E.F. Schumacher wrote about four kinds of knowledge: our knowledge of external reality, for which science is the appropriate method; our knowledge of the internal content of our own minds, gained by introspection; our intuitive understanding of how other persons understand the world, a kind of knowledge obtained through empathy; and our intuitive understanding of how other persons interact with us – a “Thou” relationship generated and underscored by love.

So here are these vast two landscapes extending before our wondering gaze – the outer world and the inner world. To this is added the third landscape – the land of Thou – but we shall not discuss that any further here. Both our outer and inner worlds are partly known to us at the close-in margins, like Newton’s metaphor of science picking up a few pebbles on the beach, with the vast ocean of unknowing extending beyond. Most of both the outer and the inner expanse is still unknown and perhaps partly unknowable. Both worlds fade into a haze of uncertainty in the distance.

We make maps of the external world: real geographic maps and architectural plans, but also the theories and diagrams of various sciences, the geometric (Euclidian and topographic) patterns of mathematical structures, flowsheets of chemical or biochemical processes, tree-like classification schemes, cycles in ecology, etc. Can we similarly make maps of the mental landscape?

We can, and many have tried, as will be illustrated below: the schemes of Freud, Jung, Aristotle, Jantsch, and Hindu scriptures, for example. But these schemes are more like Schumacher’s first kind of knowledge, constructed by scientific observation, not by introspection, which gives us only a private, subjective kind of view of only one mind – our own. For generalizations, we need at least inter-subjective, if not objective, knowledge.

There is a viewpoint which considers the mind more as a process than as a static landscape, in which case a flowsheet would be a more appropriate map than a classification, which most of the above are. But perhaps the biggest obstacle to the construction of a mental map (a map OF the mind, not a map BY the mind, which of course all maps are) is the existence of too many gaps in our knowledge, the question marks and three dots scattered all through it. The map would be like the Europeans’ first map of the New World before it was completely explored, with sea monsters illustrating the margins.

The terms we use have also not been very well sorted out. Sometimes by “mind” we mean “consciousness”, the only region that we can explore by simple direct introspection; but then there is also the “unconscious mind”, which implies that “mind” is something bigger than consciousness.

The usual picture is that consciousness is like the spotlight in the middle of a darkened stage; we can see what is going on under the spotlight, but many events are also happening in the wings, at the dark edges and corners, quite unseen; and then there is the shadowy half-lit area in between, which corresponds to the subconscious, where we might discover some moving shapes if we look away a bit from the bright central light which usually blinds us to the shadow happenings. The spotlight is like the macula of the eye, but we also have peripheral vision to some extent.

We might elaborate on this “map” by thinking of a darkened room rather than a darkened stage, but still with that spotlight in the centre, and by further postulating that the dark room has doors and windows in its very dark walls which connect it to other rooms and secret passageways.

Through Door A, the unconscious might connect to the deeper layers of Jantsch’s “neural mind” (the mammalian and reptilian brain), and beyond that to the hormonal, epigenetic, genetic, and metabolic minds, i.e. to the body, with its physiological processes which we normally do not control or know about, but perhaps could, as advanced mystics do. I am referring to being able to control one’s pulse rate and blood pressure, for instance. We can perhaps all learn this through the method of bio-feedback, i.e. observing on a machine what happens when we “think at” parts of the body in a certain way. This is, after all, the method by which a baby first learns to control its voluntary muscles. The reason for calling the hormonal, epigenetic, genetic, and metabolic processes “minds” is that they are complex information-processing systems, like the brain, whose higher cortex centres are usually seen as the seat of the conscious mind. They are material processes when seen from the outside, but mental processes when seen from the inside.

Through Door B in the wall of the darkened room that we have imagined, we might enter the higher realms of the soul and the spirit. (I am not sure of the distinction between “soul” and “spirit”, but some see them as different.) Some light is presumably thrown on that door by meditation, which might then penetrate to the other room beyond that door. Advanced mystics claim to discover God in that room; the Quakers call it “the Inner Light” or “that of God in every person”; the Hindus maintain that Atman (the Self) is Brahman (God); Jung speaks of the discovery of the Self (as opposed to the narrow Ego) as “individuation”; Buddhists talk about “Enlightenment”, which suggests that this distant dark room is suddenly flooded with light.

