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Gods & Collective Experiences
When you believe that something called “internal experience” exist, you tend to cling tightly to notion that your own internal experiences are somehow unique and set apart from everyone else’s. In fact, that’s where the word “self” comes from, an ancient word for “separate” or “apart.”
As an experiment, I have lately been giving up on the notion that my own experiences are unique. For most people, this is a bitter pill to swallow, as we have been trained our whole lives by media to build up the artifice of our own uniqueness. While what media and advertising tend to really do is rope us all into shared cultural experiences, while simultaneously making us feel like the whole thing is our doing (ie, “choice”).
But really, most of our experiences are not unique. Each of us has been or will be through one or multiple relationships which we could classify as “love.” We have all cried, all had diarrhea, all been embarrassed because of something sexual, all gotten angry at bosses, all wished that we could change our lives. The list goes on and on.
And yet we cling mercilessly to this idea that each of us is different and unique and special. And it’s not that I don’t think each of us is special or what have you. It’s just that I don’t think our worth as humans is intrinsically bound to our uniqueness. The two simply can’t be connected because the fact is that we are simply not unique.
Have you ever been at a movie or a concert or some public event with friends in your socio-economic class? What I’ve noticed tends to happen is that I will overhear other people around me who I don’t know having almost verbatim conversations that I have had with my own friends - conversations which I thought were funny and meaningful because they were unique. To hear other people having those same exact conversations though has the peculiar effect - at times - of making me annoyed. Perhaps precisely because it challenges those feelings of uniqueness.
As a continuation of my experiment in letting go of those feelings and moving into a new place in my life, I wanted to share another theory I have which hooks into this notion of uniqueness of human experience. The theory is basically that not all cultures in the modern world or historically relied on this idea that our experiences were unique. That theory could be supported possibly by some historical and anthropological analysis if one were so inclined, but I’m more prone to just skip all the persuasive documentation part and cut straight to the chase.
Here goes: a major part (though not the only part) of what other cultures mean when they say “Gods” or “Goddesses” are simply containers for collective experience. We think of each of us as having a unique set of experiences in life. And we tend to locate these experiences inside of us somewhere - in our brain, mind, whatever. But if you begin to disbelieve in the uniqueness of your own experience (your own separateness of self), I have found that you consequently also begin to disbelieve in the idea that these things are stored somewhere inside of us, like groceries in a shopping bag.
We could say that these experiences are “outside” of us somewhere - and that may be a useful way of looking at it as you’re getting started. But it would probably even be more accurate to say that these experiences just “are”. They just exist. It doesn’t matter where they are.
Try thinking of it like this: where is happiness located when you’re not “using” it (when you’re sad)? Where is happiness located when you are using it (when you’re happy)?
This is how I have come to understand gods in other cultures - as well as how they covertly work through our own culture as well, but we just don’t recognize them for what they are. Gods aren’t inside or outside. They just “are.” And the way that you communicate with them tends to be when you are engaging in an activity or having an experience over which they rule. Rituals tend to be designed for the express purposes of invoking such a pattern of energy and activity into the container of your body.
Maybe this isn’t news to anyone else. I’m not sure. But it’s been a significant element for me in the transformation of my experience. I’m not quite sure what the best rational method would be for explaining this to people. Cause I don’t quite understand it all myself at this point. So all I can really do is jump around and hope something sticks for somebody who’s in the right place to get what I’m talking about.
Let’s look at oracles for a second as well. What is an oracle for? When you lay down a Tarot spread, what are you trying to do? The simplest answer is trying to understand. Some people think divination is about predicting the future. Others take a more psychological approach to looking at different forces acting in your life at a particular juncture. If we look at the cultures which have strong oracular traditions though, we tend to also find very strong deity-worship as well. Think of the oracles of ancient Greece. Or look at the divination experience I had earlier this year within the Santeria tradition. The purpose of these rituals is essentially to consult the gods and the spirits for information. What kind of information? Information about your life.
