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Conspiracy & Consciousness



I found another quote from Marie Louise Von Franz’s excellent “On Divination and Synchronicty” which I feel like it might help us “crack the code” of what conspiracy theory is all about psychologically. In this particular instance, she is talking about mediums - people who are able to act as channels to other information sources, whether you want to call them spirits or the unconscious, or what. She describes mediums on page 39 like this:

A medium is a person who has a closer relationship, one might say a gift, by which to relate to the absolute knowledge of the unconscious, generally by having a relatively low level of consciousness. This explains why mediums are very often very queer and often even morally odd people - not always, but often - or they are slightly criminal, or take a drink, and so on. They are generally very endangered personalities because they have that low threshold and are so near to the absolute knowledge of the unconscious.

When I read that, I mentally transposed in the word “conspiracy theorist” in place of “medium”. Whether or not you necessarily agree with her assertion that they are “slightly criminal” etc, it seems like rather more than a coincidence that conspiracy theorists are often labelled (and often rightfully so) as a bit crazy. Going by what she says about mediums, it would stand to reason that perhaps this is so because truly hardcore paranoid conspiracy theorists are rather more closely connected to the realm of the unconscious than the rest of society. As such, they become gripped by “strange” fantasies which are essentially mythical or symbolic in nature, but which take on the clothing of current events.

I wondered in a recent article whether or not conspiracy theory was sort of a throwback to another configuration of consciousness - something more in tune with our more religiously-loaded past. The jury’s still out on that, but I think Von Franz’s insight into mediums certainly sheds some new light on the issue.

Essentially the thing I’m trying to figure out with all this is can conspiracy theory function as a modern-day spiritual practice? And if so, how can it be re-configured in a way that will allow people safe passage across the threshold between the conscious and unconscious minds, without being overwhelmed? Obviously, if you’ve been reading my site, you’ll know that there are various “conspiracy theories” I pretty much abide in, and thus am not out to discount any of it as necessarily false. I’m just looking for what it is that makes them so fucking compelling. What makes us stay up into the wee hours of the morning until we’re bleary-eyed and exhausted researching crypto-Nazi occult paedophilia rings and the like? And beyond just being compelling, how can we use this fascination to enhance our lives - rather than merely descending into madness and paranoia?







4 Reader Responses

  1. fishfry Says:
    April 13th, 2005 at 2:48 am

    hi tim.
    great final questions.
    your writing is very refined these days.
    nice site change.
    hope you are well.

  2. Occult Investigator » The Conspiracy Spectrum Says:
    April 14th, 2005 at 12:58 am

    […] y spectrum, you begin to court the realm of the unconscious mind and the archetypes - as I started in on yesterday. Stuff like UFO’s and satanic and occult rit […]

  3. Jacob Says:
    April 14th, 2005 at 11:31 am

    This is a really intriguing topic to me.

    You might find this interesting, it’s a Robert Anton Wilson article about the Cabala which is tangentially related to what you’re getting at.

    quote:

    “One way to get into the Cabalistic head space is to reflect long and hard on the sin­gular fact that we could not live-could not breathe, in fact-without the trees busily pumping oxygen into the air. Yet the trees are not “thinking” about producing life-support for us. To the rationalist, it seems that our need for oxygen has no real con­nection with the trees’ production of that element; sheer chance (or, the more vehe­ment rationalists will anthropomorphically say, “blind chance”) happens to have pro­duced trees, through natural selection, over many aeons. The fact that we exist is, to this philosophy, a total accident, a very strange coincidence.

    And, to the same rationalist, Arthur Ma­chen’s imagination has no real connection with what was happening on the battlefield at Mons. The magical link between Machen’s imagination and the “collective hallucina­tion” of the soldiers is just coincidence – like the magical link between us and the trees.

    To the Cabalist, the rationalist sounds like a man found in a closet by a jealous husband, who hopefully explains, “Just by coinci­dence, while you were away on business I happened to wander into this closet without my clothes on. . .”

