Three Levels of Mind – How They Operate Independently and as a Whole

The triune brain concept  has been around for more than fifty years. Paul McLean (1950’s) proposed that the human brain has three different areas that correspond with the evolution of man.

The brainstem is equivalent to the reptilian brain, the limbic system developed in the mammals, and the cortex developed to make up the three levels of the human brain. This concept has been accepted into the mainstream understanding of the physical make-up of the brain.

What is not understood is that each of these brain areas produce their own states of mind, and each area communicates with the other, mostly in an upward manner, from brainstem to feelings to cognition. The free flow between areas produces a healthily functioning and integrated brain on a psychological level.

The human brain develops in a baby in the same order that it developed during evolution.

For example the baby brain has an almost fully functioning brainstem at birth because the baby needs to be able to breathe, digest its food and have a heartbeat which are physical necessities. What is not fully understood is that the brain is sensing its environment, whether it is safe and joyful, or whether it is unsafe and unloving.

The limbic area develops at around six months and at this stage the baby is mostly a sensing/feeling being. The cortex, or thinking brain does not develop much until eighteen months of age.

The main imprinting that drives the child for the rest of its life occurs during the sensation/feeling part of its development. Obviously this area can be affected throughout a lifetime, but it is generally accepted by neuroscience that the earliest months of life provide for the deepest and most powerful imprinting.

A badly imprinted brainstem from unloving or unaware parents, is the cause of so many mental health problems and dysfunctional emotions later in life.

Much of the present day understanding of mental health disorders is that they can be controlled by using the cognitive mind to treat symptoms. For example Positive Thinking, Mindfulness and Meditation are widely practised within the mental health system to control symptoms.

But this goes against evolution. The brainstem with its imprinting, either good or bad, drives upward into feeling, and then feelings determine the way we react and think about the world.

The brainstem senses, the limbic system feels and the cortex thinks. A fact of brain functioning is that thinking cannot effect what we sense. They are two different languages, so thinking positive and meditation can alter a symptom, but it cannot change the imprinted cause.

I know this because Primal Therapy uses evolution by going back in time. In therapy I started in my cortex where I talked about my problems. Then I felt the underling feelings – gradually at first then in their full force. My dominant underlying feelings were sadness and grief, anger and very extreme loneliness. As the therapy progressed I started to experience sensations and the original imprints.

Experiencing the imprints was an amazing journey for me, because it opened my mind into a space that I never knew existed.

The reason  so many people suffer mental health and relationship problems is that their original imprinting is faulty, and this causes dysfunction in the cortex. Things like depression, anxiety, suicide, domestic and international violence and addictions all have their root cause in faulty brainstem imprinting.

Implicit in all this brain functioning is that it is very easy to traumatise a baby’s brain, and our present culture does not support the rearing of healthy children. It is too focused on  material wealth and consumerism ( the thinking mind) at the expense of the very powerful social brain (sensations and feelings).

That is why the concept of the triune brain is so important. The sensations and feelings give a human all the real pleasures of life, supplying us with love and meaningful relationships. These areas need careful nurturing, especially  in the earliest months of life. The cortex is the thinking part of the brain that can put a man on the moon, but cannot supply a human with love and happiness.

The Nature of Love

Love is a largely misunderstood concept. Within psychology it is generally regarded as too esoteric and subjective in nature to be regarded as anything approaching objective. The study of psychology involves the use of cognitive mind only. Emotions are discussed but emotions and feelings are different things. There is no requirement to actually experience the other two levels of mind, the feelings and sensations. With all mental disorders it is generally accepted that our very clever cognitive mind will eventually sort out humanities problems.

But Janovian Primal Theory knows that Love is the only way to real mental and physical health. Love is the force within the brainstem sensations that keeps humans bonded and healthy. My own journey down through the three levels of mind has lead me to the very seat of Love. From my perspective, Love is no longer esoteric, but a very objective force that gives my life the awe and euphoria beyond my wildest dreams. I now see psychology as the subjective entity, in the fact it is a bunch of theories that are not doing much to stem the tide of mental disorders.

