Tag: ‘The Origins and History of Consciousness’

How Wasted am I?

I’m chewing through Erich Neumann’s ‘ Origins and History of Consciousness’. Hoo boy. I’m sure its just me but its like being invited to a banquet serving 50 shades of salted cracker.

His argument, that consciousness progresses step by step from a ‘primitive’, maternally based polytheism full of projective identification and totemic identity, to an emerging ego-self axis represented by the crucifiction, by triumphing over the Terrible Mother who symbolises the regressive pull of the unconscious is….

still mashing the cracker then…..

and perhaps culminating in Descartes inflated, ”I think therefor I am”.

Nah, I’ve had enough now, you say sorry to Descartes…

Why, he was a terrible philosopher..

No, you just slaggin everyone off…

You didn’t even give Erich a chance to answer and all the sarcasmic cracker stuff. An’ now your havin’ a go at Descartes. Its not right. Play nicely.

But any two bit lawyer will tell you that coming up with the thought that you exist just because it occured to you is verging on criminally dodgy. Its just like insider trading.

And if Being itself can be subject to thought, then the values which derive from such an arrangement are bound to be the Machiavellian variety and ‘the end justifying the means’.

What Descartes proved was that he was veeeery mentally identified, a state which is..

”only too ready to emancipate (it)self…. from the reality and meaning of symbolic life.” CG Jung (paraphrased from the Psychology of the Transference)

in other words from moral and spiritual considerations.

The ‘new consciousness’, heralded by Uncle Neb, Jacob and David, codified by Constantine, and shipped into your hindbrain at birth, is this deification of Mind. Mind becomes synonymous with Spirit, or at least as divorced from knowing how to behave…  as Yahweh was from Sophia/Hokmah before…

you know..

the Beginning.

Consider the implications: If thinking is fundamental to being, whatever I can think is imbued with this primacy, this symbolic equation with Being itself. Whatever else I might be experiencing is real insofar as it is congruent with thought and it’s heavily invested self-construct.

Oh dear oh dear…

stuff like knowing right from wrong….

or having a gut feeling for something

or compassion for someone.

Or hands.

The problem with the philosophical position of such ‘flowering of consciousness’ is that it also fosters a flowering of depersonalisation and colonialism.

And it seems to me that our supposed consciousness is not worth the candle if it is accompanied by globalised exploitation laughingly termed ‘assisted development,’ where the colonisers have pulled out once the infrastructures of exploitation have been set in place, and manipulate from afar with generous loans the subclauses of which say we run your ship.

I mean, they carn’t govern theselves….

Nah, dun ’em a favour.

Thinking is not enough if I will not talk to me. If there is no reflection, then all that fine thinking is going to wind up in the hands of our darker complexes..

which of course don’t exist and you don’t have to think about..

really.

And since thought and being-able-to-rationalise-what-I-please all come neatly wrapped up in the same box we become like kiddies in a cake factory. A world where wishing should make it so…

Whilst praising ourselves for being so evolved.

I was shocked by many things in Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Gulag Archipelago’, which I read over and over during a rough couple of years to remind myself that things weren’t really so bad. But what got me most was when he began to question the Russian people’s relationship with Stalin.

Did the nation need his regime in some way? Did the suffering he imposed on Russia serve the spiritual life of the People? In any case, nations give themselves the leaders they deserve, seems to be the idea. The same is true for great minds. The victors write the Philosophy of a people as well as their History by supporting those thinkers that reinforce the zietgeist of the time.

Freud too, rose to meteoric success as soon as he revised his theory that parents mess their kids up, (The Aetiology of Hysteria 1896) to mean very nearly the opposite within ten years.

Society like ‘im now.

… give him his job back.

an lotta stuff.

Cocaine and unsupervised access to a massive printing press…..

In his own way, Darwin, too, rode the crest of our collective imagination, with ‘the survival of the fittest’. Though he only used the phrase once in the whole of his ‘Origins of Species’, the social milieu he was in grabbed it with both hands…

poised as they were on the cusp of global colonialisation.

and in need of a slogan.

The neat thing with the survival of the fittest is that it justifies the rules that the fit live by. Our way of being must be right or we wouldn’t be the ones left standing.

This is all on top of the divine sanction placed on thinking.

……….one might just invade India today……..

by Descartes.

This martial, dog eat dog, linear way of looking at evolution is taken up and echoed by Neumann.

but if ontology really does recapitulate phylogony (the evolution of the species follows the pattern of individual development) then you’d expect a more organic regime change from Polytheism. After all children generally grow apart from Mother in their own quiet way.

And she generally doesn’t have her stuff desecrated, or her mates killed off…

by a narcissistically  disordered  demi-urge with psychopathic features……

So Neumann doesn’t do it for me.

Oh, why so angry now..?

Well because… ”if  the emancipation of consciousness from the tyranny of the unconscious has gone far beyond division, and bought about a schism…..giving rise to atomised individualism”…. Neumann.

yeesss..

well that’s not very frikkin evolved is it?

No..

And since when was the Unconscious tyrannical?

Hummm.

 

 

 

 

Evolution of Consciousness?

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?