Explore the great minds of psychology and science in our new series. In this episode, we start with the big picture and the history of humans working with the mind and the 4 major models in modern psychology and science. We discuss:
•••
Interested in Jungian Life Coach Training? Download your free program brochure: https://www.creativemindlife.com/program-brochure
Stay Connected with Debra and Dr. Rob:
Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube | Facebook | creativemindlife.com | connect@creativemindmethod.com
Explore the great minds of psychology and science in our new series. In this episode, we start with the big picture and the history of humans working with the mind and the 4 major models in modern psychology and science. We discuss:
•••
Interested in Jungian Life Coach Training? Download your free program brochure: https://www.creativemindlife.com/program-brochure
Stay Connected with Debra and Dr. Rob:
Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube | Facebook | creativemindlife.com | connect@creativemindmethod.com
4 Ways to Work with The Mind Transcript
INTRO 00:00
Welcome to Soul Sessions with CreativeMind with Debra Berndt Maldonado and Dr. Rob Maldonado of CreativeMind. Join us each week for inspiring conversation about personal development based on Jungian philosophy, Eastern spirituality, and social neuroscience. Spend each week with us to explore deep topics in a practical way. Let's begin.
Debra Maldonado 00:28
Hello and welcome to another episode of Soul Sessions. I'm Debra Berndt Maldonado, here with Dr. Rob Maldonado. Today, we are starting a new series on all the great minds of the mind, the great teachers, the forebears of personal development. We're going to be talking about them in each episode. But today, we're going to do an overview. Before we begin, I do want to remind you to click the button here, if you're watching us on YouTube, and subscribe to our channel. If you're listening to us on iTunes or Spotify, or any of the other podcast services, don’t forget to subscribe, we'd love to hear from you every week and tune in for this amazing series that's coming up. Today's topic is the four ways to work with the mind. We're going to talk about the different schools and really the history of psychology and working with the mind. Which is very fascinating because you're online, hearing all these different teachers, where do their ideas come from? This is a really great introduction to that.
Robert Maldonado 01:49
We'd like to dedicate this to all the students of the mind out there that are interested in this incredible topic that is really very young, but also very old. We'll explain what we mean by that.
Debra Maldonado 02:09
I'd like to dedicate this episode to our wonderful team at CreativeMind. They are incredible people, they do the work just like all of us. It's just a gift to work with all of them and what they contribute to this work. The people that edit the podcasts, that post it, that market our business, work behind the scenes and the technology, even enroll our coaches. It's a beautiful process, our team supports us in getting this great work out there. From signing someone up to making sure they have a good experience, we’d just want to thank you, CreativeMind team members, for all your great work.
Robert Maldonado 02:58
Thank you, guys.
Debra Maldonado 02:59
Let's talk about the history of working with the mind. How did this all begin? Is it the cavemen finding the rock or making a wheel? Was it like making fire? Where did it begin? Do we have to go far back?
Robert Maldonado 03:18
We do because we want to see the big picture. We’re getting more and more a picture of what our history on the planet is. We certainly have to start to think in these terms of one big community instead of dividing ourselves into these different groups. We're all human beings, we all have the same mind. You can check it out, go to another part of the world, any person that you meet, their mind will work pretty much the same way your mind works.
Debra Maldonado 04:03
Even in a different social or economic levels. Everyone worries about money, everyone worries about their family, everyone worries about their health, everyone worries about having a meaningful happy life. No matter where you are, how much or how little money you make, we’re all dealing with the same human problems.
Robert Maldonado 04:22
In the big picture, with very broad strokes, we can think about humans starting to become self aware maybe 200,000 years, maybe a little more, depends on where you draw the line between our animal nature and our human nature. But by 200,000 years ago, we were developing art, we were painting on the walls of caves and putting our handprints on things saying “I'm here, I'm self aware. I'm interested in animals, I'm interested in hunting, I'm interested in storytelling.” We start to see people burying other people, caring for them. We know from the archaeological evidence, people that broke their leg were taken care of by other people. There was a sense of community, that sense of caring for each other, which is a spiritual element as well. The mind then begins to take shape around that time where we start to self reflect. Shamanism comes about, ideas of the gods, ideas of nature gods, rain, famine, the sun was worshipped as well. Animals were considered to be godlike. At least part of the dream world that people were very familiar with, there was something going on besides their physical life.
