These piece talks about the four basic faculties of mind and the consequences of their uneven development.
Four things are going on in all of us all of the time.
You've heard of them, but perhaps not heard much about them.
Those four things are
- PAYING ATTENTION
- EXERCISING INTENTION
- REMEMBERING
- IMAGINING
These four things combine in every moment to give us our experience of life, even of physical reality.
However, they don't often develop evenly -- and when they don't develop evenly, trouble follows.
ALL FOUR ARE NEEDED for ANY of them TO FUNCTION
It may not have occurred to you, but to pay attention requires all four faculties to be awake and working well, together.
You can't pay attention to something without the intention to do so.
You can't pay attention, for long, unless you can remember what you are paying attention to.
You can't remember anything unless you have the intention to imagine it.
You can't follow something very well unless you can imagine where it might be headed, based on similar experience; otherwise, without remembering similar experiences everything is a surprise, to you, that catches you flat-footed. Anxiety (and performance anxiety) follows.
All four are needed.
THE TROUBLES of UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT
It's pretty obvious what happens when a person doesn't pay attention. That when accidents happen, bad judgments are made, or things get missed that should have been seen.
Intention is equally important. A deficiency of intention leads to poor results, wrong results, or no results!
The results of poor memory are also pretty obvious, so I won't elaborate, here.
Poor imagination shows up as inept problem-solving, lack of foresight, and resistance to change.
Those are the superficial consequences of uneven development.
But there are deeper consequences of uneven development.
THE DEEPER CONSEQUENCES of UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT of the FACULTIES of MIND
Because all four faculties must operate as a unity to operate, at all, when one or more of them are poorly developed, the person feels out-of-control, or at best, vulnerable and insecure. At the very least, they feel unequal to the challenges of life.
That's when changes of circumstances can throw one for a loop. Any new situation (or stimulus) is more than a person feels they can handle. They feel overwhelmed, hypersensitive. Bad reactions or upsets occur. The person feels unable to cope. Anxiety ensues.
In extreme cases of uneven development, the person may be completely incapable of an ordinary life. They may seem overactive, ADD, neurotic, or clinically disturbed.
WHY DO THESE FOUR FACULTIES DEVELOP UNEVENLY?
Our culture values these four faculties unevenly and so they develop unevenly.
Consider education: It values memory above all the other faculties. People are taught to accumulate memories as if what they remember, alone, will save them. They're not taught how to direct and steady their attention, only that to pay attention may get them what they want or help them avoid what they don't want. It's somehow assumed that everybody is able to pay attention, if only they decide to do it (not something that anybody who has tried meditation believes). They're not taught to exercise intention particularly well; they're taught to get by with the least intention possible. They're not taught the value of imagination; they're taught to stop daydreaming -- and rather than to imagine, they're taught to give memorized "right answers" that came from somebody else!
In conventional education, it's a case of overdevelopment of memory at the expense of the other faculties.
Trauma also has a role in poor operation of these faculties. Trauma leads to suppression of memory, to not paying attention to anything resembling the traumatic situation, to suppressing imagining anything like the traumatic situation -- or to imagining anything but the traumatic situation as a way to avoid remembering it. It also leads to addictive behavior and irresponsible self-indulgence.
Imbalances of these faculties run in families. If the parents function poorly in one or more of these faculties, the children also tend to function poorly in similar ways because the parents are the children's examples of how to live. That's one reason why dysfunctions (deficiencies and eccentric behaviors) run in families.
Our final example is the entertainment media. They not only cater to a short attention span; they cultivate it.
Consider how often promotional advertising uses rapid successions of images less than one second in length. In addition to cultivating short attention-span, quick successions of images also prevent seeing and remembering details.
Consider how often video programs and movies get interrupted by advertising, breaking the continuity of attention.
So, family patterns, trauma, and cultural norms cultivate poor functioning of the basic faculties of mind.
QUIETING ANXIETY
When life is too much and anxiety ensues, the quickest way to quiet the anxiety is to get all four of these faculties awake, integrated, and balanced. It's much more difficult and much slower to change the circumstances that triggered anxiety.
Awakening and balancing these four faculties of mind works to quiet anxiety even when anxiety is well-justified!
There are particular procedures to awaken, integrate, and balance these faculties. They are known as The TetraSeed Awakening Invocations.
Here's an example:
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There's no better way to understand how this kind of mind-training works than to test it. This first segment is an orientation to the procedure, called, "The Crystal Crown Invocation". In the upper-right corner of the video, you'll seen an ( i ) ("for more"); click it, and you be shown a link to take you to to the first full instructional video segment ("Act 1").
This has been an overview of the four basic faculties of mind and an introduction to the TetraSeed Awakening Invocations. You can find more detailed articles on The TetraSeed by searching for entries, on-line, by using the hashtag, or search-term, #TetraSeedAwakening.
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Lawrence Gold is a clinical somatic educator who has worked with clients facing life challenges and chronic pain, since 1990. He conducts live-on-line sessions with a world-wide clientele. Contact him by email.
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