Four Portals of Knowing
Image: Imaginal landscape by Anahata Giri
“The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.”
- Carl Jung (1)
How do we know the difference between the voice of our own soul and the voices of our persistently-thinking mind and the ego? One answer to this question is revealed in the evocative map shared in Animals of the Four Windows by depth psychologist Eligio Stephen Gallegos (2). He describes four windows of knowing: thinking, sensing, feeling and imagining. Note, as the image of looking through a window is a little removed from inhabiting these ways of being, I describe the windows as portals or gateways that we move through to fully experience the landscape of each way of knowing. Bill Plotkin adds to this framework in his map of the human psyche shared in his book Wild Mind (3), naming the four capacities as heart-centred thinking, full-presence sensing, full-bodied feeling and deep imagining. As we will see, intuition is a composite ability, drawing on any one or more of the four portals of knowing.
Firstly a brief clarification of what I mean by the ego, self, soul and spirit. This is complex terrain and the very brief map here draws largely on Bill Plotkin’s work (4). He describes the self as an integral whole containing universal human capacities or ways of being. Similarly, Gallegos describes the wholeness of the self as the full expression of all four modes of knowing, as explored below. There can be many aspects of the self we are yet to know - the self is like a set of resources that we gradually discover and integrate. The ego is the conscious self, the “I”, the seat of conscious self-awareness. The ego is seperate to the self but can have some conscious access to the unfolding discovery of the integrated self.
Spirit can be named in many ways such as: universal consciousness, the vast play of all life, Mystery or oneness. Bill Plotkin (5) describes the soul as the specific and innate psycho-ecological niche that each individual carries within the earth community. The soul is a kind of blueprint of the exquisitely unique essence of an individual. Metaphorically, a soul is a shining star, part of the vast sky of spirit, yet living here on earth, animating a living, breathing body with unique essence, purpose, calling and gifts. The four portals of knowing not only help us grow the maturity and wholeness of our self, but are portals to the language and revelations of the soul.
The first portal we will explore is the capacity for thinking. Within industrial-rationalist culture, the window of thinking is regarded as superior to all other ways of knowing, making it the most prevalent mode of knowing for most individuals throughout their day, throughout their lives. Our government, education, health system, and culture as a whole, rest on a foundation of rational thought. This leads to a profoundly ingrained habit for most individuals to think their way through any personal dilemma or experience. The dominance of thought leads to the suppression of the modes of sensing, feeling and imagining and is an obstacle on the soul path. We cannot think our way into the realm of soul.
Thinking is a wondrous capacity. However, in western culture, thinking is primarily based on conceptual knowledge or ‘head-thinking’ where thought is separated from embodied or imaginal ways of knowing. This is in sharp contrast to indigenous cultures that still embrace and celebrate embodied, felt, sensing and imaginal ways of being. Head-thinking tends to be overly conceptual, logical and analytical. Bill Plotkin emphasises heart-centred thinking to describe compassionate, creative, ethical and systems-based thinking that sees the whole as well as the parts. Thinking that arises from our heart-centred, embodied or imaginal experience leads to this holistic and potent way of thinking.
Thinking includes conditioned thinking which usually begins as resourceful survival strategies in response to traumatic or difficult formative experiences as a young child. These survival strategies were useful to help us function in adverse circumstances, but can leave us carrying, as an adult, a legacy of internalised negative and limiting beliefs about who we are as a person. These internalised beliefs and narratives form the basis of internalised personas, or inner protectors as described by Bill Plotkin (6). Most of us have a whole team of inner protectors within, such as the: self-critic, prefectionist, bully, victim, good girl, controller and so on. For more detail you can read my full piece on how to work with inner protectors. In summary, the aim is not to banish these protectors, but to stand in the wholeness of our integrated self and negotiate empowering relationships with these parts. Importantly, we also learn to discern the voice of a conditioned part of our psyche, by recognising the ‘flavour’ and character of each inner protector. With careful inner work, we learn to discern the voice of inner protectors from the voice of our self’s wholeness and the voice of the soul.
“Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.”
- Carl Jung
Gallegos suggests that the widespread and crippling habit of self-doubt is based on an attempt to fit oneself into a map that the thinking mind creates. It is possible that the thinking mind itself is the source of self-doubt. Entering the portals of sensing and feeling can give us embodied experience and evidence of deeper wisdom, which can put to rest the doubts of the circling, restless, modern mind.