Debra Maldonado 06:20
Dreams were probably more investigated back then too because it's a window to another world. They probably saw that more superstitiously in that timeframe because they weren’t developed.
Robert Maldonado 06:39
Superstition is a strong word. From our perspective, we’d consider it that way. But from their perspective it was the way they experienced the world. It wasn't necessarily superstition, it was more that they were connected to nature and still very much embedded in nature. Whereas now we're a little bit more isolated, we like to think at least of ourselves as separate from nature.
Debra Maldonado 07:14
As we go forward in history, because we're not going to stay in the caveman era, where does it go from there?
Robert Maldonado 07:26
Then you start to develop agriculture. We'll leave the dates up to the scholars, but about 10,000 years ago, people start to develop agriculture, so that it allowed human beings to form cities, then you start to get institutions, you start to get temples.
Debra Maldonado 07:59
Academics started writing. Instead of using pictures on walls, they started writing texts, either hieroglyphics or in books in Ancient Greece.
Robert Maldonado 08:17
That's an incredible breakthrough because now you could write down your thoughts in print, on tablets and communicate your mind essentially to another mind, then keep a record of what you learned so that the next generation could use that information. Whereas before, it was passed down through stories. A lot of people don't think of the Americas but in the Americas there were advanced civilizations like the Maya, the Aztecs, the Inca, the North American tribes, they all had their own psychologies, their own way of understanding spirit, the movement of nature, the cycles, astronomy, astrology, all this was part of these advanced cultures in Europe and Asia. Advanced cultures were also very interested in astronomy and astrology as well. How were the stars in these constellations impacting life on Earth? What were the cycles of nature not only on the planet, but in the cosmos? The mind at that time, because there wasn't that differentiation, people understood magic, religion, spirituality, psychology, medicine all together. There wasn't the division. Most of the priests, men and women, were both scientists and healers and priests and priestesses. It was all taught to them in a holistic way.
Debra Maldonado 10:43
Was it also less individual and more group mind? The tribe is the force, aligning the tribe versus every individual gets to explore their own path?
Robert Maldonado 10:58
There's always been individuals, though, that really move the culture forward. They’re just brilliant for some reason, they're geniuses, they come up with ideas that transform culture.
INTERMISSION 11:15
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Robert Maldonado 12:10
That's always been a part of it. There is a culture that supports the individual. But then individuals themselves have visions, dreams, ideas.
Debra Maldonado 12:21
To pull the culture forward or start a new culture even, a new way of being that breaks away. Major religions had the same experience too, whether Eastern or Western religions. They all had a foundation and then there was a split, different ideas moving forward.
Robert Maldonado 12:46
From our perspective, the Greeks had a big influence on our current culture. But the Greeks also were highly influenced by Indian philosophy through Alexander the Great. They shared ideas about yoga, about meditation. Even Buddhism was communicated to the Greeks through the connection with Alexander the Great. Then the Romans created a whole empire that included many different cultures. Ideas came together in Rome and created new ways of seeing the world, new ways of seeing the mind. Medicine evolved from there. It's a rich history of human beings always grappling with this idea, what is the mind, how does it work?
Debra Maldonado 13:54
Who am I? What is this universe that we're in? What are the laws of nature?
Robert Maldonado 14:03
After the fall of Rome, we go through the Middle Ages, where a lot of the ideas are lost, or apparently lost, cause they're never completely lost, otherwise they wouldn't be here. But they lose favor in the sense that people aren't paying attention to them as much. They survive through the Greeks that left a lot of manuscripts behind. Some of the Arab cultures actually got a hold of them and started to translate them and to experiment with them. For a while, the Middle East was this rich breeding ground of new ideas in philosophy. Then the Enlightenment comes, after the Renaissance, people started to think about humanism, maybe we as humans have the ability to do develop and direct our own destiny.
Debra Maldonado 15:15
Versus how do we survive as a tribe and as a community? Now, it's how do I become an individual?
Robert Maldonado 15:23
Independent of the gods, which was a very new idea.
Debra Maldonado 15:32
Determine your own destiny versus what the gods have destined for you.