I suspect that they are all describing the same experience in different words. Perhaps there is more than one step that leads to this room; perhaps there is an ascending staircase to a higher level. (And a corresponding descending staircase to the lower level at Door A.) The Major Arcana of the Tarot cards (an ancient depository of arcane philosophy) suggests that these ascending steps might be: Re-evaluation or Conversion (Hanged Man), Transfiguration (Death), Communion of matter and spirit (Temperance), Temptations overcome (Devil and Tower), Enlightenment (Star), Initiation (Moon), Liberation (Sun), Awakening (Judgment), and Nirvana (World). The words in brackets are the names of the cards. The interpretations (not explained here) follow from a study of books describing the Tarot cards and contemplation of the symbols which the cards display and their associations. The interpretations given here concern cards XII to XXI of the Major Arcana, i.e. the last half; cards I to X can be considered as mental development from childhood to mental maturity, with card XI as a transition, and cards XII to XXI as higher spiritual development – beyond Erikson’s “integrity” stage and Maslow’s (1970) “self-actualization”.

Door C may link one’s total mind (the dark room with the spotlight of consciousness in the middle) with other human minds; first to perceiving the “Thou” of persons close to us with whom we are interacting with some intensity and intimacy, (family members, lovers, friends), then with other human minds known through books and other communication media, and finally with all human minds throughout the world, present and past, throughout the existence of our species. This door leads, through horizontal but multi-branching passages, to a common dark space which Jung called “the Collective Unconscious”. It is inhabited by the Archetypes of Good and Evil, larger-than-life figures of heroes, angels, devils, dwarfs, giants, fairies, witches, nymphs, sirens, and monsters – all creatures we know from myths, legends, fables and fairy tales, as well as dreams. They represent an accumulation of human experience different in quality from a library or an encyclopedia, in that they include the emotional as well as the cognitive content of that experience; and because of that added richness and complexity, they evoke a sense of awe, a sense of the numinous or sacred.

Well, then, we have the beginnings of a tentative map of the mental realm, even though it is only a metaphor. Let us now try to fit some other theories into it.

Freud’s tripartite division into id, ego and superego might fit in the following way: Id would be linked to all the physiological mechanisms behind Door A, and also the reptilian brain, but perhaps mainly to the mammalian brain, the seat of the emotions. Id would be an area close to that door, but in the half-shadow that can sometimes interact with the floodlight of consciousness. Ego might correspond to the spotlight of consciousness itself. Superego does not correspond to the spiritual realm beyond Door B, because Freud’s meaning for it was the “conscience” that arises from parental and other social pressures for moral conformity, and so perhaps it is linked more to the area near Door C to the Collective Unconscious of social responsibility.

Then there is the classical division of the mind into Emotion, Reason, and Will. Approximately, Emotion corresponds to Id and the mammalian brain, while reason and will are different functions of the cortical or conscious mind. We speak of “voluntary” (i.e. will-controlled) muscles as the ones under “conscious control”. The Will seems to be “free” (at least in introspection), but within a strictly circumscribed fairly small range of options, hemmed in by physical, genetic, environmental and social constraints. Reason should not be apotheosized as the Ruling Principle of the Universe (Logos). It is only a function or facility of ordering experience according to certain rules, originally to help us survive better even in hostile environments, but now usually used as a helper to our sense of curiosity in wanting to find out how the world operates, and in making the practical decisions of daily life. And Reason has its paradoxes and can lead us astray, as illustrated by the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons.

Psychology divides up the mind quite differently, by function: sense perception, memory, speech, locomotion, etc. Each is related to a different area of the brain, and psychology tries to trace the neurological connections. In another branch of that science, the social connections are also explored. There is no immediately obvious way to fit this into the map that we have begun to assemble.

A totally different way again is the enumeration of various “states of consciousness”: wakefulness, ordinary sleep, REM sleep (dreams), the meditative state, the hypnotic state, multiple personality, perhaps “possession” if we believe in it (possession by a devil, another human living or dead, or by God in religious ecstasy). There are also states of lapse of consciousness: epilepsy, the “lost time” of multiple personality, fainting, anasthaesia, coma and death.

These states also do not fit well with our tentative map, except that in cases of multiple personality, the different persons that live in the same body are often pictured as stepping forward into the spotlight of consciousness from the darker portions of the room. This is called “coming out”, and the patient or the therapist can often call them by name to come out. In fact, our metaphor of the dark stage with the central spotlight comes originally from the literature on multiple personality.