    To the Cabalist, the whole uni­verse is a network of meaningful connections. The seemingly coinci­dental is as full of meaning as anything else. To begin thinking like a Caba­list you must regard everything as being just as important as every­thing else. All that seems “acciden­tal,” “meaningless,” “chaotic,” “weird,” “nonsensical;’ et cetera is as significant as what seems lawful, orderly and comprehensible.

    An elementary Cabalistic train­ing technique is to try every day to “regard every incident and event as a direct communication between God and your sou1.” Even the li­cense plates on passing cars are such communications-or can be considered as such-by the devout Cabalist.

    Some will be thinking of Freud at this point; and indeed Nathan Fo­dor points out in Freud, Jung and the Occult that Freud was heavily influ­enced by a friend who was a Caba­list. The “dreams, visions and strange accidents” that Yeats thought would bring people into the ambience of the Golden Dawn are all Freudian “unconscious material.”

    A more modern metaphor is to be found in current neurology; which points out that the brain is divided into two hemispheres. The left hemisphere is where we do most of our conscious thinking, and it is linear; it breaks things down into sequences of A-causes-B, B-causes-C, and so forth. The right hemisphere, on the contrary; thinks in gestalt-meaningful wholes, comprehen­sive systems.

    Cabala, like dope, is a deliberate attempt to overthrow the linear left brain and allow the contents of the holistic right brain to flood the field of consciousness. When you are walking down the street and every li­cense plate seems part of one continuous message-one endless narrative-you are thinking like a very advanced theoretical Cabalist. (Or else you’re stoned out of your gourd.) Practical Cabala (or Cabalistic magic) is the art of utilizing such holistic perception to create effects that will seem like “strange accidents” to the non-Cabalist.

    A legendary example concerns an inci­dent when the king of Poland was being urged by his advisers to authorize a pogrom against the Jews. One old Hasidic rabbi­ and the Hasidic rabbis spend most of their time studying Cabala-sat down, on hear­ing of this, and pretended to be writing something; but he did not write. Instead, he deliberately knocked his bottle over three times. His students, who saw this, thought the old man was getting a bit funny in the head. Then, a few days later; came news from the capital: The king had tried to sign the order for the pogrom three times, and each time he had-by “strange acci­dent knocked over his ink bottle. “I can’t sign this,” the king finally exclaimed. “God is against it!”"

    http://www.rawilsonfans.com/articles/Cabala.htm

  4. Jacob Says:
    April 14th, 2005 at 12:07 pm

    also worth noting is that I’ve been getting bizarre synchronicities everyday for the past month. I think this has something to do with an awakening of the subconscious, which I’m sorta theorizing creates the “physical” world (matter is a product of mind.)

    I think when one gets closer to their individual unconscious, the subtle intent of the “will” becomes more active in making actual things happen to you.

    If you have a fairly hard worldview where certain things simply cannot happen, then certain things most probably won’t ever happen (at least not in your direct experience), but conspiracy theory, schitzophrenia, drugs, and spirituality loosens the illusory border between mind and reality. If you become enlightened, which I think, basically indicates you’re living out of the subconscious rather than the ego, then the question between what is actually happening and what you think is happening becomes moot. What people will tell you is actually happening is probably just going to be a compromise with the collective delusion. The objective details aren’t important, any way (unless they enhance the myth.)

    I don’t think conspiracy theory necesarily points at any objective truth (though it may *shrug*) just that it’s giving you a “delusion” that points at personally meaningful, subjective truths. It’s the new era of myth-making, and it’s incredibly expansice in it’s breadth… hell, I’ve even read essays connecting Miyamoto Musashi to the illuminati.

    Reality is what you can get away with. The most powerful freedom we have–which almost no one exercises–is the freedom to believe what we want. True thought crime isn’t about secretly being a racist or holding some other non-pc viewpoint, real thought crime is believing whatever the hell you want no matter what others say– you become wild.



SURROUND YOURSELF WITH STRENGTH.