Love in its pure form, when it is not suppressed because of Primal Pain, is all the spiritually that humans need. In this present day and age, when all our universities and teaching establishments only engage the cognitive mind, they leave behind the most valuable assets of being human, which are the feelings and sensations.

Religion says that God is Love, or Love is God and that we need religion to supply our moral underpinnings. But Love is a powerful force that is inherent in all humans, regardless of religious belief, or any other belief for that matter. Love is the feeling that gives humanity its moral code to live by. I would also add that Love was necessary during human evolution; as important to successful human evolution as feathers are to birds, and speed and sharp claws are to the big cats. In John Lennon’s words, imagine a world without the dogma and fundamentalism of religion but filled with Love. Love is all there is, Love is all there is, Love is all there is.

Many people from all parts of the world have developed ways of addressing their need for spirituality. If we are not Loved in the full meaning of Love as children, then that part of us that some describe as the ‘soul’ seems unfulfilled or something is missing in life. When I was suffering severe depression I explored the alternative and esoteric healing options. People were looking for spirituality, nirvana, euphoria, etc, but I can’t remember anyone looking for Love as a means to understanding the drudgery that was life for them. After I had spent many years in Primal Therapy I started to feel the power of Love, and then I knew that Love was really what everyone looking for. If we are Loved as infants then we can spend our time here on earth just enjoying the awesome journey with Love as our constant companion.

Birds without feathers and big cats without speed and sharp claws would soon become extinct, just as humans without Love are heading down the path to extinction.

From Struggle to Healing: My Journey into Primal Therapy

The Three Levels of Mind is not well known outside of those who undergo Janovian Primal Therapy, In this blog I write things that may seem strange, or are not part of the narrative spoken by the general population. In that regard I think it is time to update the process that I have gone through that enables me to write from a different reality – a reality that is ultimately available to all humans, provided we are not traumatized in childhood.

There are quite a number of factors that came together that enabled me to stay the journey that went deep into my feelings and sensations. The cognitive reality I lived with for 55 years of my life was super-ceded by a reality based on my feelings and sensations. They are two entirely different realities.

Money It takes money to travel from Australia to Los Angeles and stay there for two years while undergoing therapy and training. After thirty years of marriage I divorced and used my share of the accumulated assets to fund the process.

Time Many people struggle with making time for the therapy. I was on the verge of suicide and very unhappy with my life, so at age fifty I devoted the time to try and turn my life around. Living the way I was, was not an option.

Desire for a better life. The therapy becomes painful and the amount of it is unbelievable – it just keeps coming. There were times when I felt like quitting but I intuitively knew that if I walked out the door my physical body may well survive, but my ‘sole’ would be dead. The thought of continuing to live with a dead soul was unbearable.

Circumstances I went to Los Angeles in 2004 for two months and again in 2005 for two more months. After returning to Perth in 2005 I intended to buy a house but while I was away house prices had sky-rocketed, and I was not able to buy in. At that stage I knew how beneficial Primal Therapy was, so I decided to invest my remaining savings in going back to Los Angeles and train as a therapist. If I had bought a house and found a partner I may have got comfortable with life and not continued my Primal journey.

Openings into a different reality Through-out the early part of my seeking, when I had spent money and time, I often felt I was getting no-where. Then I started to experience a type of euphoria, only lasting seconds initially, but gradually increasing to minutes. While I was experiencing these phenomenon I remember thinking this must be the state of mind I was looking for, and if I can access them for a few minutes, then what does it take to have access to them at will. The answer was to clear out the primal pain and these euphoric and loving feelings are a common and natural part of my life. The time and money I spent has come back to me tenfold in the form of a soul that is truly alive and well.

