Category: Dr. Corvalan

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Behind the Curtain: Transcendent Consciousness

By: Dr. Jaime G. Corvalan, MD, FACS

I love the ancient Greek dramas and comedies! The works of Sophocles, Euripides and especially Aeschylus I hold very dear to my heart because they are timeless. The themes they dared explore then are as pertinent and crucial now: family, ethics, love, betrayal, duty, honor, dedication and sacrifice, among so many more. Ancient Greek theater and culture represented an incredible flowering of consciousness, the reverberations of which we still feel today.

The Divine Feminine by Anne Baring
The Divine Feminine by Anne Baring

The reason for my affinity, as well as for the continuing relevance of these cultural achievements, is that they represent a breakthrough of transcendent consciousness within our plane of existence. We often live our lives focused only on what’s right in front of us, our daily living; but in doing so, we miss the majesty and radiance of the consciousness that pervades all things yet transcends them as well. There is something behind the curtain of everyday existence, and every once in a while we are treated to a glimpse of that wondrous transcendence.

Transcendent energy consciousness, as it’s been called, is both immanent (pervades everything and nothing) and transcendent (beyond everything and nothing). It informs everything within the realm of time and space; it has been called, rightly so, I think, the “DNA driver of the soul.” It is what gives motive, what informs everything seen and unseen within our universe, all plants, birds, insects, animals, inorganic materials, stars, molecules, galaxies, and the like.

The wonderful author, Anne Baring, puts it so eloquently and poetically in her book The Divine Feminine when she says:

For those awakened to this vision, to be born a human being is not to be born into a fallen, flawed world of sin and illusion, cut off from the divine; it is to be born into a world lit by an invisible radiance, ensouled by Divine Presence, graced and sustained by incandescent light and love.”

The human mind is like a telescope, exploring the farthest reaches of consciousness. For this is our task, our very purpose for existing: to pull back the curtain of darkness and to bring as much awareness into the light as we possibly can. We are the vehicles by which the universe comes to know itself!

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The Meaning of Consciousness

Man’s task is . . . to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious . . . As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.”

Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, p. 326

– Dr. Jaime G. Corvalan, MD

The purpose of human existence is the creation of more and more consciousness. This is such a profound statement on the part of the great analyst, Dr. Carl Jung, and one with which I am in complete agreement. We are coming into a new age, one which is bringing together the twin elements of our being: our religious nature and our intellectual (scientific) nature. To quote the wonderful author and Jungian analyst, Edward F. Edinger, from The Creation of Consciousness – Jung’s Myth for Modern Man, p. 57:

If religion is Self-oriented, science is ego-oriented. Religion is based on Eros, science of Logos. The age now dawning will provide a synthesis for this thesis and antithesis. Religion sought linkage, science sought knowledge. The new world view will seek linked knowledge.

. . . A genuinely new goal and purpose for human existence is required. That new goal has been found and articulated by Jung. In his words, ‘Man is the mirror which God holds up before him, or the sense organ with which he apprehends his being.’  “

We are entering a new age of synthesis, a new era of individuation in which we will begin to see with the eyes of the soul. It is both a tremendously fraught and exciting time, and I look ahead with great anticipation as we work to evolve into the spiritual selves we have all been born to be!

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The Evolution of Consciousness from the Trinitarian to the Quaternarian

By Dr. Jaime G. Corvalan, MD

The chaos befalling the American Presidential election process, is, I think, reflective of the process of the evolution of consciousness we as a species are presently undergoing. We are well into a process that can best be described, in my view, through the application of Jungian Analysis and the study of our great mythologies.

The seminal work by Robert A. Johnson, "He: Understanding Masculine Psychology"
The seminal work by Robert A. Johnson, “He: Understanding Masculine Psychology”

The author and Jungian analyst, Robert A. Johnson, has done a superb job in describing this process in his seminal work, “He: Understanding Masculine Psychology.” I offer below an extended passage of his work that describes this evolution of consciousness particularly well:

We are apparently in an age where the consciousness of man is advancing from a trinitarian to a quaternarian view. This is one possible and profound way of appraising the extreme chaos of our world is now in. One hears many dreams of modern people, who know nothing consciously of this number symbolism, dreaming of three turning into four. This suggests we are going through an evolution of consciousness from the nice orderly all-masculine concept of reality, the trinitarian view of God, toward a quaternarian view that includes the feminine as well as other elements that are difficult to include if one insists on the old value.

It seems that it is the purpose of evolution now to replace an image of perfection with the concept of completeness or wholeness. Perfection suggests something all pure, with no blemishes, dark spots or questionable areas. Wholeness includes the darkness but combines it with the light elements into a totality more real and whole than any ideal. This is an awesome task, and the question before us is whether mankind is capable of this effort and growth. Ready or not, we are in that process.”

We are moving from the psychology of Hamlet – individuals hopeless divided and unsure – into the psychology of wholeness and unification. We must endeavor to see what we have unconsciously hidden or had repressed into our collective shadows and reintegrate that into our complete selves. Only then will we be able to emerge from the presently climate of dissension, violence and conflict that is the hallmark of humanity today.

