THE THREE DISCOVERIES: THE SEMANTIC FIELD

The unsolved problem: how nature speaks

“I am being attacked by two opposing sects – scientists and the ignorant. They both laugh at me calling me “master of frog dance”. And yet I know I have discovered one of the greatest forces of nature”.
Galvani, who discovered electricity.

Man has searched for energy since ancient times. Recent history has been marked by the discovery of two important types of energy that have changed the world: electric and nuclear energy, yet many maintain that another type of energy exists, which is present in the universe and affects every life form.
Even Descartes spoke of this universal energy, defined “virtual hyperfield” by Tom Bearden, “morphogenetic field” by Sheldrake, “orgon” by William Reich, “Spiritus Universalis” by alchemists, CHI by the Chinese and KI by the Japanese.
Many speak of this basic form of universal energy that is present everywhere. Many scholars have identified a similar form of energy in man. Two fifteenth century philosophers, Agrippa and Ficino, individuated a force in man that derives from the soul or the spirit and is capable of acting “not only on one’s body but also on those nearby”.
In the eighteen hundreds William Crookes defined this force as “psychic force”. The English scientist noted that this force or power was extremely variable and at times completely absent; it required patient and conscientious research. The Freudian revolution involved overthrowing the Ego and recognizing the true voice of the individual in the unconscious: the voice within the individual is not his ego but his unconscious. Lacan also maintained that the unconscious was structured like a language, a language which we should learn to read. Some analysts, such as Jaspers, Stein and Binswanger felt that empathy with the patient was necessary in order to understand it. Even though they speak of the language of the unconscious no-one is able to codify it in a “dictionary” that is valid for everyone. There is a universal energy and psychic force which even if it cannot be measured by physics, produces concrete effects, as revealed by the scholars cited above. Are they two independent forces or are they related in some way?
Several theories affirm that psychic forces, like physical forces, are different moments of the same universally acting energy. This is a thesis which forms the basis of many oriental schools of thought. Advaita philosophy and other yoga traditions speak of “Kundalini”. By “Kundalini” they mean an energy which resides in the human body, as a manifestation of the universal energy called sakti. The “Kundalini” is used by Schopenhauer to indicate the will, inherent in the soul, which when exercised allows one to reach higher states of consciousness. Freud’s Id also reminds us of the oriental Kundalini. So, there is a universal energy and psychic forces are a part of it.
Some speak of energy, others speak of existing but immeasurable forms of communication. Is there a link between energy and communication? If there is a universal intelligence at the basis of this energy or communication, would it be possible to understand its language? The Professor has found a scientific answer to these questions.

The discovery of the semantic field

It cannot be measured because “it is not energy but it is with the energy”. It is information that varies the energy of the receiver. For this reason it is more correctly defined as a language, the language that nature uses through her individuations. Antonio Meneghetti defines this language as “semantic field” and it was his earliest discovery.
“The semantic field is the proportion that nature arranges within its individuations. (…) Everything in life moves forward through relationships, force fields: plants, insects, birds, eagles all have preferential rapports and they are attracted. This is the game through which nature maintains her unity of discourse, aim, project; in creating her forms she also maintains their possibility to communicate”.
The ontic In-itself and the deflection monitor can neither see nor touch the five senses. And yet they represent the fundamental discoveries in Ontopsychology. The medium that made these discoveries possible was the semantic field. The semantic field represents Meneghetti’s earliest discovery. During his years as a therapist he noticed that while his patients talked he averted sensations, saw images in his mind that did not have a logic that could be directly connected to what the patient was saying. Yet Meneghetti perceived that this too was transmitted by the client. Transmitted but at an unconscious level: the client did not realize what he/she was transmitting but it was a much higher level of information compared to what the patient was saying. This was how Meneghetti realized that there was an unconscious communication that transmitted information without considering the conscious will of the subject. Meneghetti noticed that this language transmitted all the elements of the unconscious, in particular the ontic In-itself and the deflection monitor. In short he managed to distinguish between these two pulsions and the images originating from each. Putting the information he received into practice during therapy he was able to verify in the effects that if the client acted on the intentionality of the ontic In-itself they obtained the solution of the problem and became healthy. If instead they followed what was expressed by the deflection monitor the result was that the illness continued. Meneghetti also noticed that while what the deflection monitor communicated was consistent with social values, the super Ego, the “norm”, the ontic In-itself was instead much more creative, acquiring an originality in each individual and changing on the basis of the situation. He noticed that following the In-itself always meant success for the subject.
All this communication occurred through a language that Meneghetti could not find in any of the texts he had studied. The only affinity he found was in some research which spoke of the child as outside of the adult, Meneghetti more properly defined this as “phenomenology of the psychic causality of the adult of reference”, all this occurred through the unconscious communication of the semantic field.
Starting from clinical research, Antonio Meneghetti realized that this type of unconscious communication occurring between human beings is a widespread reality, or rather it is reality, and it is the basic communication that occurs in nature. This is where Meneghetti’s path coincides with humanity’s great writings which speak of the existence of a way of communication in nature that leads the insect to find the flower, the migratory bird to find its way; there is continual interaction between every creature, between plants, animals and every element of nature. Meneghetti called each space of interaction “semantic field”, seen as an interaction that has meaning, from the Greek term sema that means sign. “There is therefore a constant symbiosis, men are also connected, they continually breathe, and they are continually in and out, in osmosis. The semantic field transports something, both the deflection monitor and the ontic In-itself, which can be distinguished through the results. Semantic field is negative when it reduces man’s work, his potential, his activity, his intelligence”. Antonio Meneghetti also dedicated a text to the Semantic Field, which thoroughly describes its characteristics and effects. As a language Meneghetti codifies it in his writings and through his explanations it becomes a potential tool for knowledge of human beings.

