.

Symptom catalogue

In recent decades, psychology and psychiatry have declined into a diagnostic, protocol-driven system that subdivides emotional-mental states into categories of disorders, recorded in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). This handbook lists countless varieties of mental states. It contains moods and behaviors that deviate from a norm, that are functionally ineffective or unhealthy, and all kinds of forms of depression arising from mental inability, fear, dissatisfaction, or anger. With these hundreds of described disorders, ‘professionals’ try to get a grip on the inner life of their clients. But this entire approach crucially misses the essence of our human Consciousness, the meta-psyche.

This prevents people who are struggling in life from accessing the possibility of healing and transformation of their psyche. The list of human suffering is made ever more complex, and people try to cast it into manageable categories. Things are measured, labeled, and preferably also ‘treated’. In the process, forms of high sensitivity and mental capacities in people who fall outside the norm are overlooked and not understood at all. People have no idea who—or rather What—can observe all these psychic disorders. They miss the Observer itself, that Silent Witness that can see all inner experiences arise and disappear again in complete neutrality. They miss our meta-psyche.

Instead of psychic dysregulation being immediately treated, we should see it as something that can be observed by us, namely in a conscious silent presence without intervening in it with thoughts and feelings. In an overactive emotional-mental psyche, feelings drive thoughts, and those thoughts in turn further drive the feelings—a self-reinforcing and highly undesirable dynamic. Emotions may indeed be released, and the body too may react from that observation (trembling, tears, grief, etc.), but intervening in this is undesirable. We can simply ‘let it be’. To learn to observe in silence in this way, coaching and practice are naturally necessary, especially when people have become stuck in a pit of misunderstood suffering.

Because our mechanically oriented psyche is being catalogued and labeled in ever greater complexity, there is no place at all for the Observer itself: that silent, neutral, conscious presence within us that clearly beholds what is happening, without reacting to it as if there were a problem: our meta-psyche, the only non-dual point in our human mind.

What many therapies fail to recognize is that psychic problems arise precisely because of the unobserved psyche. Without activating our meta-psyche, the mind remains trapped in automatic reactive patterns such as fears and counterproductive (even destructive) habitual patterns. Merely reacting mechanically to life and events thus continues. Without silent attention, all states of mind and mood swings keep ‘happening to us’ again and again instead of being seen as they arise and come up. Medication, by dampening the intensity of moods, can take us even further away from the consciousness that detects these colored moods as temporary phenomena that appear and then disappear again. It can even block the transformation of our individual consciousness (the core of human growth). Old wounds are kept open by therapeutic ‘scratching’. Medication may relieve acute distress (perhaps to prevent self-destruction), but it never changes the mechanical nature of the mind that ‘sleeps’. You do not wake up from chemical medication! On the contrary, it prevents the activation of our meta-psyche and does not bring us closer to awakened self-awareness.

The mechanical functioning of our psyche is partly sustained by our culture of external solutions. All problems are supposed to be solved from outside, while they must be resolved within us. Our ego-‘story’ is also constantly fed from outside, by ourselves and by others: ideas about who we are, what would supposedly be wrong with us, and what needs to be repaired. Many collective trends and identifications fuel this, and on the internet they are ‘boosted’ by influencers, coaches, and all kinds of so-called experts. What is always missing is the invitation to turn inward and ask: Who or What is it that perceives these experiences? That is why, when faced with psychological discomfort (but also physical ailments), people ask the doctor, ‘What do I have?’, whereas they should ask, ‘What is lacking in me?’ or rather, ‘What do I not have?’ It is clear what they do not have: an activated meta-psyche that makes us realize: ‘I cannot be what I perceive, for I am That which perceives.’

Integrity as a guideline

The article on integrity on Zelfkennis.nu describes remaining faithful to what you have truly come to Know: thinking what you Know, saying what you think, doing what you say, and knowing what you do, as a line of integral consciousness. This is not a psychological model, but an inner state of connectedness with the Observer, the meta-psyche, which enables you to recognize, stop, and leave behind automatic reactions for good. Integrity means that we have integrated our mental faculties and are no longer distracted by conditioned assumptions or emotional reactions. It means that we are self-reflectively in the Now and take responsibility for what we perceive. In psychiatry, mental ‘undesirabilities’ are seen as objects that must be cured, rather than as phenomena that can be observed and no longer need to be followed.

True transformation—the possible evolution of the human being—does not ask for the reduction of suffering, but for consciousness training to sustain silent observation, even when it is difficult, even when life ‘tests’ us. This means learning to remain quietly present with moods without being pulled into them; recognizing that most streams of thoughts and feelings are not truths; learning no longer to identify with our psychic ‘story’ and thus stepping out of automatic waking sleep. Then we live from our meta-psyche: fully self-reflective and attentive in the Now. Only through this inner discipline—what one may call self-remembering—directed toward the finding of truth can we transcend our automatic, mechanical state.

An inner anchor

A lasting power arises through this widening of inner perception, in which we no longer react to stimuli in a reactive way, but consciously observe our own reactions, thoughts, and feelings. In our world full of uncertainty, unrest, and social disruption (tensions in relationships and the impact of societal crises), many people become dysregulated because they lack the inner steadiness to remain anchored within themselves. Head and heart are usually unconscious and not attuned to one another: the heart reacts quickly and emotionally (it knows only yes or no), while the head is much slower and explanatory, and easily gets lost in a grinding stream of thoughts that further unsettles the heart. But with a pure cooperation between head and heart, inner balance arises. By consciously observing what is going on in our head and heart, these two can work together in a pure, harmonious unity, which forms an inner anchor. Head and Heart become a mutually strengthening team!

This inner anchor is not a psychological coping strategy, but a steadfast presence that will be far less disturbed by external circumstances. It is a gentle, fundamental strength with which we freely observe what happens within and around us, through which we see through unrest and reactive patterns and experience an inner unity that ‘carries’ us in uncertainty or adversity. In short: our inner anchor is the basis for true freedom and stability, rooted in conscious perception through our meta-psyche.

“To move freely, you need technique,” Johan Cruijff said. Usually, theoretical knowledge alone, however ‘spiritually’ phrased, is not enough to preserve your quiet inner anchor and freedom, especially when life tests you and you end up in unpleasant situations. Then you notice that you lack the technical experience needed to ‘move freely’—and to keep doing so. So you will have to work on your ‘technique.’ For this, there are many short daily exercises that help you with this, provided they are applied as often as possible, alongside practices such as meditation and mindfulness.
The words of Jiddu Krishnamurti, “The hope for humanity is the transformation of the individual,” should permanently be our guiding principle in this.

© Michiel Koperdraat