Robert Maldonado 15:37
If you look at history from this lens, before the Enlightenment, most societies were theocentric, they saw themselves as worshipping God, a god or several gods, at the mercy of these gods. The gods determined what human culture and human destiny was about. Humanism, after the Renaissance and through the Enlightenment, was this idea that we as humans have incredible power, if we are willing to develop it and use it, cultivating that humanism. Humanism, as we'll see, is still around in psychology because it was such an important idea. Of course, science grew out of it, the scientific method. One of the things that a lot of people don't know is that science was actually developed by mystics. Rishis in India, but also Newton. Newton was an alchemist. Most of his writings were about alchemy. It's a dirty little secret in science about the scientific method. Da Vinci was way before Newton, but Newton spent a lot of his time trying to figure out alchemical formulas and processes. By the way, he said “Here's calculus that we can use to measure the universe.” Incredible power came through science and the scientific method, which we're still grappling with today, with AI now and the power that it's giving us through technology. The same old questions are now taking center stage, because now they're becoming more important. What is consciousness? What is the mind? What do we do with it?
Debra Maldonado 18:19
Now we're gonna go into the models because we skipped over a big piece of modern psychology, we went from Newton to AI, but there's this huge contribution, all these minds about hundred years ago. This is really the development of psychology. First, they used a lot of physical ways to measure what's happening with the body, they measured the size of the brain, the skull, the size of the head. They also put them in cold water if they were having neurotic episodes, shocking them, this mechanical way of working with a disturbed mind. Then Freud came up with this idea of “What if we talked to them?” That opened up this whole new idea, which is where coaching and therapy arises from, from this idea of letting someone self reflect.
Robert Maldonado 19:33
At the turn of the century, the 1900s was a big turning point. That's where Freud publishes his interpretation of dreams, which opens up a whole new school of the mind. We have to give Freud credit, even though he was wrong on a lot of things, he was a pioneer, he wasn't going to get everything right.
Debra Maldonado 20:05
But that's what science is. The scientific theory isn't a scientific fact, there's never a scientific fact. It's always a theory, until the next theory proves it wrong. A true scientist would want to disprove its theory to make sure that it's valid. I wouldn't say Freud was wrong. He had a theory that is now proven to be not on the mark.
Robert Maldonado 20:35
There's either support for the theory or there's lack of support. For Freud's work, there's both. There's plenty of support, we still talk about defense mechanisms, about the ego, about repressed wishes and dreams. But a lot of his psychosexual theory and his ideas on child development, not so much.
Debra Maldonado 21:10
We're going to talk about the four ways to work with the mind in modern psychology. That is the psychodynamic model, the behaviorism, cognitive behavioral therapy and also our cognitive behavioral coaching, and the biomedical model, the neuroscience. Those are the four main ways, or branches in the modern world, with all this history of us developing ourselves as human beings and understanding who we are and what the world is and why we're here. There's many models, but this would be the four main schools.
Robert Maldonado 21:57
There's different ways of breaking up the ideas in psychology but these hit the main ones. Certainly psychodynamic models, which is the schools that evolved and emerged from Freud and Jung's work.
Debra Maldonado 22:20
Psychodynamic, in layman's terms, how would you describe it?
Robert Maldonado 22:28
Most of us think of the mind as singular. There's this little I in me, the sense of self I'm experiencing, I'm doing things, I'm thinking this and doing that. But the psychodynamic model paints it more as there's a little committee in our brain or in our mind that is arguing between themselves trying to decide things. That's where the dynamic part of the model comes from.
Debra Maldonado 23:06
Does it mean that they're unconscious?
Robert Maldonado 23:09
If you think, we have animalistic instincts inherited from our animal nature, that are still around. Then the higher parts of our mind have to deal with those, damping those and keep those under control.
