Holistic Psychology, Balance on All Levels PACMES Chapter 1
These revised chapters, one at a time, update humanistic psychology (1955–1975) to include everything useful for a general audience, 2023, college-level textbook.
Dedicated to magnifying the ministry of John-Roger
The thing we are looking for,
is the thing we are looking with ~ Ernest Holmes, Founder of Religious Science
The future is already here; it’s just not very well distributed yet ~ William Gibson, author, Neuromancer
Where to start?
Psychology means “study of the psyche.” Yet this begs a second question, what is the psyche”?
A mirror-maze of reflections. The easy out this maze I found is to start here: The content of each human psyche is what awareness is doing, both internally and externally.
This connects with a later topic in this text, the Inner and Outer Games of Life.
I found this frame enabled me to escape the mirror-mazes around the words consciousness and spiritual.
The above frame also facilitated side-stepping the endless mazes of psychology as the study of cognitions, perceptions, emotional affects; and, behavior per se (behaviorism). These earlier frames exist primarily as convenience for left-hemisphere-only thinkers, left-brain in isolation, dissociated from and divorced from cooperating and collaborating with right-hemisphere.
When awareness is placed at the enter of holistic psychology, its more clear what makes us truly human, is not visible but invisible.
Becoming friendly with the invisible and unseen
Q: How can I feel safe and trust things invisible and unseen?
A: The good news is, even tho awareness, values and intelligence are invisible, patterns exist you can learn. Awareness has the least patterns; we call it unconditioned. Any and everything below the Soul Realm is within Creation and highly patterned.
A scheme of this is below. Tho several Light and Sound groups have been using this scheme since the middle 1800s, it has no official name Im aware of. I call it Spiritual Geography 101. Its also a chart of the realms, including Creation and Soul and Above. This scheme has become better known in the West since John-Roger promoted it publicly 50 or more times between about 1968–2002.
PACMES is the big pattern of intelligences in our current Creation. You can picture these either as layers-levels; or, as concentric circles or concentric, inter-penetrating spheres, up to you.
A map of Mother-Father-God-Creation in your own hands
This grand scale of Creation shows multiple intelligence levels, each one cooperating and collaborating as timely and useful.
Your own two hands offer an easy way to imagine your multi-intelligent psyche. Can you copy this image with your two physical hands?
Video of this here “Spiritual Geography PACME 101 In your hands, handy version” https://youtu.be/SPYXtidpwss
Notice one hand is palm-out the other hand is palm-in. This suggests the additional inherent less obvious mirror effects the model contains.
Your two hands should be in the same vertical plane as much as possible; for instance, NOT 90 degrees to each other. That’s something else.
Your upper hand represents Soul and Above. Your lower hand represents Creation. If you wish to conceive of this as Father and Mother god, many metaphysicians will agree with you.
Your lower hand represents Creation. Your lower-little-finger pointing down represents the physical level. Our weakest finger naturally stands for the weakest of our five bodies, in terms of energy potential, that would be the Physical.
Your lower-hand-ring-finger represents the level of liking, disliking, polarity and ambition (astral).
Your lower hand middle finger represents your deeper emotions. You have two strongest fingers on each hand, middle finger and thumb. Middle finger represents one of the two strongest of your five invisible bodies, in terms of energy potential, at this time in Creation. The original Theosophy name was the causal (emotional) realm. This is where the letter “C” comes from in PACME. Theosophy taught our causal-emotional body is the strongest level at this time in Creation. John-Roger seems to agree with this.
Your lower hand pointer finger represents your mind-beliefs-judgments-evaluations. The finger we point with represents our mental activity — how convenient!
Your lower-hand-thumb is our other strongest finger. It points up. It represents our unconscious memories, habits, behaviors, role-models, archetypes, and fairy tales we live by. This is other strongest part of our psyche in Creation, our Habit Body, our comfort zones. This is the “flywheel” of our psyche so we don’t have to re-learn how to walk all over again each day anew. It is the strength of stability, continuity, predictability.
Your top hand represents Soul and Above
These two face each other, tip to tip, as equals, a picture of the wholeness and Oneness of God, of Mother~Father God.