The next portal, sensing, is our ability to perceive the immediacy of the world around us. Sensing is the portal that is most aware of the outer environment. We draw on the senses of hearing, seeing, feeling, tasting and smelling as we engage with the sensory immediacy of our surroundings. Our senses help us survive by giving us immediate knowledge of safety or danger, attraction or repulsion and so on. Our senses are gateways into moment by moment sensations as ground for pleasure, innocence, playfulness, delight and wonder.
Interestingly, in the moment of sensing, there is no thought. For example, if our hand touches a hot flame, our hand will move away before our thinking capacity registers and labels what has occurred. Perception through our fives sense is direct and does not depend on thinking. Perception arises from awareness, which could also be described as consciousness or presence, thus Plotkin’s naming of this window as full-presence sensing. It is common to confuse awareness and thinking as one and the same thing. Awareness is the capacity to be aware. Australian Indigenous elder Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr beautifully describes awareness or presence:
“It is perhaps the greatest gift we can give to our fellow Australians. In our language this quality is called dadirri. It is inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness. Dadirri recognises the deep spring that is inside us. We call on it and it calls to us…When I experience dadirri, I am made whole again.”
- Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr (7)
Full-presence sensing draws on this deep pool of awareness to sense the moment. A guiding question for this portal of knowing can be: what is here, now?
The portal of feeling is our capacity to feel through our bodies. Bill Plotkin’s term full-bodied feeling reminds us of the depth of feeling that is involved here. We feel: sensations, energies both within and around us, emotions, gut feelings, sensuality, sexuality, interoception (awareness of our internal body) and proprioception (awareness of our body in space), to list a small part of our feeling world. The capacity to feel relies on moment by moment, present-centred awareness. Once again, the guiding question - what is here now? - can be a useful way to anchor us in what we are feeling.
For many of us, our full-bodied feeling is buried or suppressed. This can mean we are seperate from the energising and responsive aliveness of our feeling bodies. Our thinking capacity has been trained in our culture to distrust what we feel. There can be a strong tendency of the mind to avoid or rationalise felt experiences such as pain, grief, shame, joy, peace and bliss. Our culture as a whole actively and systemically avoids pain.
Being with our feeling sense can bring powerful insights and messages but we cannot know the meaning of our feelings with the head. We need to move through the feelings so that meaning can arise from our actual experience, not from our rationalisation about that experience. Gallegos suggests that our feelings already know why they are here. If we give these feelings room to express themselves, then we will discover the meaning and wisdom that feelings hold within. Of course we may need support to help us hold a loving container for processing strong feelings.
The two portals of sensing and feeling are based on embodiment. I love Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen’s description of embodiment:
Embodiment emerges from our cells’ awareness of themselves. It is a direct experience.There are no intermediate steps or translations…just the fully known consciousness of the experienced moment initiated from the cells. Here, the brain is the last to know. The process of embodiment is a being process, not a doing process. It is an awareness process, not a thinking process. There is complete knowing and peaceful comprehension. Out of this embodiment process emerges feeling, sensing, thinking, witnessing, understanding, compassion. The source of this process is free; it is love.
- Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen (8)
The last portal to explore is probably the least understood in mainstream culture: the portal of imagining. One aspect of imagination can be head-driven fantasy, but this is not the full extent of imagination that Gallegos points to. Deep imagination, as Plotkin calls it, refers to the images, symbols, dreams, visions and revelations that spontaneously rise up, that seem to ring with truth and insight. One of the gifts of shamans and mystics past and present, is the ability to commune with the imaginal realm, that holds images of what is and what will be. Carl Jung had profound dedication to the imaginal domain, including exploring the archetypal imagery of the collective unconscious. He wrote:
“The years when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is…derived from this.”
- Carl Jung
Jung developed the practice of active imagination, a process of entering an altered state of consciousness to dialogue with the inner images that appear. This needs both active participation and dialogue with images and receptive surrender to the flow of imagery, without controlling the process with head-thinking. He writes:
“Active imagination requires a state of reverie, half-way between sleep and waking.”