Debra Maldonado 23:27
Because we live in a culture and society, we can't take off our clothes and growl in the streets, attack other people like an animal, or go into the grocery store and start eating the food right there because we're hungry. We have to wait in line, we have to drive and be nice. We're suppressing a lot of it because we evolved from animals, we didn't lose any of that, it’s just repressed. Also this idea of conditioning too. We have the personal life, we've been molded and shaped by our past experience. The things that were unacceptable in our culture were repressed as well. Not only as a whole as human beings repressing the animalistic nature, but on a social level, what is not acceptable in my family, my community, my country. What is acceptable, what's not acceptable. We're fighting our desires, our true desires versus these other forces. Some we’re aware of, and some we’re not aware of, most of it we're not aware of. That's why Freud and Jung bonded over the dreamworld and the unconscious. Jung used that, or I guess it came from Freud, the word association, where you’d say “black” and then say the first word that comes to your mind, revealing a little bit. There's more to you than just what you're conscious of. There's more to you than just “I desire something, so I'm gonna make it happen, there's no other force stopping me.” Would you think that maybe early man thought those forces stopping them weren't from conditioning, but from the gods and fate? People still believe that when things don't happen in their life. I want something, I want to create wealth, I want to find a relationship, I want to get better health, I want to lose weight. But there's this other force, so we say “That's not my timing, there's something outside of me.”
Robert Maldonado 25:33
We certainly see it in the history of clinical psychology where people thought people were possessed by demons, by something external to them because they acted very strangely and in bizarre ways. They thought this must be a spirit.
Debra Maldonado 25:55
Also the concept of placing an evil eye or a spell on someone. Or that you basically were a bad person, so you're ever going to be happy. But psychodynamic is more about these other parts of ourselves that are working, they're not all human, they're of spiritual nature as well. That's where Freud and Jung split. Freud thought it was all our animal instincts that we have to repress, where Jung saw us more of a complex human creature with spiritual experiences.
Robert Maldonado 26:31
But the psychodynamic school, the big picture of it is that from this idea that Freud initiated many schools evolved from there. You have object relations theory, you have cell psychology, ego psychology schools that evolved out of there and are still very strong in the world today, used in psychotherapy a lot, in some instances in coaching too. That’s the gift and the contribution Freud and Jung made to psychology. They gave rise to this way of seeing the mind in a very rich and deep way.
Debra Maldonado 27:29
We're more complex than we are on the surface. We're not simple creatures. Going back to not complex, Skinner behaviorism. I found it fascinating when I learned about Skinner because he was very much into watching a person's actions and reactions. It’s a basic, very mechanical way of looking at a human being. It's the carrot and stick idea, reward and punishment.
Robert Maldonado 28:05
A lot of his work was with animals, he observed animals in cages, in controlled lab experiments. He deduced that these principles are very powerful and can be tested in the laboratory. Therefore, human beings are no exception. We're are conditioned by our environment, by the rewards and punishments that we experienced in everyday life.
Debra Maldonado 28:33
But human beings have a more complex brain system and have the ability to make decisions and reason more than animals. We're not animals, you can't measure an animal. We’re from animals, but we can't measure.
Robert Maldonado 28:54
Here’s where Skinner would disagree. He says we're biological beings, just like any other animal. Therefore, we're subject to the same contingencies of conditioning.
Debra Maldonado 29:10
A lot of people I've met before they did the individuation process with Jung fall into that idea that they can behave through change, just force themselves to go and take action. The mind doesn't really have a say it's more mechanical, like “I'm going to go work out, I'm going to commit, I don't care if my mind is screaming at me. I'm just going to go and work out.” It works for a while, you give yourself a reward or whatever, but don’t you want to get to the root of why it's so hard. Why are you really so resistant to this? Why are you so resistant to working hard or to staying in the game? A lot of motivational speakers say “Go through it. Don't worry about the fear. Just go.” Without self examination of understanding what is really going on, maybe this thing I want isn't really what I need. Maybe that's why my spirit resists. It's a very mechanical way to see us as condition beings with no spiritual insight or intellect involved.
Robert Maldonado 30:22
Skinner was adamant that because we you can’t observe the spiritual element or even the mind, what's the point of building a science of the mind, if you can’t measure it, if you can’t see it. Therefore that was his downfall, because we all know just from our own experience that there's a mind. He was trying to deny that, but his writings are brilliant, people should not discount Skinner.
Debra Maldonado 31:02
It's still a part of our being, we’re conditioned creatures, there is a biological element. But we can't just stop there. The next level is CBT, or cognitive behavioral therapy, or coaching. It's bringing in the cognitive sciences.
