![[tmbchr]™](/journal/popocculture-blog-logo.jpg){kind=logo}
Subjectivity and the Rise of Consciousness
I’m re-reading a really interesting book by Jungian psychologist Marie Louise Von Franz called On Divination and Synchronicity. It’s first of all a very interesting and complex topic, which she picks apart in a simply fascinating and sometimes mind-boggling way. Actually, it’s a transcription of a series of lectures, so it’s a bit disjointed. It’s got that spoken style where intriguing thoughts are sort of just tossed out, and then wash away without a full explanation or follow-up.
One such item she brushes on is the notion of subjectivity as being linked to the increase in control of the ego-consciousness. Again, it’s not explained much at all; it’s more just a passing reference. So I thought I’d try to pick up and run with it a little. First, let me pop in the passage where she talks about it on page 24:
[…] One can very clearly see what Jung characterized as the general development of the human mind: that anything which we now call our subjective spirit […] was once the objective spirit - that means the inspiring movement of the unconscious psyche - but with the development of consciousness, we have got hold of a part that we now manipulate and call our own, behaving as if it were something which we completely possess.
I’ve lost the spot, but she elsewhere goes into the example of inventions. The modern inventor believes that she has created such-and-such a contraption, whereas the primitive hunter who developed the bow & arrow was granted the boon while praying to an external god. This is very similar to a concept I once found in a book by Erich Von Neumann, another Jungian scholar:
[…] The “functional” gods of religion eventually become functions of consciousness. Originally, consciousness did not possess enough free libido to perform any activity - plowing, harvesting, hunting, waging war, etc - of its own “free will,” and was obliged to invoke the help of the god who “understood” these things. By means of ceremonial invocation, the ego activated the “help of the god” and thus conducted the flow of libido from the unconscious to the conscious system. The progressive development of consciousness assimilates the functional gods, who go on living as qualities and capacities of the conscious individual who plows, harvests, hunts and wages war as and when he pleases.
Applying our example above, we might be able to say that the modern style of consciousness is more subjective, because it gives responsibility for creative actions to within the mind of the experiencer. And the primitive style believes that it comes from without, from external reality. (Note: The use of the terms “modern” and “primitive” here are just to delineate prevailing modes according to time frame, rather than to suggest one is better or “more right” than the other)
We could easily get into debates from here about things like moral relativism, and subjective vs. objective truth. For now, I’d just like to think more about this possibility that people who are subjective may be “more conscious” (which may not actually be better) than objectivists, who are looking outward. Also, it seems worth adding that the purpose of many occult arts is to bridge the two: As above, so below. The microcosm being representative of and ultimately the same as the macrocosm. I also feel like the whole “God is dead” pronouncement deserves some consideration here. God being outward objective truth, which has been subsumed and devoured by the modern ego-consciousness. In this way Gnosticism and religions which posit the divine spark within seem especially relevant to the increasing consciousness of the modern age. More on this to follow.
April 8th, 2005 at 8:00 am
What she calls the “objective spirit,” biologists would call “instinct,” and Sheldrake would call “resonating with the morphic fields of your species.” So the first agricultural humans were violating their instincts, and needed “gods” to help them. Two questions: Could these “gods” have been real occult entities with a motive for leading humans to adopt agriculture? And have we now been doing it for so long that we have established morphic fields and we no longer need “gods”?
April 8th, 2005 at 8:22 am
This is an interesting subject.
Here’s a Terence Mckenna quote on it:
“Now in the era before science scientists liked to say people were more epistemologically naive… what they mean by that is they didn’t have a clear understanding of the division between the inside and the outside, between what we imagine and what actually is, but if you live long enough I think you discover what we imagine and what actually is, are very close to the same thing.”
I don’t think we’re more, or even less aware, really. Differently aware, most definitely (I don’t really think that the ego functioning human has freewill, just the illusion of it.)
I’m currently speculating that the tribal person generally has a mind of greater sophistication (as in practical and elegant, not sophisticated as in complex)–one that lives in present time, with a worldview that isn’t rooted in abstract and mechanical principles, but takes things more at face-value.
I also read that in Chinese, reality is described as a relationship, rather than an object.