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.

THE THREE DISCOVERIES: THE ONTIC IN-ITSELF

The unsolved problem: the existence of the soul

Soul or spirit means “vital breath”. By “breath” the ancients meant something that was invisible but had visible effects. For all great religions the soul was a natural concept of man and represented his point of contact with the divine.
The ancient Greeks made the soul a philosophical concept, to be analysed through rational techniques. All those before Socrates discussed the soul and particularly the link between body and soul, the two fundamental dimensions of man’s existence. According to Plato body and soul are separate while for Aristotle they are closely connected. “The soul is the act before the natural body and has the potentiality of life. Therefore it is manifest that the soul is not separable from the body since some of its actions are the corresponding action of parts of the body”, wrote Aristotle, thus “natural bodies are tools (organs) of the soul”. With Christianity the discussions on the soul went from philosophical to religious and the studies made regarded the attempt to make the concept of “soul” coherent in a catholic sense to western rationality. With the enlightenment and the subsequent industrial revolution the scholar’s interest turned to reason and soul was often seen as a religious concept and thus not scientific. Philosophical interest in the soul continued however, shown by Schopenhauer, Kant and Hegel. In the nineteen hundreds there was the tendency to consider the soul as a mystic concept, even if some scholars such as Brentano, Freud with his Id, Jung, Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel highlighted that within the human being there were vital and creative impulses and intentionality that were not strictly pertinent to reason.
In the twentieth century there was still no answer to the question: does the soul exist? If it does exist can it be described and studied in a rational or even scientific manner?

The discovery of the ontic In-itself

“On beginning to cure the human being, I was looking for a principle for curing, the criterion that could give the direction to life, when I discovered that in the background of the unconscious there was not life or death, because these are consequences, rather there was a principle, a living transcendent criteria. Transcendent in that it was in that subject, but at the same time it was not there.
This principle was the ontic In-itself.
This principle worked from the phenomenology and operative results of the person, thus a subject was neurotic or a failure because he went against the specific properties of this elementary criterion, while everything that conformed to it would give the subject life, well-being, satisfaction, this was the criteria that meant being or not being, to be ill or healthy, successful or frustrated etc.”.
“The ontic In-itself is the foundation or criterion of Ontopsychology” writes the Professor. Therefore the ontic In-itself is the criterion that in ontopsychological analysis allows us to distinguish “what is good from what is bad”. It is an intelligent principle: “In our body there is a mind that organizes the existence of the whole and the single parts”. “This basic criterion is the same for everyone”, it takes the name of the human being’s In-itself or constant H, and it is the form of intelligence that differentiates man from other life forms. “But it specifies itself differently in each person”.
The definition of the In-itself is: “intelligent form principle that makes historical autoctisis”. For Meneghetti the soul has a metaphysical nature but is concretely embodied in the history of the human being. It is noumenon that becomes phenomenon.
Meneghetti wrote a fundamental text to formalize the ontic In-itself, The In-itself of the human being, and a section found in the Ontopsychology Handbook. More generally the ontic In-itself constitutes the criterion for Ontopsychology and therefore represents the founding principle for all the texts written by Antonio Meneghetti.
For many of today’s schools of thought the soul is not a scientific concept. What then is the novelty of the ontic In-itself compared to the concept of soul?
Meneghetti is two steps ahead of the religious and scientific-philosophic world; he describes and demonstrates the soul. He clinically demonstrates its existence through his results and he describes it through the fifteen characteristics.
Antonio Meneghetti’s innovation is that he has “individuated” (he has recognized it), “isolated” (he has distinguished it from other existing questions) and “specified” (he has described how it is manifested, what it does and why it does it) this first principle. “All ontopsychological practice consists in the individuation and application of the In-itself”, in teaching how to individuate it and make it work in every day life.
The ontic In-itself is coherent with humanity’s great books, Meneghetti himself affirms it. He realizes that the historical importance of his thought is not that he discovered something that nobody knew existed, the In-itself is, as Antonio Meneghetti identified it, what so many had searched for and hypothesized.
Meneghetti’s point of departure is the point of arrival for others. The innovation lies in giving this discovery scientific dignity. For Meneghetti the ontic In-itself is not a mystic idea but something concrete and real within every man, which when individuated and put into action allows success in every concrete aspect of man’s existence. It determines health, well-being, pleasure and economic and social success.
Instead of representing it with dogma or fideism, Antonio Meneghetti describes it almost automatically; he illustrates all the phenomenology with the precision of a careful researcher and makes understanding and personal application possible for every human being.
How did Meneghetti manage to give a scientific answer to the ancient question regarding the existence of the human soul?
“I used this criterion observing it, reading it and decoding it with all the arts and studies that I had behind me. I did not get there by chance; I possessed all the tools for reading it: the tools of mysticism, rationality, mathematics, evidence, physics, theory and many other things. The luck was that when I started the analysis of this process I had superior training, which Jung, Freud, St. Thomas Aquinas etc could not have had. I had more skills which allowed a more complete analysis”. “So at first I discovered that this criterion – which was observable, readable – manifested itself and following its indications always led to precise results: health, well-being, success. If this principle was forgotten, contradicted or altered it was always followed by illness, disorder, confusion etc.”.
But why would we contradict this principle? The answer can be found in the second fundamental discovery: the deflection monitor.