Robert Maldonado 31:22
It was a compromise between Freud and Skinner. We acknowledge that behaviorism is very powerful. Conditioning is a powerful force and still active. But there's a mind behind experiencing those things. CBT, which is cognitive behavioral theory or therapy, Aaron Beck, Albert Ellis, these guys really took it to the next level and developed a science around it, or a very strong theory that when we’re conditioned through the environment, we develop a phobia, we develop a bad habit, there's a mind experiencing that and the mind itself can start to work its way out of it. I can reason and say “This is hurting me.”
Debra Maldonado 32:27
Also excuses, when you're doing something that's uncomfortable, let's say, the workout phenomenon, you can push yourself to go work out or you can think positive and say “I'm going to work out every day.” That's gonna help you a little bit more. But then there's also the other part of the mind that says “You don't need to work out, it's okay, just do it tomorrow.” Then you start to get into that reasoning of the excuses and the stories of it's raining out today, you did a good job this week, you could do it tomorrow. Because behavioral is looking at that narrative more, the behavior and how they match together, the inconsistencies or incoherency.
Robert Maldonado 33:14
You can question your own thoughts. You can ask “Am I really stuck in this? Or can I do something about it?” You’re examining your own thoughts, which is a very ancient philosophy as well. The Greeks were used to doing this stuff. In Buddhism we see this self reflection. It's very old, but it's packaged in a new way. Cognitive behaviorism is the way to go because it addresses both the mind and your actions. It's not neglecting one or the other.
Debra Maldonado 34:02
It's really good for addictions or changing behaviors, motivation. But the limit of it is that it's basically shining up the ego. In psychodynamic model, you're looking at the unconscious, you're looking at more of a deeper sense of who you are, a wider range or complexity to you, and even evolving out of your old personality, Jung talks about individuation. Cognitive behavior is “I'm an ego. I have this bad habit of thinking, and feeling, and doing, I'm going to change my ego to have it think, feel, and do better.” It's a good start. I think that's where a lot of people start in personal development. That's where I started. It gives you that lifting and gives you that “I can actually change my destiny, if I change my thoughts and my feelings”, but it's limiting because you're just framing it from the ego perspective, which is that you are this individual, you're not a spiritual being, your physical being, doing this human change, then you are still the same person, you're just thinking and feeling better, the identity doesn't change.
Robert Maldonado 35:19
It's one of the most dominant models right now because it can be tested and measured. You can measure progress, you can measure behavioral changes, therefore, it has a lot of research support. It's a good model to base your therapies, your psychologies, your coaching on.
Debra Maldonado 35:50
A lot of times, that's what people want. They really don't want a spiritual solution, they just want to get their life better. It works for people that aren't looking for deeper answers, that just want to change their habits. It's very effective.
Robert Maldonado 36:04
The criticism is that it's not dealing with a whole person, you're targeting certain behaviors, certain parts or aspects of the mind, but not the totality of the human being. The biomedical model, which is probably the most popular, but also the least understood by the public because it's a difficult thing to understand what the brain is doing biologically through all the neurotransmitters and neuro chemistry. It requires some study, some dedication, some understanding. The way the public gets it is through these sound bites that the media uses to entice people to read stories on what the brain is doing. People start to think in simplistic and erroneous ways about what neuroscience is.
Debra Maldonado 37:17
The biggest one for me was this whole idea of what your brain’s doing when it's in love. It discounts this soulful, spiritual element of bonding and having a love relationship. It's just a bunch of neurons firing, that’s it. If you change your neurons, you're wired for love. There’ one of the books talking about the wiring. Now, there's truth to it. When you are in a state of love, the brain is activating, but they're making the assumption that the brain is the cause versus the brain is activated in a certain state that reflects the deeper sense of self. Change your brain, change your life, rewire your brain. It's still a little bit deeper, but very close to the cognitive behavioral model. If I think positive and listen to positive affirmations every day, I'm wiring my brain to think in this way. Yes, but affirmations are like trying to empty the ocean with a spoon. We have billions of thoughts. We're trying to isolate one or two that's going to rewire. It just seems like an ineffective way to work from the hardware versus the software. That's the brain, we're thinking it just works on the hardware but there's also the software, which is all the other things that are happening in our experience.
