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"Concrete operations" is a term coined by Jean Piaget, a Swiss epistemologist who studied children of all ages in order to discover how they learned and the progression of cognitive skills as they emerged. His work has provided a foundation for development of educational curricula in our schools and for continuing research into the cognitive processes of children and adolescents. As far as I know right now, his findings were limited to children who grew up and were educated in western countries/cultures that value rational thinking. So he did not tell us anything about the development of intuition. Some of his most important concepts follow.

Decentration. Concrete operational thought depends upon the ability to decenter oneself, to become objective about what one is observing. This means that we have to go beyond what the senses apparently are telling us and bring our reasoning ability to bear upon a phenomenon in order to gain the correct information about it. We also have to conform to the differing perspectives of others in order to arrive at consensual validation about our perceptions of the world around us and our interpretations of reality. This enables social organization and communication.

Seriation. This is the ability to arrange objects along a continuum according to increasing or decreasing value or order. For example, a child could arrange a handful of licorice sticks in a row of increasing length. Or another child could lay out a row of nails in increasing or decreasing length or thickness. This has applications in arithmetic as well as in dividing up Halloween candy.

Conservation. This requires a kind of detachment from the obvious. It is the ability to recognize that, as long as nothing is added or taken away, two equal quantities remain equal. This seems obvious on the surface, but take the water glass problem, for example. If I take a given quantity of water and pour it from a tall, thin glass into a short, fat glass and am depending upon my senses entirely for information, I might think there is now less water in the second glass. Or, if I am attending to the width rather than the height of the water, I might think there was more water. What is required to gain the proper conclusion is the ability to reason that, if I do not take away or add any water, there has to be the same amount regardless of appearances. This example requires conservation of substance. Similar processes occur with respect to number, weight, length, space and volume. Popcorn, for instance, weighs the same popped as unpopped but the apparent difference in size will fool a small child.

Reversibility. Reversibility refers to the ability to return to the starting place in thought and is the basic mechanism for logical thinking. I can mentally cancel an operation and go back to the beginning. For example: If I know that 2 + 3 = 5, then I can reverse my thinking to undertand that 5 = 2 + 3 or 5= 3 + 2. Or, if I am doing the arithmetic problem and say that 2 + 3 = 6 and am corrected, I can go back and start over until I get it right. On a more sophisticated level, if I am trying to solve a problem and my first attempt fails, I can retrace my thoughts to the original parameters looking for the error, and if I do not find it I can begin again. Balancing a check book is a case in point.

Hierarchial classification. This is the ability to group things or ideas into concepts, then treat the concepts as if they were a single thing and arrange them into hierarchial categories. This requires the verbal mediation we encountered in Book II. At first children need the objects in front of them to proceed, but eventually, in adolescence, they become able to perform these operations in thought only. Classification requires decentration because it may be necessary to shift focus from one attribute or characteristic to another or to base the concept on two attributes simultaneously. For instance, a person could form a concept based on both shape and color such as red squares or shapely blondes. To take this a step further, one could then arrange women (or men) in a hierarchial classification scheme according to one's personal preferences.

1. Write down the dream in as much detail as possible.

2. Go back into the dream and make a list of all the key words, usually nouns but can be unusual verbs, adjectives or adverbs. You want those words that carry the most meaning. You need to leave the structure mostly intact for later. Skip a line between each word to make space to work with it.

3. Putting the dream aside and out of your mind, take each word you have listed and free associate to it, writing down everything that comes to mind. What you are trying to find are all the meanings that word has for you including synonyms and words that sound like the word in question. Ask yourself what that thing does, what it is used for, etc. If it is a person, ask yourself how you are like that person and write those characteristics down. Or, for example, Joe is a person who. . . What does Joe do? If you think an association could not possibly be right, it surely will be, so put it down. Your ego will try to censure the process, so keep it in its place.

4. Go back to the dream and rewrite it substituting one of your new meanings for each key word. You must use your intuition to select the right word. Sometimes the feelings you had in the dream will help you select. For persons, you will write: "a part of me that is arrogant. . ." etc. depending upon what characteristics you selected in common with that person. These identify your personality aspects and roles. If you get stuck and a substitution does not make sense, you may have to return to your list and work on the associations some more to find one that does.

