Where does our consciousness reside?

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By Lloyd I Sederer MD

I was well trained in psychodynamic psychotherapy and underwent ‘classic’

psychoanalysis, on the couch, 4x/week, for 6 years, with a “training analyst” (top of the

totem pole), and an emphasis on my dreams.

I never pursued “the full monte” of becoming a psychoanalyst, that was not what I sought

as my career. Psychoanalysis was intellectually stirring, which is to say it could capture

many a good mind. But I doubted whether undergoing analysis would do me, personally,

much good. How could its method of free association, dream analysis, transference, and

countertransference benefit me? I could not believe (then and now) that “making the

unconscious conscious” or giving ‘voice’ to my repressed feelings and thoughts would do

my much good.

Yet my analysis had been helpful to me. Why so, if not from the prevalent orthodoxy

proposed when I had been in analysis (late 70s, early 80s)? Mostly, I thought that my analyst

was very skilled at not letting me get away from facing the parts of me and my experiences

too emotionally hard or shameful to bear. For me, he was a wise man, gentle but firm. I had

to believe he liked me because after my analysis ended (as did his fees), we continued to

meet over coffee in his home, talking about a wide range of topics, from gardening, to

books, and to human nature.

For those familiar with Yiddish, I came to believe that my analyst helped me be a mensch (a

decent person who thought more about others than himself). Like most analysts, he didn’t

talk much though he certainly was not silent. He regularly used gardening, his ardent

passion and beautifully adorning his home, as a metaphor. I did ask myself if his use of

plants as metaphor was mutative, capable of changing me, especially for the better? If so,

then why was I not using my time and money creating a garden of my own?

I now wonder if my response to therapy wasn’t so much what he said (or planted), but,

rather, the ways that my permeable conscious mind had been an active receptor of the vast

consciousness that it unknowingly bathed in. A consciousness that is an enduring,

collective source of all there is, was, and even possibly will be.

My query is not new. I draw fully from the science of noetics: the science of

consciousness, and what we are learning to be inner wisdom, of directly knowing and

intuitively understanding.

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After six decades of my having had what has been called “paranormal” experiences,

I found the right term: noetic experiences. These Included being out of my body, seeing and feeling distress in people close to me (even when 3,000 miles away), seeing myself simultaneously alive and dead, “lucid dreaming” that would trump IMAX, and much more.

If I am describing your world, write me thru my website. Better still, write The Institute of Noetic Sciences.

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Lloyd Sederer MD is a psychiatrist, public health doctor, and non-fiction writer.

www.askdrlloyd.com