Well, the biggest thing that happens from stabilizing or even just visiting a higher state of consciousness, is that it provides a kind of a turbocharger to the theological pole, the evolutionary driver, the thing that is in you the kind of the ultimate Rob Kall oak you know that you may be an acorn or a sampling version or you know a younger, smaller version but there is a bigger potential, even bigger that is vying to find expression.
What is that pole from that omega point that is active in you? That gets turbocharged. You go into a meditative state or a high state, and you wake up and you're one with all existence. Your heart is streaming with love and you're just almost crying with gratitude just for a moment of being alive.
I'll tell you what, you know that just puts you in touch with the possible you, that could be like that more of the time, that could be more fully forgiving and loving and smart and grounded and really present and really show up in life.
Rob: Well, well. Sorry.
Terry: [laughs].
Rob: The good stuff but we are going to run out of time soon, and I want to cover another issue that you have not touched on that's the shadow. Talk a little bit about that.
Terry: Sure. Well, the thing that Freud really put on the map is the fact that the human psyche will get rid of disconfirming, disturbing, dissonant experience, particularly drives and emotions that feel like they're a threat to our survival. So a baby who becomes serious with his mother because perhaps she has not attended in certain ways or whatever, he is neglected or not treated well, maybe absolutely enraged, but she is his only contact with food and warmth you know. "I hate Mommy but if, and I want to kill her but if I did...," then they just can't do it. Then the system goes to tilt, and the rage just disappears because it doesn't work.
But it doesn't fully disappear. It goes under the rug. There is this mechanism of repression into the unconscious. And these ideas of repression and the unconscious really were discovered by Freud. Even though the ancient spiritual traditions talked about dark nights of the soul, wrathful deities, hell drums, all kinds of things that had to do with dark energies, they didn't understand repression and the unconscious.
So one of the implications of that is that all of us are involved in doing some repression into the unconscious all the time, and so there is an important question that we need to live like almost living a question all the time. It is like, "OK, what is it that is going on here that I am committed to not knowing? What is it that I don't see, that I don't want to see that is part of what is going on with me?"
And then the kind of way if I really ask that question with sincerity, I become trustable, I become less arrogant, I become somebody who's engaged in a process of really, really trying to go beyond my limitations in a whole different way and I'm much less stuck, and it is a core module of personal practice.
People who don't do shadow practice are just, you know, they're not trustable. They're not really curious to see how they're making themselves blind because of attachment, because of emotional closure, and it's that kind of...
Rob: Only the kind of people... When you say people don't do shadow practice, you mean people who don't face their shadow?
Terry: Yeah, I think people who...
Rob: When you think shadow attractive, talk a little bit more about what kind.
Terry: Well, the core of a shadow practice is basically a kind of living life as an inquiry into what it is that you are suppressing? What you are repressing? What it is that you are driving into the unconscious? What it is that is tending to be outside your awareness? So that there's a kind of healthy skepticism at the stories you're telling about how it all is. And there is some concrete practices such as the threetoone shadow practice that we outline in the "Integral Life Practice" book where you essentially face your shadow projections and you resonate or dialogue with them, and then actually take their position, become them and discover how that catalytically shifts your perspective and opens up inside, or energetic shift that can free you from a pattern that otherwise was dominating you.
Rob: OK now, because we are almost out of time, I just want to ask you a couple of quick questions, OK? You had a lot of experience with the technology, the Neurofeedback and the AVS and the sound/light mind machines. Do they set into Integral Life Practice at all?