That is, you consult an external source to shed light on something that culturally we as modern Westerners believe is an internal thing. How could that possibly work? In our worldview, it really couldn’t. Which is why so many people have problems “believing” in psychics, tarot, etc - because they seem to only “tell us things we already know.”
But for just a second, adopt as an experiment the belief that there is literally nothing inside you but blood and guts and bone. There are no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no memories. Nothing. How would you feel in such a circumstance? All of a sudden everything becomes dark and quiet, doesn’t it? Try it again if that wasn’t your result. Close your eyes and just for one split second try to imagine that there is literally nothing inside you. Don’t bother trying to sustain it. That’s not the point.
The point I’m making goes back to oracles, divination, etc. If there’s nothing inside you (which I recognize is a big leap to make), how would you know what you feel? How would you understand the forces at play in this particular moment in your life? An oracle would certainly come in handy here, wouldn’t it? An oracle would tell you that such and such a god or archetype or energy pattern is at play in your life right now. Knowing which one would enable you to then take certain types of appropriate actions to steer the energy in the proper direction based on the outcome desired. You would undergo a ritual, perform a sacrifice, say a prayer, wear a certain type of costume, eat or not eat a certain type of food.
What you would be doing, in effect, would be drawing from a collective pool of human experience (a “god”). A store of energy and patterns of activity which are designed to activate or diminish that energy.
How you’ll apply these ideas in your own life and own “inner” experiences will of course be up to you - because that’s the great conceit of democratic-consumerism, right? That the foundations of reality itself depend on your ability to “choose.” I will continue to chronicle my own efforts to draw from what I am now perceiving as collective experiences (gods) in the hopes that it will inspire or propel others well beyond anywhere I have gotten with it.
I make no claims at being able to rationally being able to back-up or necessarily needing to defend what I’m saying here. We’re moving beyond all that from here on out. Reason will only be applied to help make the medicine go down smoother.
Here’s some catch-up reading for you if you have no idea what the hell I am talking about or how I got here or where I am going with all this.
- Podcast 11: Express Yourself
- Centrally Networked Life Forms
- Erasing Personal History
- Coney Island Cut-Out Consciousness
- It’s All In Your Head!
- Where Are Thoughts?
- Voices In Our Heads
- Podcast 17: And I’ll Form The Head!
December 19th, 2006 at 9:16 pm
I used to want to hang onto my ideas and keep them secret so that nobody could steal them, but its more rewarding to share lately i think
anyway they aren’t really in my head they’re out there, when i have an idea its actually being shared with me not coming from within me now i think. The zeigeist.
December 19th, 2006 at 9:21 pm
Yeah I was gonna write this into this article before I got up in a bunch of other bullshit - but the way I am now beginning to understand thoughts is that they are almost like locations which you step into or go inside of…
I have another post or maybe a podcast I want to do specifically on the subject of holding onto ideas… I’m waiting for a Bill Hicks track to download though as it is part of what inspired it.
But yeah it relates to the fact that a few nights ago I almost donated every thing I have ever or will write or create to the public domain… But then thought differently about it the next day
December 19th, 2006 at 10:35 pm
Well, perhaps not exactly what you are talking about, but your comment about “inner experience” not being unique reminds me a lot of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s argument against the possibility of a private language. Essentially, the idea is that in order for talk about our “inner experiences” to have meaning they must be in some sense publicly experienced. This is because you can only learn to meaningfully use a word for something if there is some criteria above and beyond your experience which other people have access to. As one web site puts it, “If we both spoke English words, but in my version scuba diving means taking a hot shower and to you it means swimming with a tank of air on your back we could quickly get confused. If everyone had their own definitions for all words communication would be impossible. Therefore the fact that language works at all is proof of commonality of experience.”
