The Architecture of the Self

The Architecture of the Self

Chances are that when you were very young, you lived in the fullness of spirit most of the time...If you are an adult, chances are that nowadays these experiences are rare enough to be memorable. What happened to you? Somehow your heart was broken, or you became insecure, or your self-esteem was shattered, or you were smitten by fear or anger. These terrible events, whatever they were, wounded your spirit.

Eliot Cowan 

We are hybrid beings, made up of body, mind, and soul. Of these three, body and mind are limited to this lifetime. With the soul being functionally eternal, it is easy to deduce that the soul is in a body for a reason, a purpose. The soul has an agenda and is using the body and mind as a way to interface with the world to attend to its agenda.

When we are born, we are pure soul sealed into an adorable little body. Over the next twenty-one years or so, we are steeped in everything we need to function in the world and in our society. Like little computers, we download programs from our family, school, church or religious group, peers, and seemingly endless media sources. These programs act as our software and applications, all overlaid on top of the still, small voice of our soul. All that programming stands between the soul we really are and the world. By the time we are adults, we are fairly well convinced that we are our programming. We are sure that the mask we are wearing to interface with the world is the totality of who we truly are.

Shamanism has long understood that the mind – or the thinking machinery, as it can be called – is loaded into us in a very orderly and sequential way, but modern brain and behavioural research has given us the language to understand it more completely. The behavioural software, or the sequential, orderly way the mind is loaded, is like a mask slowly built over our true nature. One model of the human thinking machinery includes four distinct developmental stages. These stages correspond directly to brainwave frequencies in very nearly a one-to-one correlation.

Seeing in then Dark,

Colleen Deatsman and Paul Bowersox