THE THREE DISCOVERIES: THE DEFLECTION MONITOR

The unsolved problem: man’s incapacity to know reality and know himself

Something cut man off from his knowledge of reality. This is the greatest human problem expressed by religion and philosophy. Many thinkers and religious schools throughout history have highlighted the incapacity of consciousness to understand the real for what it is and they describe the serious effects that result from this. This is a drama to which a rational and scientific solution could not be found.
Plato insisted that man is kept in the dark from the truth. According to Plato there are vital forces within the soul, symbolized by the white horse that takes us higher, but there are also destructive forces, which according to him are essentially the basest and lowest passions. But why do they pull us down? Where do they come from? Why does every man have this black horse?
For Plato not knowing the truth is the human being’s great existential drama, symbolized by the myth of the cave which leaves little room for the individual’s capacity to manage alone.
Many others follow Plato in speaking of limited knowledge of reason. Plotinus wrote in the Enneads, that rationality has a limited and distorted vision of reality. Besides not knowing the external reality man’s drama is that he does not know himself. Like Socrates and Plato, Leibniz also underlines this concept: writing about “small perceptions” and “virtual nativism”. The German philosopher maintained that in man’s head there were notions which he had no consciousness of, hypothesizing that our mind contains something that goes beyond consciousness.
For Kant the phenomenon is reality, the only reality conceivable and accessible by the human mind. Reason cannot know the noumenon: man cannot achieve comprehension of the causes but must limit himself to understanding the effects. It is an acceptance: man is destined for ignorance, and there is no cure.
Nietzsche also confirms the limits of the knowledge of reason: “there is more reason in your body than in the height of your wisdom”.
The presence of something which impedes man from understanding reality is an important point in Schopenhauer’s thought. Contrary to Kant he believed that phenomenon was an illusion, dream and appearance, what in Indian philosophy is called the “Veil of Maya”, the illusion that veils the reality of things in their authentic essence.
How can we pierce the veil? According to Schopenhauer it can be done through the will. Where does the Veil of Maya come from? Why is it there? And why does every human being have it in his consciousness?
All great religions confirm the problem that the highest philosophers complained of, even if they maintain that it can only be solved with the help of God or after death. According to the great religions and ancient myths man originally lived in an Eden-like space with a god or some gods. But at a certain point something happened that cut man out of this seemingly divine condition and threw him into the drama of existence. Each religious school has its own formula on how to return to the original condition, they all agree however that all human suffering derived from this cut.
In the modern age Sigmund Freud symbolizes the acceptance of man’s “non-knowledge”. The Austrian scientist discovered that the conscious ego is only a small part of the mind, which is mostly formed by the unconscious: Freud believed that man does not know himself and is at the mercy of ungovernable forces of which he is unconscious. Freud’s unconscious, like Pandora’s Box, contains everything. In particular Freud revealed from his study of the sick that the psyche was governed by impulses for pleasure (Eros) and destructive impulses (Thanatos). The two impulses are simultaneously present in every person, in dialectic opposition. Freud in some ways recalls Plato’s myth of the chariot, but treats it as a doctor would. Moreover he added the concept of the super Ego, which represents the social norms interiorized by the Ego and superimposed on the consciousness. Freud’s Ego should resolve the pathology by bringing repressed material to the light of consciousness, finding a balance between vital impulses and the needs of the super Ego.
Freud’s greatest discovery was the identification of the unconscious, but he concentrated on analysing the effects, with the aim of solving the pathology, renouncing a deeper investigation into the unconscious dynamics and without making general rules for every human being. According to Freud the solution should be sought case by case, through the methods he indicated: especially through association and oneiric analysis.
Freud was the first, from then on psychoanalysts and philosophers accepted the scientific discovery of the unconscious. Nearly all of them confirm the existence of a grey area in the human mind where vital forces are linked to the destructive ones. Furthermore many schools of thought place the accent on how environment warps consciousness.
In some clinical cases, Binswanger’s are an example of these, the existence of a mechanism is noted that alters the conscious in the seriously mentally ill. However these scholars avoid explaining paranoid schizophrenia, even in psychological terms, and limit themselves to describing the effects.
No-one tries to isolate this altering mechanism or to understand what it is and how it acts within the human mind.
The effects of the fact that man does not know himself are: existential suffering which may cross over into more or less serious pathologies such as neurosis and schizophrenia. This incapacity for knowledge, or rather the presence of the unconscious is for everyone a “given fact” of the human being: even if it has serious effects no-one manages to find the cause or a definitive solution to the problem of man’s incapacity to know himself and his surrounding reality. What darkens consciousness and prevents man from knowing reality and from knowing himself?
After three thousand years no-one has yet understood what the “Veil of Maya”, active in men’s minds, is. This is the question mark which Antonio Meneghetti is the first to answer in a scientific way by isolating, describing and resolving the warping mechanism inserted in the human mind.

The discovery of the deflection monitor

Meneghetti asked whether the human being can achieve knowledge of reality, and if this doesn’t happen is it nature that made a mistake in man or has something been added that alters consciousness?
“Having discovered this principle (the ontic In-itself. Editor’s note), it was easy to discover the “deflection monitor”. I saw this other principle that spoke, made laws. The ontic In-itself does not give laws, it has no middle ground, it simply says: “It is, it isn’t, it’s for me, it’s not for me”. This other principle instead spoke and said: some things you can do, some things you can’t, for a series of reasons, etc. and it had its own language and laws. It possessed its own category (and its own set of commandments) which at first seemed to me to be an archetype of morals, and therefore positive, but in following its directives it did not bear the same fruit as the first criterion. In fact when I analysed people by listening to the dictates of the deflection monitor – so through respect for and implementation of current moral laws – they physically died. I slowly began to realize that the deflection monitor had nothing to do with the simple principle of life because it did not bring positive results to the subject”. Antonio Meneghetti identified a mechanism that acts in the human psyche deflecting the reflection of his perceptions and altering his knowledge of reality and therefore his consciousness. In his texts he describes its nature, how it acts and the effects its activity produces on human beings, both individually and in the social group. He also describes how we can successfully neutralize its action thus guaranteeing development for the subject.
Meneghetti was very prudent in revealing his discovery. In 1975 he first spoke of the presence of a “deforming grid” that alters our perception of reality. Four years later he began to speak of the deflection monitor until finally in 1985 he decided to publish the book The deflection monitor in the human psyche, where he described the nature and effects of the monitor in a very original way, showing how it acts through examples taken from society and the theories of other scholars.
The two discoveries, the ontic In-itself and the deflection monitor, were obtained thanks to a particular tool that represents the solution of another problem which remained unsolved for thousands of years. The semantic field.