Archaeological Psychology: Consciousness and Subconscious

We present here a collection of lectures given by Daniele Corradetti at the Portuguese Archaeological Association section in Alvor on October 16, 2020. These lectures, which we decided to collect in a single volume, constitute an introduction to archaeological psychology and deal with the distinction between the SELF and the psyche, between conscious and subconscious, the language of dreams, the power of symbols, and how to use these instruments to achieve inner transmutation.

Pampsychism means "Everything is psyche." Hermes Trismegistus said: Everything that exists has a consciousness, has a psyche. Galaxies, the Sun, planets, atoms, animals, ourselves—everything that exists has a psyche. And all reality outside of us is essentially a mental reality, meaning the ultimate matter that exists is mental matter.

A table is hard, even in dreams. In dreams, we can see all colors even though our eyes are closed. So what is the difference between dreams and reality? The difference is that our dreams are the expression, the fruit, of personal oneiric activity—that of one person—while the world and universe are the fruit of the oneiric activity of Universal Man, Cosmic Man. This is the fundamental idea.

According to Hermes Trismegistus, everything that exists possesses consciousness and has psyche. Everything, in the final analysis, is psyche. But we also have something different from animals, plants, everything else—we have something we call the SELF, something special. The ancient Greeks called it Logos, as it is related to the Word (Greek: logos) and the capacity to speak.

The SELF is spirit, the deepest part of ourselves. This is a super-conscious place, and generally we are not conscious of this part of ourselves that is totally immortal, that is free, without physical prison, mental prison, or emotional prison. It is without form and cannot die, has no limits of form, dimensional, physical, or psychological—it simply is. We are not conscious of this part, but it is above our consciousness.

The SELF acts as a force, manifests generally as a force of will. It is the place where, when our consciousness reaches this state, transparency between us and the divine aspect becomes possible—a truly divine, transcendent aspect that we will generally call Christ, to denote the God-Man state. The relationship between our self and the psyche generates what we call the field of our consciousness, involving perceptions, sensations, thoughts, emotions—all forces of which we are conscious, that we do consciously.

There is also a world that is larger, that is no longer the field of our consciousness but what we can call the subconscious or personal unconscious—all psychic acts (like perceptions, thoughts, emotions that are not conscious), meaning we are not conscious of these acts but they can become conscious and are found just below our consciousness. For example, when we see an advertisement, we are not conscious of it, but somehow it remains in our consciousness...