The tribal people realize that they live in a world held together by eachother and directed by the shaman. Simple perception becomes a communal thing, where we all particapate in holding the tribe’s world-view together, which *does* explain why they would war with eachother. Two tribes from two different realities, unwilling to compromise their world and looking to cancel the other one out, so their reality will be maintained. Irreconcilable differences.
That’s probably where the roots of all religious war are. I think it just gets worse when the enlightened shaman is replaced by the ego-functioning religious politician(s) (see: the pharisees, the ayatollah, the papal, and our evangelical president.)
–
Some of the most succesful magicians don’t seem to care much about archetypes and autonomous complexes, for them to invoke the gods it works just as well (probably better) to think of them as literally external and completely autonomous entities. However, nowadays we’re getting closer and closer to dismissing all mystical experience of god/gods as ‘psychological derangements’, or “bizarre relapses into an archaic mind-set that our mighty rationalism has surely evolved beyond.”
I think the fundamentaly mistake of the latter viewpoint (among others) is the “dismissal” part. I would never underestimate the powers of the raw unconscious (I don’t even want to call it the unconscious “mind”, since it seems so far beyond any mind), and drugs that take out our brain’s reducing valve show us truly what it’s capable of. So do our dreams, for that matter.
The fish dragon bahamut which our world rests on is too immense and terrible for our eyes to ever bear to look at. A metaphor for the unconscious?
Here’s Mckenna’s essay that I have copied to my home-node on this site, he goes on to talk about how reality is made of language, and that the only real difference between a scientific model of reality and a mythic model of reality is the syntax used…
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1518316
April 8th, 2005 at 8:26 am
ran, i dont know that i necessarily follow your logic. id sooner guess that gods are a personification of instinct, rather than a violation of it. i do like what you said about the morphic field of the species…. that somehow if gods were “exteriorized” than everyone could objectively interact with them.
but lets suppose they were a violation of something, why would they suddenly have become that upon the introduction of agriculture?
further, what purpose would occult entities have in introducing agriculture to us? not saying it couldnt happen, and certainly most cultures say that it was brought to them by a god. i just dont see what the value would be for an occult entity to do that. my personal leaning is that it more has to do with how they talk about amazonian shamans when they go into psychedelic trances are somehow able to communicate with the plants, and are given information about medicinal uses. maybe its like humans were doing this, and the plants and animals suddenly started saying to them: “Grow and harvest us. Here’s how.”
jacob: interesting stuff. ill check out that essay. you might also want to check out some essays i did on the monotheistic (ego-centered) mind, and the “primitive” polytheistic. seems right up your alley, although perhaps in a slightly different direction.
April 8th, 2005 at 8:59 am
tim:
damn! I can’t believe I haven’t read that one!
I read all of your Archetypes, Autonomous Complexes and the Polytheistic Mind, and have it printed out in my room. I really can’t get enough of this stuff…
April 8th, 2005 at 10:41 am
interestingly, this quote from philip k dick’s tractates cryptica scriptura also kind of bridges the gap between what both of us are saying:
April 8th, 2005 at 11:12 am
I think what Ran was saying is that anything that is not instinctual (i.e. something an animal could do) must be learned from an outside source, like a god. Animals hunt, so I don’t think humans would need the help of a god to hunt. But they would need the help of a god to farm, because farming is not natural or instinctual.
Why would a god do that? Well, who can fathom the mind of a god? But, if we are talking about Archons, of COURSE they would want us to farm. Farming is an earth-destroying control system, after all.
That’s what I think, anyway. Maybe Ran meant something totally different.
April 8th, 2005 at 11:38 am
i dont think that farming is “earth destroying” although certain methods certainly are. and there are plenty of animals who assist nature in the propagation of other species. just look at bees and birds for an example of the “farming instinct” in action. there are tons of others.
anyway, i dont believe in the idea that we do anything that “animals wouldnt do” since we are animals, for better or worse. we’re not against nature, we’re a part of it. that said, there are certainly more and less appropriate ways to do our part
April 8th, 2005 at 12:39 pm
Tim, you might like this article (if you haven’t read it already): The Oil We Eat by Richard Manning.
It talks about farming as a control system and also explains the viewpoint I’m coming from. If you believe this article, you might think the archons would just love for us to rely on farming.
