Animals of the Four Windows: Integrating Thinking, Sensing, Feeling and Imagery

The book describes how the ways of knowing have been distorted and how we have moved out of balance, with a strong bias towards thinking and sensing and a lack of value on Imagery and Feeling. It explores the possibility of a return by the Four Ways of Knowing to a balanced relationship with one another.

As Stephen Larsen Ph.D, author of The ShamanÕs Doorway and The Mythic Imagination, says in his introduction to the book:

......Joseph Campbell dedicated the first volume of his monumental Historical Atlas of World Mythology, The Way of the Animal Powers to this concept. The origins of the human mythic imagination, as he shows, lie in the vast reaches of prehistory: the great hunt, and our most ancient religion, that of the shamans, which celebrates the spritual potency as well as the earthly relevance of animals.

Animals of the Four Windows is Stephen Gallegos' second book, dedicated to the exploration of this same realm, but through the perspective of psychology rather than anthropology. In his first, The Personal Totem Pole, he described an entirely new mode of psychotherapy based on a visionary experience of his own, in which he saw the chakra system, the arrangement of psychic centers along the human spine, to be permeated by animal presences. His work in education and psychotherapy since has been informed by this same concept. Long after we have willfully forgotten our own beasthood, it seems, the imagery of the animate ecosystem still lies at the root of our souls.When I wrote The Shaman's Doorway (published in 1976), inspired by the powerful shamanic lore of traditional societies, I felt it important to envision a new type of human being, of which there were very few examples yet in existence. I wondered if the prototypes were best to be found among visionaries, artists, or psychotherapists, or perhaps a combination. Several years later, at a conference in Vermont entitled "Common Ground," I felt I had met one in Stephen Gallegos. The conference was a wonderful meeting of minds which had never entered upon each other's territories in this way before Ñ biologists, ecologists, psychotherapists and artists. Yet all found themselves learning things of great importance from the others. In particular Stephen's system seemed to me so elegantly simple. He began, as I had proposed in my hypothetical model, with a vision, the one that he had while running, of animals arranged vertically within his own psyche.

The vision led him to try an inner dialogue; and he found that his psyche, in the form of the animals he envisioned, responded in a creative way far beyond his expectations. The dialogue deepened and enlarged his perspective, as I had speculated might happen.

But in my model the shaman must also share the vision, passing on the visionary fire to heal and vitalize his community. This Stephen Gallegos had already been doing for a few years when I met him. His already established practice as a psycotherapist had offered him an opportunity to try his method with others, perhaps a risky thing to do, the more traditionally-minded might think, but one for which he found immediate and gratifying results. People responded to his method, finding healing and regeneration to flow from it. People began to encourage him to teach workshops and seminars, and to train other therapists Ñ all of which began to happen at a rate, startling even to himself, as if invisible helpers were at work. (It was just what Joseph Campbell said would hapen if you "follow your bliss.") Soon he was initiating many people in a new method of inner work. The method introduces the exploratory, creative shamans of today to their own inner deep ecology.

The animals capture the living quality of our inner symbolism Ñ they move and fly and speak, they have bright eyes and damp noses. Their instincts may be our own, long atrophied and ignored, yet willing to be awakened. (Unlike the version described in the traditional Sanskrit texts of Kundalini Yoga, which fixes symbolic animals at each chakra, Gallegos' system allows a metaphoric openness Ñ any animal may dwell in any chakra for a particular individual.) Do they offer a restoration of much that has been lost in our post-Cartesian world with its formal concepts and categories and its emphasis on the rational mode, a reconnection with our own instinctuality, initiative, independence, the "ways of the animal powers?"

In this new book Stephen Gallegos has opened his conceptual windows wider than before, to include the four human faculties also discussed by Carl Jung. Thinking, feeling and sensation are presented similarly to Jung's system, but his new twist is creatively insightful: the fourth function is imagery, not intuition as Jung has it. (Gallegos envisions intuition as potential to all the functions.) Deep imagery, alive with its own suchness, as are the animals, is not just to be manipulated for our own ends as in some psychological systems of guided imagery, but respected for its own inner vitality and wisdom.

It is a revitalization of the human soul from within that is the real goal of Stephen Gallegos' approach. The reader will find his prose clear and inviting Ñ while he reveals to us a new (yet very old) way of revisioning our minds. This book is a must for those interested in self-exploration, guided imagery, and the never-ending, self-transformative work of the creative shaman.

Stephen Larsen, Ph.D.
New Paltz, New York
February, 1991