We need a different “map” for understanding the different states of consciousness and of multiple personality. This can be derived from the mathematical theory of Chaos, as expounded for example by Stuart Kauffman (1991). According to that theory, complex non-linear systems are in a state of Chaos if their successions of states are very sensitive to the initial or previous conditions (the Butterfly Effect), so that even initially very similar systems may diverge radically even after a few iterations. However, successive iterations may eventually bring the system to a state in which it was before, and after that the succession of states will repeat for ever. We say that the system has reached one of its “attractors”, which are then stable to minor perturbations, i.e. no longer sensitive to every flap of a butterfly wing. The system is then in a stable deterministic state, no longer in Chaos, even if the number of states traversed in each cycle is very large and may appear chaotic unless examined as a whole. A system may have several or even many attractors; which one it falls into depends on its initial position. If the attractors are pictured as deep valleys with streams running through them, the “basins of attraction” from which the system goes to that particular attractor are like the natural basins between watersheds. To get from one basin of attraction to another, a system has to cross a “mountain chain” or barrier, which it can do if a major perturbation pushes it over the barrier. (This is like chemical reaction kinetics, where the reactants have to cross an energy activation barrier in order to yield the reaction products in the next energy valley.)

The different states of consciousness might be likened to the different attractors into which the semi-chaotic complex system of neural networks can fall, i.e. settle down after many iterations. The various “persons” in a multiple-personality patient can also be seen as such alternative attractors. In most people, the early ego-formation in childhood is by far the main attractor, but it too is formed by many iterations or experimental gropings of the fresh blank mind (“tabula rasa”) of a newborn infant. (Or the gropings may first begin in utero before birth.) So the single ego of a normal person, and the multiple egos of a split personality, can be regarded as different crystallizations (like the allotropes of an element) from the same Chaos, to different attractor valleys.

Most ordinary people never experience the more exotic states of consciousness; they know only wakefulness and the two kinds of sleep: ordinary sleep (with 3 or 4 levels of depth) and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, in which dreams occur while muscles are “paralyzed”, i.e. disconnected from the brain. These 3 states (awake, sleeping, and dreaming) are characterized by 4 distinct EEG (electro-encephalograph) patterns of brain waves: alpha waves for awake subjects with their eyes closed (visual scan, or search for visual information), no waves or a mixture of waves for awake subjects with their eyes open (showing how dominant is the sense of sight in humans over the other senses, where presence or absence of incoming sense signals does not affect the brain waves; how would the dominance of the sense of smell in dogs show up in their EEG?), delta waves in ordinary deep sleep, and spikes superimposed on an irregular wave pattern (almost as if awake) in dreams. In epilepsy the EEG shows wild spikes and signs of an “electrical storm” (overstimulation) in the brain, with wave amplitudes so high that they interrupt neuronal communication (the way that an electromagnetic pulse or EMP would disrupt electronic communication); consciousness vanishes while erratic muscle convulsions occur. When the storm is finally over, the patient goes into a deep sleep from which he or she cannot be awakened for some time – probably a state of total nervous-system exhaustion.

While deep sleep is like a dim-light, wakefulness is like a bright ordinary light (the spotlight of consciousness in our previous scheme), and dreaming is intermediate in brightness, we can think of meditation as producing a coherent beam of light like a laser, much more powerful and concentrated because the mind is kept from wandering and “bucking like a wild horse”; instead, it is kept focused on a single thought, like a mantra, or no thought at all (empty mind).

Another metaphor is that in meditation the mind is like a limpid pool of water without ripples, so that one can see clear down to the bottom without distortion or interference. What that means in terms of brain waves is very regular alpha waves, as in wakefulness with eyes closed, even when the eyes are open. Ordinary wakefulness would then be a pool with ripples on its surface, which limits the visibility in attempts at introspection.

To recapitualte our progress so far in drawing a map of the mental realm. We have the picture of the darkened room with the spotlight in the middle and 3 doors leading to other rooms; we have the different states of consciousness which are various attractors in Chaos; and we have degrees of brightness and coherence of light and the pool with or without ripples. But we are not yet finished with our map building.