- Carl Jung
In a similar vein, Gallegos writes:
“Deep imagery is a dimension with its own integrity and although we may try to control it and manipulate it the way we have learned to do with the sensed world, we must remember that it itself is fully alive, that it has its own inherent intelligence, and that it is deeply organic, touching closely those places from which our very being springs.”
- Eligio Stephen Gallegos (p. 13)
Whilst imagination’s intelligence flows spontaneously, beyond the control of our rational mind, there are ways to evoke our deep imagination. We can use trance or altered or heightened states of consciousness to evoke the deep imagery locked within our psyche. Practices to evoke heightened states of consciousness include: drumming, dancing, singing, movement, many embodiment practices like shaking, silence, fasting, guided imaginal journeys and nature immersion.
“Intuition does not denote something contrary to reason, but outside of the province of reason.”
Carl Jung
Carl Jung described these four capacities as four functions of consciousness. However, Jung’s four functions included intuition which Gallegos substituted for imagination. Intuition is the capacity to know things beyond the present moment and in circumstances where there is no tangible or immediate evidence. Gallegos studied Jung’s work carefully and noticed that whenever Jung described intuition it was in the form of imagery, thus Gallegos suggests that Jung’s way of intuiting was through the window of imagination. Further, Gallegos believes that intuition is not a single window but a capacity that can draw on any or all of the four windows of knowing. We can intuit based on a gut feeling, an emotion, a thought or an image. This composite capacity of intuition can be pictured as the centre of a compass, with the four compass directions being the four directions or gateways of knowing.
"Sensation establishes what is actually present, thinking enables us to recognise its meaning, feeling tells us its value, and intuition points to possibilities as to whence it came and whither it is going in a given situation.”
- Carl Jung
To add to the above quote:
“Without deep imagination, we would have only the most superficial experience of another person, a relationship, a song or painting, a word or flower, a meal, or the design of a book or a business.”
- Bill Plotkin (9)
The current planetary crisis, both humanitarian and environmental, is partly due to a profound lack of human imagination. Our capacity to imagine is vital if we are to come into deep communion with each other and with the living, breathing web of life of our earth home. From loving communion with the wild web of life, we can discover more effective ways to live on this planet without destroying the air, water and earth that all life needs and to meet human needs in harmony with the earth community. Deep imagination is humanity's untapped resource for creating visionary and life-enhancing societies, yet to be dreamed into being.
As we have seen, each of the four portals of knowing offer profound gifts for navigating our inner lives and the world. Heart-centred thinking helps us create maps and share stories as the foundation for service, teaching and leading, to create a compassionate world for all. Maps and stories guide us but most important is to walk the terrain. The other three gateways help us do this. The gateway of full-presence sensing is the most attuned to the outer world and gives us the basis not only for survival but for sensory delight and connection with nature and all of life. Deep feeling is a river of felt experience that energises and guides us as we act in the world. Deep imagination is a knowing of the inner and can evoke growth, healing, wholeness and communion with self, soul and nature.
Whilst these four portals of knowing are distinct, the full potency of each is only revealed when we can access all of them, flowing through each portal, each portal informing other portals, moment by moment, in a fluid synthesis of our wondrous capacity to feel, sense, imagine, think, intuit and be. Intuition can help us weave the threads of our multi-faceted knowing, to reveal the wisdom of our own soul and the wisdom of the web of life all around us.
Anahata Giri
Footnotes:
(1) Carl Jung, Lecture The Inner Voice, cited in The Integration of Personality, 1939.
(2) Eligio Stephen Gallegos, Animals of the Four Windows, Moon Bear Press, 1991. All other references to Gallegos come from this text.
(3) Bill Plotkin, Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche, New World Library, 2013. All other references to Plotkin come from this text unless otherwise specified.
(4) Bill Plotkin, Journey of Soul Initiation, New World Library, 2021. See Glossary.
(5) Bill Plotkin, Journey of Soul Initiation, New World Library, 2021.
(6) Bill Plotkin, Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche, New World Library, 2013.
(7) Miriam Rose Ungunmerr, https://www.miriamrosefoundation.org.au/dadirri/
(8) Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Basic Neurocellular Patterns: Exploring Developmental Movement, Burchfield Rose Publishers, 2018.
(9) Bill Plotkin, Journey of Soul Initiation, New World Library, 2021, p.50