You may also find that one association works in one place while a different one for the same word works somewhere else. Allow that freely. One of the wonderful things about dreams is that their symbols can hold more than one meaning simultaneously. Because of this, you can analyze a dream on several different levels. Just be careful to be consistent within a level. What we want here is the spiritual interpretation. You are looking for information about your personality aspects especially those that appear to be speaking to you through your dreams.

5. When you finish the analysis, write up the new form of the dream and give it a title. When you honor a dream by working with it, you will soon have more dreams and you will find it easier and easier to interpret them.

6. Look at the new dream and add a one-sentence statement of the main theme of it.

You may have noticed that your suffering tends to cycle and recycle. You go around in circles and cannot find your way out. Cycles are normal in nature and in human life. Taken a step further, Buddhists explain our spiritual development in terms of cycles of reincarnation. Each reincarnation involves a round of experience that is predictable and that keeps repeating itself until we find a way to break out of it.

The Wheel of Life consists of four concentric circles. The hub has a cock representing lust, a snake for hatred and a pig for delusion each biting the tail of the one in front. These are the three poisons of egocentric volition. We have met them before in the form of passion, aggression and ignorance. The next circle is half white and half black. The white is the realm of the gods, humans with healthy volition; the black is the realm of hell, unhealthy volition.

The largest part of the wheel is the next circle which is divided into six realms or classes of sentient beings. These have been discussed before as the god, human, jealous god, hungry ghost, animal and hell realms. Each of them symbolizes a major orientation toward life and ranges from the most pristine to the most neurotic forms of behavior and experience.

The outer rim consists of the Cycle of Dependent Origination (nidanas) showing how each stage of development of karma leads into and incorporates each other one. There are twelve steps in the Cycle of Dependent Origination each of which represents the truth of suffering. Each gives birth to the next and each contains the qualities of the previous one. They are as follows. Try to imagine yourself in each stage as you read about them.

1. Ignorance (avidya) - this is the ignorance of dualism and the illusion of "I-ness." It is bewilderment and confusion due to a wrong assessment of reality, maya.

2. Samskara - accumulation of energy and activity that manifests through body, speech and mind as structuralizing forces. It is the basis of personal karma, tendencies of past lives acting in the present.

3. Consciousness (vijnana) - partially structured consciousness or psychic complex like frozen energy that results from the samskaras. Taken with the samskaras, it accounts for the experiential data in the unconscious including memory, dreams and emotional complexes.

4. Name and form (rupa) - material existence and mentality due to action of the skandhas. Rupa is composed of four structuralizing operations of 1) solidity (earth element), 2) cohesion (water element), 3) heat (fire element) and 4) motility (air element). These, taken together, create the body. Namas are the components of mental functioning. Bodymind functioning such as sensation, ideation, dispositional orientation, mood energy, etc.

5. The five senses (sad-ayatana) and their objects including mind - not the actual forms, but bases of awareness, and the capability and integration of all six.

6. Contact of senses and objects (sparse) - sensory impressions that give rise to impressions of tone corresponding to the particular mode of sensing.

7. Sensation or feelings (vedana) that result from contact.

8. Desire for objects (tanha), craving for what has been experienced, for sensual gratification. One of the six modalities is joined to one of the three motivations.

9. Grasping, attachment, prehension (upadana) - clinging to or holding on to the acquisition of the objects gained

10. Chains to existence (bhava) - process of becoming, creation of new forms of karmic tendencies that will come to fruition in next life.

11. Birth (jati) - first appearance of new patterns of karmic tendencies. Can be a newborn appearing in one of the six realms of being or thought which finds itself in a new situation. Ways of being in a situation.

12. Old age and death (jara-marana) - inevitability of change, decay and death. Process of disintegration, destructuring and entropic scattering which leads to ignorance again. This is a structure of patterning that feeds back on itself and creates the Wheel of Life.

The implication of all this is that, if we can interrupt this cycle anywhere, the whole thing will disintegrate leaving us enlightened or in a state of original unity. Buddhists say the easiest place to tackle the cycle is at the levels of ignorance or of desire or grasping (numbers 8 and 9). In terms of our present life, the first two take place in a past life, numbers 3-10 in this life and 10 and 11 in a future life, if that helps to orient yourself.

Samsara. Just a note on this to remind you of what samsara is. There are three components of it:

[Note: Do not confuse samsara which is the process of worldly life through repeated births and deaths with samskaras which are the tendencies of number 2 above.]

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