Robert Maldonado 38:57
Here we come to the ancient question of what is spirit and what is matter. What is the brain and what is the mind, and is there a difference or are they the same thing? From the neuro biomedical model perspective, they say consciousness, meaning your mind, your awareness is arising as an emergent property, out of all the interactions of your brain, all the neurons firing and communicating with each other. That gives rise to your sense of yourself, your awareness, that's the biomedical model.
Debra Maldonado 39:43
But if you think about someone who had a near death experience, where there was no brain activity, but they were aware, then they come back and see the doctor in the room, they have this experience. That would discount that theory, wouldn’t it?
Robert Maldonado 39:59
They call this the hard problem of consciousness, it doesn't fit in with what human beings experience as their mind. It’d be a great idea to think we can figure everything out from the brain. If we understand the brain, we’ll understand everything about the mind. But it's not that simple, we start to see that when we take that approach, there's phenomena that we can’t explain through the physical model.
Debra Maldonado 40:42
Quite simply, the brain is not the cause. It's the spirit of consciousness and the matter interacting. It's not like one is more than the other. But you can't say one is the sole cause.
Robert Maldonado 41:04
Let's address this one first because it's such an important one. The chemical imbalance model that emerged out of the biomedical model and is used to explain a lot of mental health conditions. You'll see it on TV, it's a common one. If you're depressed, there's a neurotransmitter imbalance in your brain. If you take this pill, this substance, it will rebalance it, you'll be fine, you'll feel better. That's a powerful statement and explanation of depression. Is a true? There's some research that supports that, but a lot of it doesn't.
Debra Maldonado 42:01
The thing is that for these drugs to be authorized, they have to do a little bit more than the placebo. But it's not that much. There's one case, or a couple of cases, then they're able to pass it. A lot of it could be placebo as well.
Robert Maldonado 42:20
The placebo is always studied. Every experiment they do, if they do it right, has to account for the placebo effect. They know it's a very powerful effect. They don't usually mention it, of course, they just say “This drug has been proven, or supported by research to improve depression. Your symptoms of depression are going to go away or improve if you take this medication.”
Debra Maldonado 42:56
Think about this from a spiritual perspective. What is depression? Do I want to feel happy or do I want to get to the root of what my spirit is aching for, what the true problem is. We work on the symptom of “I'm having these down feelings, I'm not motivated”. Those are symptoms. When we take medication, just like everything else in the medical model, we're making sure the symptoms go away. But many times not addressing the core problem, the core root, which is the question of “Who am I? Why am I here? What's my purpose?”, if an individual can have those answers, it could help them free their mind. Eventually their brain would produce more oxytocin and all these feel good chemicals that will start bringing them to have more balance in a natural way. There are people that actually need medication, we're not discounting it. But if we stop there and think “Just take a pill and your life will be better,” it's such a limited way to work with our potential and who we are as human beings, as spiritual beings.
Robert Maldonado 44:15
You hit upon something there. It's not that these are wrong. It's that there's a lot of politics that plays into these models, where people want to state that this is the only way to see the mind or the brain. It's much healthier and much more productive to think in terms of these are different models, all models have a truth or reality to them. If we consider that perspective, it gives us a bigger and a better picture of what we're dealing with.
Debra Maldonado 45:00
We don't want to lose some of the great minds, which we're going to be talking about more in this series. We want to take the gems of it and see how it all fits in together. We don't want to discount that the brain wires a certain way, that there is neuroplasticity, we want to use that. But we can't just use that in its isolation, we want to take the whole picture and address the whole being, which is also beyond just the physical.
Robert Maldonado 45:28
This is not a comprehensive list. But evolutionary psychology has been playing a big role now in recent developments in psychology. It’s the idea that there's adaptation going on, the way our brains function and our mind has evolved is adaptive. We think this way, we feel this way, we perceive the world this way because it was adaptive for us. It helped us survive. Donald Hoffman of the University of California spoke about this idea that the way we perceive the world is there, it functions the way it functions because it helped us survive. The other one is socio cultural psychology, some people call it multicultural psychology, which is the idea that culture also shapes the way we perceive, the way we act. That context of the culture and the behavior is so important to understand. If you go to another country and look people in the eye very directly, and speak very frankly, in their culture that might be considered very bad behavior.