The right zone Francis Janov said that the people who do best in therapy are the ones who can understand how the therapy works and can use that to advantage. I was fortunate to fall into that zone. Some people are highly emotional and distraught and so are above the feeling zone. Others are so depressed and lack any access to feeling at all that they are well below the primal feeling zone. Also some people have so much pain that they can’t stand the experience. Then there are many millions of people in the world who struggle through the daily grind of life, not aware that life could be so much better.

Primal Pain – Humanity’s Greatest Danger

Humanity’s greatest danger is not coming from Global warming, as many scientists are predicting. Humanity’s greatest problem lies in the fact that the nature and power of Primal Pain is not understood.

The future of mankind lies in understanding how our brain works. The world rejoiced when we landed a man on the moon, and the general feeling seemed to be that if we can achieve that wonderful technical feat then we can achieve anything we put our minds to. Amongst all the euphoria of the time I can clearly remember some important scientist saying that  now we have conquered outer space, the next great achievement for mankind will be to conquer ‘inner space’ (meaning how the human brain works).

By all accounts the efforts of trying to conquer ‘inner space’ is proving more difficult than landing a man on the moon. Despite billions of dollars being spent on brain research, the mental health industry cannot fully explain what causes anxiety and depression, and therefore are struggling in their efforts to find cures for these common disorders effecting millions of people in every country on earth. Primal Pain is rarely ever mentioned, and yet it is one of the strongest forces within the human brain. Imagine getting a rocket off the earth if scientists did not understand the force of gravity. The same applies to issues within the human brain. Our “rockets’ in medical science are not getting off the ground because hardly anyone understands the force of Primal Pain,  much less the effort it takes to overcome that force so the journey into ‘inner space’ can blast off.

So what’s the problem? Why don’t brain scientists understand Primal Pain? For that we need to understand that the human brain has three different levels of functioning – the cognitive mind, the feeling mind and the mind that deals in sensation. The cognitive, or intellectual mind is used when putting a man on the moon, because physics is an intellectual type of knowing. Sensations and feelings are put aside when a scientist is trying to work out gravity and how to build rockets and the mathematics of moon landings.  Primal pain, depression and anxiety are functions of the feeling/sensing brain, but brain scientists are trying to solve these problems from their intellectual brain. Just like a rocket scientist needs to put his feelings/sensation brain aside to land a man on the moon, a brain scientist should put his cognitive mind aside when dealing with feeling and sensation – and Primal Pain is a function of this part of the brain.

Putting my cognitive brain aside was one of the things I experienced during Primal Therapy. The primal journey starts in the cognitive mind and the patient is guided to gradually open up into the feeling brain.  As the journey down into deeper feeling progresses. the ability to talk and think gradually decreases until the pain of reliving childhood trauma completely over-rides the ability to talk. Then the journey continues down into the sensations, where the body /mind relives the original trauma, and responds in reptilian like movements because sensation is generated from the reptilian part of our brain.

The most notable thing about experiencing my feelings and sensations was that they carried  with them a huge amount of knowledge, not about how to put a man on the moon type of knowledge, but knowledge of the power of Primal Pain and how it stopped me from enjoying my life to the fullest.

This year I have decided to finish the units I need to complete my bachelors degree in psychology. My visit to a University  bookshop had me up to my shoulders in academic books of all kinds. I stood in the aisle and reflected that my journey back to excellent mental health and better physical health did not require any textbooks at all. Instead I had to lay down on a mattress in  a padded room where a therapist guided me into my feelings and then deeper into sensation. The knowledge that I gained from my ‘inner space’ of feelings and sensation was more beneficial to how I experience life on this earth than all the intellectual books I was surrounded by.

What is Primal Pain and How it Shapes Our Beliefs and Actions

Primal Pain is created when we do not get our needs met as children. Another way of saying that is when our primary carers do not love us we suffer pain. It is not just ordinary pain that can be easily felt. If we are not loved as babies and children then that lack of care is a threat to our very lives. Regard Primal Pain has having a life or death quality about it. Then we can begin to understand how Primal Pain shapes who we are and how we act in a monumental way.