The concept of “mind as process” was mentioned in the beginning, and “process” reminds us of “development”. We know something at least about bodily development, in the embryo and fetus, maturation from childhood through adolescence to adulthood, aging, and death. Regarding mental development, five types could be mentioned: cognitive, emotional, psycho-sexual, moral, and attitudinal-ideological. We shall describe them briefly.

Cognitive development was outlined in the essay “The Unfinished Road to Truth”. Briefly the child goes through the Piaget stages, on to commonsense physics. The adult may then go on to Newtonian physics, Einsteinian relativity, quantum theory, thermodynamics and various theories of complexity.

Emotional development was explored by Erikson, who outlined its stages as follows: basic trust (in infancy), autonomy, initiative (two early stages of ego development, i.e. establishing the child’s separateness from the parent), industry (completion of ego-development at the mid-childhood development plateau), identity (the crisis of puberty), intimacy (the search for a life partner and mate), generativity (fulfilment in career and parenthood), and integration (coming to terms with life, aging and death, and searching for spiritual truths – the Hindu stage of the Holy Man). It is an intuitively appealing description of the human life cycle. For an artistic expression of this sequence, see the Vigeland statues in Oslo.

Psycho-sexual development was described by Freud as three stages of Id satisfaction: (1) The oral phase; infant suckling at the breast, not only feeding, but deriving sensual pleasure from the physical contact with mother; if not satisfied sufficiently before weaning, the oral impulse may persist as thumb-sucking or pipe-smoking. (2) The anal phase; in toilet training, the toddler, now in the Erikson stage of “autonomy”, tries to assert independence of mother by resisting the training and retaining the stool when it should be passed; if not properly worked through, an anal personality may become unduly eager to accumulate property and power – to “hang on to his shit”. (3) the genital phase; during puberty, the pleasure centres move to the external genitalia and become part of the natural incentive to sexual intercourse. Forcible genital stimulation (rape or incest) of a pre-puberty child may be very damaging psychologically, causing later inability to respond properly to normal adult sexual contact.

Moral development (or rather the development of moral judgment) was described in 6 levels by L. Kohlberg (1973). (1) Avoid punishment – escape pain. (2) Seek rewards, i.e. pleasure (Stage 1 and 2 together could be considered a restatement of Freud’s pleasure principle, as well as the basis of J.S. Mill’s utilitarianism.) (3) Be a “good child” or a “good citizen” if still at that stage in adulthood. This means to obey and conform to social demands, norms and pressures, somewhat in line wih Freud’s super-ego. But conformity and obedience might also mean obeying the orders of a tyrant in the political order. Milgram experiments show that about half the people are willing to give painful electric shocks to another person on the experimenter’s orders. (4) Obey the laws of your community and preserve its social order; a continuation of the previous stage, but now willing to defy orders which are considered illegal or unconstitutional. (But without regard to intrinsic morality, only legality.) (5) Fulfill your social contract, explicit or implicit; a more principled approach to social obligation and responsibility; fulfill your social role, whether ascribed or acquired, as parent, spouse, child, sibling, teacher, ruler, pupil, subject. This comes close to Confucian ethics. (6) Universal conscience: deriving general ethical principles and trying to live by them; e.g. “love your neighbour” or “never deliberately harm a human being”.

Kohlberg’s scheme was criticized by Carol Gilligan as applying only to men (all of Kohlberg’s experimental subjects were male), while women (whom Gilligan studied) follow a different developmental scheme, relying at first more on preserving relationships and less centred on one’s own pleasures and rights, and only later discovering their own rights. When examined by Kohlberg’s method, many women seem to be at stage 3; Gilligan interprets this as meaning that women start out as members of families or communities, and only at later stages begin to assert their individual rights – almost the opposite sequence to that followed by men. Neither is inherently better or worse; Gilligan’s book is entitled “In a Different Voice”. Presumably, both can end up at a high stage of observing both their own rights and the rights of others, approaching that stage from opposite starting positions.