Debra Maldonado 47:11
You don't even have to go to another country. I grew up in New York City area, New Jersey, I brought New Jersey to Colorado, I’d be very direct because we didn't waste our time. Instead of “Hi, sweetie, how’re you doing today?” I'd be like “Hey, did you get this done?” People would assume I was being mean or aggressive. Even just the way we talk, the way we say words is a little short, to the point, direct and actually sometimes more honest. In Colorado, people were “You're such a tough girl.” I said something in a very easy sentence, but it was interpreted differently. We all have those laws and rules in our culture. When it comes to psychology and mental health, different cultures have a different attitude about it. In some of them, if you need mental health work, you are crazy. In the West it's a little more accepted that people have coaches and therapists, but in some cultures, there's something really wrong with you if you have to get mental health. We don't talk about our feelings, we don't talk about anything to do with stress or depression or any of that stuff. It's off the table.
Robert Maldonado 48:32
Finally, personality psychology, which is a bit unknown to the public, but it's such a rich school that really instructs us on what the nature of what we call the personality is. Theodore Millon, incredible work both in clinical and in social psychology, looking at the development of personality. We’ll be maybe talking a little bit about that, too as we go along in the series.
Debra Maldonado 49:10
This is an extra long episode, we had a lot to cover. I just want to end with the question, we're going back to the beginning of time, which is “Why are we here? Who am I? What's my purpose?” When we think about the brain and neuroscience, we're actually seeing what the ancients talked about in Eastern philosophy. We're seeing Maya, this illusory expression of the world through our mind. It's a distorted reality. It's not an absolute reality. It's an apparent reality. The latest in perceptual sciences are showing us the same thing, how our brain processes color and spatial recognition, all this information, we're looking at things from a survival mechanism, missing out on so much. We’re studying neuroscience, it brings us actually back to what's really going on in consciousness. The question is, is there something more to us than just our brain, our thoughts, and our a behavior or are we part of something bigger?” This is where Jung brought in the spirit part of psychology. Some other psychotherapy models work with it a little bit but Jung was in a world of his own when he was saying that the true reason why we're here is to know ourself, the big self, not just to get things and to not be sad, and be happy in life. Those are great things but the true purpose of life is to know who we really are. By saying that our mind misperceives reality, we have to see what we’re misperceiving. How will we shape our assumptions about the world and our self and what limits us? What is possible by understanding this? Now we're getting to a deeper realm of personal growth and development.
Robert Maldonado 51:25
As we question consciousness, Jung's work and Eastern philosophy perspective on consciousness will become more relevant to us. It'll help us in putting all the puzzle pieces together while we're learning about the brain and the neurobiology of it. How does it fit into our understanding of dreams, awareness, consciousness? What does it all mean? How do we put it to work so that we can solve these very human problems that we're facing?
Debra Maldonado 52:08
How do we look at the big picture of all the contributions of our ancestors and past wisdom teachers have taught us about the mind and ourselves? How can we really see that there's nothing wrong about what they taught? At the time it might have been right, then we evolved. But what can we take because there's wisdom in everything, so it'd be more inclusive of what is really happening for ourselves. How do we really explore that question of “Who am I? Why am I here? What's my purpose? What is this world?”. In the next episodes, we’ll be delving deeper into the great minds of women and men who’ve been on the forefront of psychology, of mysticism, the brain sciences, and spiritual development. We think you'll really enjoy this series, so stay tuned. If you don't want to miss this series, please subscribe to the channel here, if you're watching us on YouTube. If you are listening to us on the podcast, through Spotify, YouTube, iTunes, all those great podcast services, make sure you subscribe because we don't want you to miss, this series is going to be fantastic. Hope you have a great day. Hopefully, we gave you some food for thought. Think about what you've been working with on your own personal development journey, what pieces have you been putting in and maybe what pieces you never thought of that you can integrate into your own whole development.
Robert Maldonado 53:53
Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. Stay well.
OUTRO 53:59
Thank you for joining us. Don't forget to subscribe to CreativeMind Soul Sessions. Join us next week as we explore another deep topic where you can consciously create your life with CreativeMind Soul Session. See you next time.