When Primal Pain is relived during Janovian Primal Therapy it is released in small modules. For example I have probably released something like two hundred “modules” so far. However each ‘module’ was as much Pain as I could physically and emotionally deal with at one time. It is my experience that the mental health industry and brain scientists grossly under-estimate the amount of Primal Pain each of us carries, and the effect it has on our lives. All Primal patients are always surprised at how much Primal Pain they carried, and how much the pain had influenced who they became as adults.

After we suffer Primal Pain we unconsciously develop a defence system that keeps the pain from coming to conscious awareness. I will briefly discuss three of the worst ways (in my opinion) that Primal Pain and its associated defence system make a human life more miserable than it needs to be.

Primal Pain stops or reduces all feeling

The pain and pleasure pathways in the human brain use the same neuronal tracks. Therefore when the brain blocks Primal Pain from coming to consciousness it also puts a block on any good feelings, and especially on our feelings of love. Love is the feeling we need to bond and communicate in meaningful ways. Who would disagree that there is a huge lack of love in the world today. We have psychologists who approach brain science in an intellectual way, but I have heard it said that Primal Therapists should be known as ‘Feelologists’ because we understand feelings and sensations, and how important they are to healthy human functioning.

Primal Pain causes irrational minds

When we carry Primal Pain we have to think and talk in ways that keep us from our Primal Pain. We do this unconsciously but it has a tremendous negative outcome in just about every area of human life. In the twentieth century humans killed around 250 million other humans because one group irrationally thought that making a better world involved killing all those in ‘different’ groups. And even today that irrational thinking is still causing many deaths, and nobody seems able to stop it or understand what causes people to think and act in such obviously pathological and idiotic ways. Another common thing that irrational minds develop are belief systems. The most obvious one is a belief in a God. Now it would not worry me if people wanted to believe in God and kept it to themselves, but religion is the basis of so many conflicts within communities and also the world at large – so much so that surely we must all realise that maybe there is a better way. (This better way involves understanding the Three Levels of Human Consciousness, and how Primal Pain distorts these three different levels to create the mess we humans find ourselves in.)

Primal Pain is the underlying cause of nearly all mental disorders and many physical disorders as well.

The common mental disorders of depression, anxiety and suicide have their basis in Primal Pain. Depression is the repression of Primal Pain. Anxiety and panic attacks happen when the defence system is unable to completely block all painful feelings, and so some of them come to conscious awareness. Suicide, or not wanting to live in this world, is the result of painful things that happen to us, mostly in early childhood. We get physically sick because when the brain represses pain it tends to repress all systems, like the immune system and also our sexuality. Low libido and painful sex ruin many promising relationships.

GETTING REAL

When undergoing Primal Therapy the therapist targets the Primal Pain. It does not matter so much what the symptoms are, because once Primal Pain is released from the system, the human organism can return to good health. One of the most profound things to happen to a person undergoing Primal Therapy is that FEELING comes back into the body. When we can feel our own feelings we become a lot more aware of other peoples feelings – we will be less inclined to shoot and bomb our neighbours.

Irrationality disappears because during Primal Therapy we have confronted our Pain – which is facing the horrible truth that we were not loved much, if at all. Facing that truth makes it easier to face the reality of life, and although life can deliver us some horrible blows, it is still mostly a wonderful world to live in. If we can learn to replace Primal Pain with Love then the world can become our oyster. Our need to believe in a heavenly father will disappear when we understand the real power of love. Loving parents are all we need to establish a sound mind/body to experience this world in all its glory.

If Primal Pain causes so much sickness both mentally and physically, then it follows that not imprinting Primal Pain, especially in young children, will have a huge impact on the future health outcomes of all peoples. (This is already becoming known with research like the Adverse Childhood Experiences, which shows how trauma in childhood is strongly correlated with mental and physical ill-health later in life. Primal Theory and Therapy knew this fifty years ago and has developed a process to reverse most of the damage. The orthodoxy are still looking for a viable cure, but not towards Janovian Primal Therapy).