What is Psychological Thinking?

What is Psychological Thinking?

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe. — John Muir

I think John Muir, the celebrated Scottish-American preservationist, was saying poetically that everything is connected to everything else. Most environmental scientists and lovers of the outdoors and the natural world would agree with his assessment. However, applying that idea to the human experience—our personal or more importantly our inner world—is more difficult to grasp. It is easy to see the connection between flowers and pollinators or to take an even bigger step of seeing the connection between forest health and the well-being of the oceans. This is ecosystemic thinking. Does this parallel hold for man?

Man is indeed a mini-ecosystem or microcosm, as G.I. Gurdjieff might say. Seeing connectedness is observable in the quest for self-knowledge and is one of two fundamental ideas of the Work. The other idea is perceiving the inner meaning of things and manifestations, which underlies a term that P.D. Ouspensky calls “psychological thinking.”

The psychological method starts with two admissions. The first is that things have their inner meaning. The second is that things are connected; that they only appear to be separated. Things depend on one another; they stand in a certain relation to one another, whereas the logical method takes each thing separately. — P.D. Ouspensky

Psychological thinking involves the ability to hold an idea with many parts of my being and not solely the lower part of my intellectual center, the logical mind. An enhanced capacity to observe, hold onto, and evaluate an idea through self-observation, experience, and greater objectivity is the role of psychological thinking. It plows deeper and asks questions of myself that I would not ordinarily pose. It stretches and helps me make new understandings. What looks like a contradiction or conundrum is in fact a greater whole, a perspective that approaches unity from a place of disunity. For instance, a strength is a weakness, and a weakness is a strength.

In the Work, it is necessary for me to re-orient how I look at the world and how I view myself. True self-knowledge is only attainable if I can suspend my logical mind and look deeper tangentially, vertically, and horizontally at any given observation or experience.

I had an incident just this past weekend to test my valuation for psychological thinking. My wedding anniversary date coincided with the day of a dear friend's memorial service. We flew to California on Friday and returned home late last night, two days later. To the lower parts of my machine, it was potentially a story of poor timing, not the way to spend an anniversary, and a bit of woe as me. My actual inner experience, with psychological thinking was something entirely different. The only woe is saying goodbye to a friend. It was not poor timing at all. It was as it was supposed to be.

I am grateful that I was able to see the miraculous in the overlapping correspondence of these two events. Seeing the inner meaning and connectedness of everything made for a profoundly different understanding for me (and my wife). What could be a better way to celebrate my anniversary than to reflect on a dear friend and his kindness and contribution to my life and my marriage over 40 years? We celebrated not only my anniversary but a deeply profound friendship and an esoteric relationship transcending time and space, an eternal connection.

My Teacher said at a dinner on the night of the memorial service and anniversary that if he were allowed to change one thing in his life, he would not change a thing. That is another example of psychological thinking. Does psychological thinking provide you with a greater and deeper understanding of things in your life?

There can be a scales on which the gram outweighs the kilogram. — Simone Weil

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Book of the Dead of Hunefer, Heart Weighing Ceremony (detail), British Museum