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The Purpose of Human Life

All life is informed and shaped by Transcendent Energy Consciousness
All life is informed and shaped by Transcendent Energy Consciousness

– Dr. Jaime G. Corvalan, MD, FACS

Transcendent energy consciousness is what gives form and function to everything. This consciousness is in everything in our world of duality, because consciousness is what informs all things. For instance, a flower is the way it is because transcendent energy consciousness give it its form; everything, from bees and birds, to worms, bacteria, trees, rocks – everything we perceive around us is informed by consciousness. This happens in a non-dual way – that is, transcendent energy consciousness is beyond the world of time and space (which is what defines duality, or our reality). This consciousness is not dual, but it informs everything in duality.

All societies depend upon a central, living myth that gives its members a meaning for existence. Today, we face what Dr. Jung called a crisis of mythlessness. The traditional myths of Western society have value, they point to something beyond this world, but they are increasingly losing their capacity to provide us with a relevant meaning for our existence. Dr. Jung, like Krishnamurti, both indicated that religious myths are valuable not because they are literally true but because they have symbolic value (something that represents transcendent nature).

What we need is a universal, transcendent myth, one that is non-local and gives us purpose and meaning. Dr. Jung indicates that we are currently in about a 600 year process of developing a new myth, one in which humanity and the divine are co-creators of our existence. That is, humanity’s conscious knowing combined with the divine’s unconscious being is what structures reality. Both compliment and affect each other.

So, the purpose of human life is the structuring or unfolding of consciousness. Humanity is necessary for the completion and perfection of the creation of the divine, or transcendent energy consciousness. Every individual participates in the manifestation of consciousness, acting as a light in the dark of what otherwise would just be mere existence.

 

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Greek Conceptions of Time

The ancient Greeks had a much better understanding of time than we do today. They understood that time was too complex to describe in a single word, so they had two words for time: Chronos and Kairos.

Chronos marks the sequential passage of time, in single moments – 1, 2, 3 and so on. Chronos, in ancient Greek mythology, was a god who, with his consort, Ananke, gave birth to the universe of earth, sea and sky.

Kairos, on the other hand, comes from the ancient Greek word for the “Supreme Moment,” that point at which Chronos time seems to stop and where everything exists at once.

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Dream of the Cosmos

The Dream of the Cosmos is the story of a multi-layered quest to understand the causes of human suffering and to re-connect with a deeper reality than the one we inhabit in this physical dimension of experience. It answers the question “Who are we and why are we here, on this planet?” It is written for those who are looking for something beyond the superficial values of our culture, who may be disillusioned with religious and secular belief systems as currently presented and who question the political values which are deeply mired in the pursuit of power. It is written with two voices: one the voice of a personal quest and the other which explores the historical and psychological causes that have brought our present view of reality into being.

In it I seek to recover a very ancient image of the soul, one that has long been lost. The soul was once imagined as an all-embracing Web of Life—not so much something that belongs to us as something to which we belong, in whose life we participate. The world is crying out for the primary values that have always been associated with soul understood in this wider sense: wisdom, compassion, justice, relationship—values which I will define further as the book proceeds.

Over the course of many centuries, we have developed a formidable intellect, a formidable science, a formidable technology. But what of the soul—source of our deepest instincts and feelings? What of our visions, dreams and hopes as well as our unhealed wounds and the suffering generated by our cruelty and lack of compassion towards each other? What of our need for relationship with this unrecognized dimension of reality? The pressing need for the soul’s recognition has brought us to this time of choice. It is as if mortal danger is forcing us to take a great leap in our evolution that we might never have made were we not driven by the extremity of circumstance.

In one of the medieval Grail Legends, Parsifal asks the question of the wounded Grail Guardian, “What ails thee, Father?” It seems appropriate to ask this question of our culture. Our current worldview rests on the premise of our separation from and mastery of nature, where nature is treated as object with ourselves as controlling subject. This belief has its roots in a far distant past—in the Myth of the Fall in the Book of Genesis and its profound influence on the development of Western civilization. There we find the story of our expulsion from a divine world and our Fall into this world, a Fall that was brought into being by a woman, Eve, who disobeyed the command of God and brought death, sin and suffering into being. From this myth there developed the belief that the whole human race was tainted by original sin, a subject that will be explored in later chapters.

Author Anne Baring, from her magnificent work, The Dream of the Cosmos

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Space and Time are Dimensions of Consciousness

Matter is derived from mind or consciousness, and not mind or consciousness from matter.
– Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation

We think the world we see around us is composed of matter–that the stuff of the world is, for the want of a better word, matter stuff. As far as the actual physical reality is concerned, this may be so–uncertain though we may be as to the ultimate nature of this matter stuff. But the world we see around us is not the physical world. The world we actually know is the world that takes form in our mind. And this world is not made of matter stuff, but mind stuff. Everything we know, perceive, and imagine, every color, sound, sensation, thought, and feeling, is a form that consciousness has taken on. As far as this world is concerned, everything is structured in consciousness.

Kant argued that this was even true of space and time. To us, the reality of space and time seems undeniable. They appear to be fundamental dimensions of the physical world, entirely independent of my or your consciousness. This, said Kant, is because we cannot see the world in any other way. The human mind is so constituted that it is forced to construct its experience within the framework of space and time.

SPACE AND TIME ARE NOT, FUNDAMENTAL DIMENSIONS OF AN THE UNDERLYING REALITY.  THEY ARE FUNDAMENTAL DIMENSIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.