The Overwhelming Thunder of Eternal Silence
Yiwu, Zhejiang Province, China, August 11, 2013
Salaroche

Erik Erickson’s proposed process of individuation has considerable acceptance in the field of psychology. It has its detractors as well, but it may at least be a good point of departure for the study of the development of the personality or ego.

Before a child’s process of individuation starts, however, there is only a single mass of awareness in its consciousness. Up to that moment there is no separateness in the child’s awareness between mother and self or between the world and the self. Until then, the child’s sense of being has no limits, no demarcations, no delineations.

At one point in its very early development, the child gradually begins to differentiate mother and self and gradually begins to feel its separateness from the rest of the world. From that moment on, the child will start to generate an identity for itself through attachment to the different objects and persons outside itself and will start to recognize all those attachments as characteristics somehow attributable to his or her own body.

But before such process begins, the only thing that pervades the child’s awareness is pure unalloyed consciousness of the kind that most human beings will very rarely experience ever again in the course of their lives. Such type of consciousness can be best defined using the term “Oceanic Feeling”, which was coined by Romain Rolland, Nobel Prize of Literature, 1915, and was later used briefly by Sigmund Freud in a couple of his books.

In some of the correspondence between them, Rolland explained that such feeling is the source of all possible religious sentiments, asserting that there’s no specific religious allegiance needed to experience such feeling, meaning that the Oceanic Feeling precedes any religious beliefs or doctrines.

Freud didn’t develop much on that concept stating that, because of his own personal inability to experience that oceanic feeling, he was unable to corroborate it. Yet he acknowledged that, given that it is a highly subjective feeling, other people could well be capable of experiencing it.

In my view, the oceanic feeling permeating every child’s consciousness before the process of individuation starts is the same as the god consciousness that some Yogis and Buddhists acquire when attaining Realization of the Self or the Buddha Consciousness. The difference between the child’s oceanic feeling and the adult’s attainment of the god consciousness resides in the developmental state of their cognitive organ or brain.

The pre-individuated child’s organ of cognition is literally in an embryonic state, whereas that of the intellectually evolved adult is fully developed. The child’s mind is incapable of gaining awareness of its own states of consciousness, while the evolved adult’s mind is perfectly capable of gaining full awareness of its own states of being.

In acquiring a series of identities through the variety of attachments that we all gradually go clinging to during the developmental process of our egos, our minds basically go wrapping layers of veils around that pure and unalloyed initial consciousness that we’re all born with, thereby eventually blinding us to our own true identity.

Fortunately, there are a few transcendental disciplines that may help us reverse the process of individuation, thereby allowing us to unmask our true identity. The quest prescribed in Jnana Yoga, for example, explicitly implies going full circle back to that state of being where there were no superimpositions over our god consciousness or Oceanic Feeling, except that, as adults, we can attain such state of being while in full command of our cognitive capabilities.

In reversing our process of individuation we are getting rid of all of our attachments and identities, which are the essential pillars of our ego, thus heading back towards that very same god consciousness that we were all born with and that we all carry dormant behind the veils of identities and attachments that form our ego.

But the ego is not necessarily the evil villain that my words may lead some people to believe it is. The ego is an essential tool for our survival whose use often takes a whole lifetime to master, even if there is no guarantee that we will ever get to know and control its mechanism in ways that are conducive for an optimal earthly existence. The ego is the same as the mind, as without the mind there are no identities and attachments, and without identities and attachments there is no ego.

The highest function of the mind resides in its thinking abilities and the highest function of the intellect resides in its ability to realize that all its mechanisms are nothing but an obstacle in its quest for unveiling our true identity. The ego, therefore, is an indispensable instrument for deactivating the ego, as to attain full awareness of our true identity we need to engage in a reversed process of individuation, which entails getting rid of all those identities and attachments we have all accumulated since infancy which in turn constitute the essential pillars of our ego.

In other words, the highest function of the ego resides in its ability to realize that it needs to step aside in order to realize the highest purpose of its being, which is to allow our minds to attain full direct knowledge of the god consciousness which is our real nature.

And in attaining direct knowledge of the god consciousness we become fully aware of the overwhelming thunder of that eternal silence which is the Creative Universal Energy residing in each and everyone of us and in every other being or thing that exists, has existed, and will ever exist anywhere in the Universe.

Salaroche