Excerpt:
Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature’s offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points to the answer, I think, lies in the difference between early agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts—the presence not just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those granaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since.
http://www.harpers.org/TheOilWeEat.html
April 8th, 2005 at 12:44 pm
Oh, yeah, in my first comment, instinctual = something animals can do. Not instinctual = something animals don’t do. The way I wrote it was ambiguous, sorry.
Stupid english language.
April 8th, 2005 at 12:45 pm
well, maybe consider this. An intent was formed in the mind of the human, that he needed a more stable source of food, probably because the tribe was getting a lot bigger, and hunting/gathering was becoming more difficult or less predictable. Now, I know if enough energy attaches to an intent, it inevitably finds its way into reality. I’m not sure if agriculture was divinely inspired or not, it’s possible. I think it might be mentioned on this site, but cavement, tribal people, and people in general have been eating naturally occuring hallucinogens ever since the dawn of their existence. I think using those would probably put a few smart ideas into yer’ head on how to manifest your most important intents. Of course, a tough question is: how do the archetypes figure into this?
I mean, we have/had gods of agriculture, et al. What role did they play, and if they’re not wholly external, than how/why did our unconscious go about manifesting them to play a part in our lives?
One thing that I want to make clear is, that I believe an entity can be just autonomous and real as anyone of us, though they may very well not be external/outside (although they may seem that way, but so does the physical world, and satori taught me that *that* wasn’t true.) It could be they’re one particular abstract intent that manifests and filters itself through our unconscious imaginations to become a god that we can relate to.
God, this is fucking exciting.
That’s a great quote, btw, Tim. I have to read the TCS more throughly.
April 8th, 2005 at 12:51 pm
Yes Dan, that’s exactly what I meant. Some kinds of “farming” are natural, but grain agriculture was competely alien to our history and our biological instincts. It’s always been earth-destroying, and it’s always been allied to concentration of wealth and the spread of hierarchial empires.
Biologically, humans are natural animals, but all animals are capable of anti-natural behavior (behavior harmful to the biosphere as a whole), and humans are capable of SUSTAINED anti-natural behavior, because we can overrule instinct with culture. Culturally, we’ve been violently against nature for thousands of years, and I’m sure the Archons are loving it!
I’ve read a lot of speculations about how and why grain agriculture got started, and possession by life-hating occult entities is actually one of the more plausible ones.
April 8th, 2005 at 8:04 pm
yeah those are all really good points guys. ill have to read more about the development of agriculture. im also curious to look more at what other animals are “farmers.”
in regards to dan’s comments, i like what youre talking about with hoarding. i was thinking about that story in i guess its probably exodus, where god drops manna from heaven to feed the israelites… and some of them try to hoard it and save it in pots, but then it turns to worms, to teach them they shouldnt do that. i feel like theres probably a good morsel of information we could draw out here with that.
oh here, its from exodus 16:19-20
April 8th, 2005 at 9:39 pm
I looked up “object permanence” after reading some of the earlier comments. If you don’t know what that is, I think it’s a psychological term for when a baby learns that an object exists even when it is not in clear sight (i.e. mommy’s face is behind her hands when she plays “peek-a-boo”). This stuff kind of makes my head all fuzzy, but my first thought was that maybe this was a early learned behavior. Since children are not “naturally” born with this instinct, that maybe it is just a child imitating parents who use abstractions. But it seems that some animals have object permenance as well. Or maybe we’re teaching our bad behaviors to the rest of the animal kingdom. I don’t know, it’s after work and I need to crash.
But anyway, I found this article while browsing, which might not be news to anyone, but would definitely be good fuel for my vegan roommates:
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2002/09/04/wise/print.html
“Drawing the Line” by Steven M. Wise
It’s about: “a Harvard professor says science itself proves that such animals as parrots, apes and elephants should be considered persons with legal rights.”
Oh, and I don’t know if it will come up in your link, but the top banner is of a TV movie on NBC called Revelations: The End is Here. It features Bill Pullman (aka Lonestar in Space Balls). Anyone know about that shit?
Garrett
April 9th, 2005 at 10:45 am
[…] age!
Inner and Outer Conspiracies
My post on Subjectivity and the Rise of Consciousness spawned a num […]
April 20th, 2005 at 9:03 pm
[…] e Calorie! The Pepsi One Tarot The Conspiracy Spectrum Metatron: Angel of the Presence Subjectivity and the Rise of Consciousness When Mind Co […]