Palmer, H. (1998). Inner Knowing. New York, NY: Penguin Putnam Inc.
Helen Palmer’s ‘Inner Knowing’ is a compilation of essays by an impressive cohort of writers who offer a wealth of collective knowledge in the field of human consciousness, evolution and the search for meaning. The overall message this book conveys is that our ability to self-examine our life will determine its quality. The many essays in this book offer both Eastern and Western philosophies to encourage a more conscious existence and enhance our ability to create a meaningful life.
Carl Jung, Montague Ullman, Erich Fromm, Ann Weiser Cornell, Jack Kornfield and many more contributors to this book offer their thoughts of how we can become more conscious, recognize our intuition and increase insight.
Palmer explains that the evolution of modern society resulted in individualistic meaning making and the loss of the collective compass that ancient societies benefited from. Palmer feels we have become too dependent on external modes of eliciting information, rather than calling on our internal senses to inform us. Garry Lachman is another contributor and describes consciousness today as based on projection, whereas ancient consciousness was ‘participatory’ (Pg. 9) meaning there was no distinction between original mankind’s inner and outer landscapes. This was a time in evolution where consciousness was collective, at one with nature and not encumbered by ambiguous language and metaphor.
Montague Ullman writes about the wealth of information our dreams convey if we take the time to understand their meaning and symbols. ‘There are no rational defenses in a dream and we therefore face ourselves more honestly, in a way that we cannot while awake’ (Pg. 91). Ullman believes dreams served as a primitive alert function to wake cavemen who existed under a constant threat of attack from predators, thus ensuring survival of the species. Dreams can convey personal and collective meaning and can be put to use in a psychodynamic context, such as a dream group. This allows people to consciously connect, on a deep feeling level, addresses societies fragmentation and leads us towards species survival.
Erich Fromm describes how our reality is distorted by the mind’s construct, which influences how we interpret our experiences and relationships. In today’s society the individual considers him or herself as the center of the universe, as apposed to primitive mankind who existed as one with nature and his tribe. To conclude this review, I have included a passage by Fromm, regarding the nature of the therapeutic encounter:
’In this productive relatedness between analyst and patient, in the act of being fully engaged with the patient, in being fully open and responsive to him, in being soaked with him, as it were, in this center-to-center relatedness, lies one of the essential conditions for psychoanalytic understanding and cure. The analyst must become the patient, yet he must be himself; he must forget that he is the doctor, yet he must remain aware of it’ (Pg. 101).