We are not evolved…
not as much as we tink we are..
and we’ve been in decline for a rather long time..
So long, in fact, that we can give it the kind of spin that would make a politician blush and call what we are experiencing, ‘the evolution of consciousness’.
In reality, the erosion of consciousness, the process of becoming ever more internally divided that began with Gilgamesh being split off from his dark brother Enkidu way back in 3000BC, through the stories of Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, onwards and upwards to the sacred kingship of David, so idealised and golden that even God’s punishment of him failed to inform public opinion, is now ripped firmly in half by the 4th Century with all kinds of consequences for mental health.
you just summarised 3500 years in 7 lines mate. That is not cool. You lack intellectual rigour.
I’m not going for rigour, so shut up. I want nutshells and overveiw so we don’t get lost in how fantastic we all are.
Again.
In Revelation, written in the first century AD, we see some handover going on between Sophia/Wisdom, the Whore of Babylon, as prior embodiment of God’s shadow, and Satan whose name will become synonymous with evil.
The problem with scapegoating is that its not a one time thing. Psychic effluent must be continuously hived off and so getting rid of the shadow container immediatly necessitates the drumming up of another…
ethnic group.
When the Great Mother is banished the kids fall out, never more so than with the Christ and the Devil, who are now extreme manifestations of a split reality.
One in which modern psyche’s become bedevilled…
An aside, a story of possibility taught to me by ‘primitives’. I was in the wilds of Africa, the Transkian hills, very remote, places no white man had been. Seriously, one time people gathered around me and my mate Alasdair touching our hair and marvelling to one a another.
‘Told you they was real.’
‘Bloody hell, you really wos telling the truth.’
‘Do you think they know how babies are made?’
I digress, We were catching a ride with a couple of locals in an ancient vehicle. Sliding down muddy lanes, everything awash with pelting rain. On a hillside stood a young woman in a single shift singing to the sky, drenched, hands raised, dancing… I asked about her and was told she was crazy. I was young and inexperienced and asked if she should not be in a hospital. The guys looked at me with incredulity, ‘but, what would we do without her?’
She had value in the village.
No split reality.
So who was evolved?
In 325AD and 364AD the Council of Nicea and the Council of Laodicea respectively formed the official bible on the back of stirling efforts made by folk like Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons,
who was a right bastard,
and very keen for the split to become canon. Two legs good…
four legs bad.
The new book was good. The rest could get you killed. Even Enoch, who ‘walked with god’, was now kindling for those who refused to hand over their souls for safe keeping.
The devil leaps into focus in the public imagination despite all efforts to keep him in his pit and the world, both inner and outer, becomes sharply divided between good and evil.
that’s not a good thing for consciousness, mon.
It gets worse… From Constantine onwards, God’s representative and wordly power come firmly in the same vessel.
Kings are made at the Pope’s behest.
Or at least without sending armies…
The final blow to the feminine comes with the ejection of the books of Thomas and Phillip who regarded Mary Magdalene as equal to the other disciples and Mary, the mother of Jesus, to have been divine herself.
Western culture is now firmly run by the archetype of the divine king…
but that’s very exciting, mon!
Well of course it is, but to what does it appeal? Oh, how wonderful that our great leader (place name here) is not only appointed by God but has backstairs access to Him in a way you and I do not.
but dats fantastic, mon!
No its not, everyone loses. It looks great for the king but he is now so inflated you can’t talk to him and everyone else is excluded from their own authority and knowing.
So him rule them better..
Sure, but what does it mean for the evolution of consciousness? Its the route of least resistance. The self is either projected, wherein we experience ourselves as lost to our own destinies, or identified with wherein we become psychopathic tyrants.
Neumann, whose book ‘The Origins and History of Consciousness’, seems as riven with controversy as content, says that this heroic individual, this divine king, becomes, ‘the forerunner of mankind in general’ as though he, the spiritual king were someone to realise as one’s own potential, an awakened archetype, at the least to emulate.
The Dark Ages disagree.
You going to read them whole book sometime then? Just quoting from at like that, like you de hexpert…
Fair cop, Its on my list.. Poor Neumann. To feel so accutely the disparity between the idea that consciousness simply unfurls and the fact of Nazi Germany…
How can this be the pinnacle of culture?
No more than the rest of our narcissistic society positively rewarding psychopathic adaptions.
If consciousness simply evolves how come the psychopath is so successful in our world?
An’ you can’t go callin’ for new ethics Erich, its too new world order all over again. Things never change much with rallying cries but with mourning and loss and grief and missing…
Which is kinda what the Dark Ages seem to be.
Centuries of monochrome and drench and rotting straw.
Consciousness seems to have suffered terribly under the model of the divinely appointed king. Not only would people’s daily round be largely at the level of subsistent survival, the common person hands over secular and spiritual power to some one prepared to subjugate them for their own good.
All of which culminates in the figure of Charlemagne..
know a lot about Charlemagne then…?
leave me alone.. enough to make a point..
your own point..
Waal that’s all I have. Charlemagne was made Emperor by the Pope, a gesture that inflates poor Charlie to such an extent that he began butchering for God. How do you corral 4,500 men and decapitate them one by one? Or would you do it in batches?