Finally, attitudinal and ideological development, as outlined e.g. by W. Eckhardt, can follow either one of two alternative paths – toward compassion or toward compulsion. A compassionate personality, generally produced by loving and permissive child-upbringing, tends to be democratic, peace-loving, international-minded, radical in politics (which may mean different things in different societies: e.g. socialist in the West and free-enterprise in Eastern Europe and the USSR): liberal or agnostic in religion, open-minded, flexible, tolerant of ambiguity, willing to be non-conformist, and altruistic. A compulsive personality, usually brought up in punitive, rejecting, or inconsistent ways, tends to be autocratic or authoritarian, militaristic, nationalistic, conservative in politics (wanting to keep whatever system is in place in their society), conventional or fundamentalist in religion, rigid and dogmatic in thinking style, conformist, and egoistic. The difference between compassion and compulsion goes back to a different view of human nature: the former regards it as basically good, or at least perfectible and amenable to reason and persuasion; the latter thinks of it as basically evil or corrupted by original sin, and needing external control, by punitive laws, police, army, stern discipline by teachers or parents (corporal punishment), and fear of a vengeful God. These different views of human nature are linked to child-upbringing in the following way; if the child gets the idea that he or she is “bad” (low self-esteem), the child develops the idea that other people must also be “bad” and must be brought under control; but if the child grows up regarding him or herself as basically “good” (“you are a child of the universe, you have a right to be here”), the child develops high self-esteem, and acquires the ability to regard other people as also basically “good”, citizens of the same universe, needing love rather than fear from their God and their society.

What remains to be discussed is various theories of the relationship of the mind to the body, or to matter in general. This is a topic of long-standing and central interest in all philosophy.

There are the dualistic theories, which maintain that mind and matter are separate essences. Among them are the following: (1) Descartes’ assertion that mind and matter are not only separate, but do not even interact. Mind and body (mind and brain) are synchronized by God to run in parallel without touching. (2) Mind and matter are two separate essences coextensive in time and space, i.e. both have always existed since the beginning of the universe and both exist everywhere in the universe. Mind resides in non-living matter as well as living matter, though perhaps to different degrees. (3) Mind came into existence as an emergent property only in living matter. (4) Mind came into existence as an emergent property only when a nervous system developed; thus it exists only in animals, not in plants, fungi, protozoa and bacteria. (5) Mind emerges only when the nervous system exceeds a certain critical limit of complexity, which may occur in some animals including humans. If this is so, there is a possibility that complex “artificial intelligence” computers might become conscious at some future time. Already the Turing test designed to distinguish the responses by machines and by humans is quite ambiguous. (6) Mind exists only in humans, not in any other animals or any machines. Other animals are automata without consciousness, though they seem to feel pain, but that is an illusion. The Catholic Church doctrine asserts this about soul, which is immortal, and which only humans possess, no other creatures.

Then there are the monistic theories, which state that only one essence exists: (7) Materialism states that matter is all there is; mind is only an epiphenomenon of brain function. Free will is an illusion: the mind is only a helpless observer of deterministic bodily events. (8) Idealism holds that mind is all there is; matter is only an illusion, a construction of the mind. Hinduism calls the material world “maya”. (9) A monistic theory that gives equal status to mind and matter is one which believes that they are like the opposite sides of the same coin, or two views of the same common essence. This common essence appears as matter when viewed from the outside and as mind when viewed from the inside. (Cf. Schumacher’s first two kinds of knowledge, the one gained by science and the other by introspection, mentioned at the beginning of this essay.) This theory is similar to the complementarity between the particle and wave aspects of an electron in physics; now we see one aspect and now the other, but never both at the same time. It is also reminiscent of the yin and yang symbol of Chinese philosophy, both in their common circle representing the world; or of the union of the male principle and the female principle which is so creative; or the dialectical interplay of thesis and antithesis to produce a synthesis.

The final possibility is that there are more than two essences. One example (10) of such a theory is contained in my essay The Three Essences, which names them as matter, energy, and information (or negentropy), and relates information to mind. Actually, as is already apparent in the essay, a fourth essence to follow “information” should be “meaning”, and then mind would become the “quintessence” of all being.

Which of these theories do I believe? None of them dogmatically, of course; but on balance and as a hypothesis, I would choose a combination of (2) and (6); they are compatible if we assume that mind has degrees of brightness. I would also accept aspects of (9) and (10), which are compatible because the five essences interact strongly and can almost be regarded as one. (I even mention the conversion factors in my previous essay.) I also consider the (2) (6) combination to be compatible with the (9) (10) combination. To summarize my position, I believe that mind and matter have coexisted everywhere since the beginning of the universe; that mind became more and more intense (“brighter”) as the nervous system developed, and then became more and more complex; that mind and matter are actually not separate, but the external and internal aspects of the same common essence; and that mind is related to, and interacts with, matter energy, information, and meaning.