The five fingers of your upper hand are not meant to suggest the same stratification of frequencies and conditioning as exist below. The five fingers of our upper hand are place holders suggesting something is up there worth knowing about.
As souls here in the human experience, our five conditioned levels-bodies, physical, imaginative, emotional, mental and unconscious, are what we are charged with managing. Our job is to make healthy choices, as best we can, to do the right thing, at the right time, with the right people, for the right purpose — as Plato or Socrates said.
We have habits on all these levels: physical, imaginal, emotional, mental, and unconscious-mythological. This is the Spiritual Geography used in Light and Sound groups since the mid-1800s at least.
Friends of John-Roger have heard this model as “PACME” an acronym for the five octaves of Creation in Theosophical terms: Astral, Causal, Mental, Etheric. We’re going to abbreviate these as “PACME” because it’s better-known.
If we add Soul and Above, we get this: PACME+Soul & Above. I abbreviate this as PACMES. If you find a better way, contact me.
Q: Aren’t these distinctions, Physical, Imaginal, Emotional, Mental and Mythological obvious; and, not worth mentioning?
A: I agree they seem obvious. However if you check psychology literature, you find they are seldom evident nor laid out so clearly Even most metaphysical chakra literature fails to lay them out this clearly The scheme is useful because it represents the wholeness of Creation simply and concisely.
Q: Why is this valuable?
A: PACMES encompasses the whole domain of the waking human experience.
If you have an unresolved disturbance you wish to locate and address, it must be embodied in one of these frequency levels, PACME. Why? Because all habits are conditional energy. Creation is all conditioned energies locally. Any habit you wish to address must by definition be somewhere on the PACMES map.
You no longer have to guess; you can check by asking if the origin of the disturbance is in P, in A, in C and so on.
In about 100 years, more people will be interested in healthy self-connection and self-testing. PACME provides solid, clear landmarks useful for navigating the invisible in ourself or for client support.
Q: What about the simpler body-mind-spirit model?
A: PACMES contains about three times more Therapeutic Direction than earlier schemes of body-mind-spirit. Well talk more later about therapeutic direction.
Q: Why does Holistic Psychology incorporate Spiritual Geography?
A: It provides one of very few available stable baselines for Creation. Psychologies based on other baselines, mental or archetypal, are much less stable. Spiritual Geography offers the greatest “object permanence” within Creation known to us. If you find a more stable baseline for object permanence in Creation, be sure to contact me and share it.
PS: The lack of a stable baseline for invisible realities was a big deficit of humanistic psychology 1955–1975, which I call ‘Holistic Psychology 1.0.’ Adding Spiritual Geography is a big part of what makes the current text Holistic Psychology 2.0. Comments invited.
Reframing soul to include awareness
Given PACMES, another confusion to address circles around the term soul. Since the year 2000, like the word spiritual, the word soul is defined so widely and variously, the word has lost much of its meaning.
In Rudolf Steiner’s day, soul meant approximately, what since the 1970s in the USA, we call the inner child. Yet in how the inner child is defined, whats missing is any indication of each human beings capacity for immortality and eternity. The part of us who journeys on from life to life, incarnation to incarnation, is NOT acknowledged.
The easy fix appears to be is to prefer the word soul refer to our immortal-eternal capacity, the part of each of us who goes on learning no matter what.
- Inner child (child within, 22 or more names for this), NOT immortal, NOT eternal, co-creates and supports our physical body and immune system. Its job is done after our last physical breath.
- Soul is our capacity for the immortal and the eternal, awareness which goes on learning no matter what.
See if the above reframing is workable for you. Let me know what you discover.
How to measure any psychology
The most sane, healthy, useful, stringent and practical test
of any psychology
has little to do with adult criteria. In fact,
the most stringent test of a successful
psychology has nothing to do with adults at all.
Rather, the most practical test of a healthy psychology is this:
Does it inspire high school students and college students to pursue mental-emotional wellness, as lifelong personal goals, at the age when they are most receptive to such a challenge?
If a psychology inspires young adults to pursue wellness and truly human values, then — and only then — is a psychology optimally workable and practical.
Q: The above is pretty abstract. What useful practical application does this have?
A: Im glad you asked. The above has huge practical application. To introduce this, lets start with Goldilocks.