Another link with Wittgenstein and your posting is your comment about a “collective pool of human experience.” Wittgenstein also came to an interesting similar conclusion but referred to it as ‘language games’ where meaning and cognitive rules are passed down. Think of a game of chess. If you taught the game by merely naming the pieces, “This is the king. This is the knight. etc.”, the student would have no idea how to play. But show him how each piece moves and then the names of the pieces hold more significance since he now knows what it means when a piece is labeled a king. So it is with our daily discourse and mannerisms. We are embedded within human society through our shared experiences and our language. We use words constructed centuries ago and have been socialized to understand and respond to symbolic activity that was also set down before we were born. Just think of the concept of personal space which differs from culture to culture, and yet we all react physically to something we were never explicitly taught. We just pick up how close we and others should be in proximity by simply being around each other.
Like I said, its probably not exactly where you were going, but I thought it interesting that an analytic philosopher may have had some similar insight.
December 20th, 2006 at 12:43 am
Woah, that was cool.
Tim, I got to the point where you said to imagine yourself as empty inside. I thought “Na, I don’t have a problem with that.” Didn’t really try it. Then I read you pretty much saying “No, try it” - so I did. I closed my eyes and imagined myself empty.
What I got was just this empty spot where I was, but this glow around it. I thought to myself “Hey, that’s pretty cool” and realized that my thoughts were coming from behind my back somewhere.
I’m going to have to play with that a bit now.
December 20th, 2006 at 12:54 am
In a way, this all sounds pretty heavily Jungian — collective unconscious, archetypes, etc…But maybe that’s just the window trimming. I like your idea of pre-existing spaces/locations…though that’s maybe problematic because it feels a little too three-dimensional and Newtonian. Maybe the modern metaphor of a network or database that’s already there, somewhere in the aether, even before you figure out how to log in.
Part of Jung’s genius was the way he tied psychology to history, but history seen as well-documented mythology. Some of his stuff on alchemy and eastern philosophy makes this sense patent. Got to hand it to him when it comes to understanding the Gods in you head.
Like the way you make the point. Great stuff…
December 20th, 2006 at 1:30 am
Hm, I can see what you’re saying, but that’s very different from what I am saying. Basically just do this: drop all the concepts and interpretation. Then, drop your “self” out of the picture. Then, drop the “picture,” then drop “dropping,” then “then”
And there you have it. Like you said, everything else is window dressing designed to hopefully hook you into it with curiousity. It sounds stupid when you write it out like I did above, so thats why you have to practice it. And practice it. And practice it.
I’ve been dwelling a lot lately on this sort of paradox I am initiating in my life: that I am nobody. That no “me” actually exists, when it’s patently obvious that something does. But the thing is that it’s obvious to other people. It’s not obvious to me. Where am I? What am I really made up of? The question isn’t unanswerable because it’s “mystical” or whatever. It’s unanswerable because no ‘thing’ at root exists. There is no me. There is no answer.
December 20th, 2006 at 1:33 am
I’ve also been thinking a lot about Jung lately. I think what Jung *said* and what Jung *did* were two completely different things. It must be that way with any teacher, because when we use language we initiate the task of crossing media formats. It’s like trying to write out a song or a movie in words. It doesn’t work, but it gives you an approximation. (And the matter is compounded because a song or movie is still only an approximation of real life turned into a kind of language)
There’s some famous Jung quote where he says something like, “I’m glad I’m Jung and not a Jungian.” Because those people were getting hung up on what he said and what he meant by it, rather than what he actually *did* and what was behind it all.
December 20th, 2006 at 9:24 am
Finally, Tim, I think I get what you’ve been getting at with your talk of not being unique, personal expression not being that important, etc. I’m finally convinced you’re not joining the Borg, or the Luddite Borg (though that would be an interesting idea, huh? A contradiction?)
Also, the comment from Rev. Max:
This comment made me think of something I read in Newsweek* about how “kids today” have been raised in a world where MySpace and blogs and whatnot allow them to be narcissistic and sorta exabitionist — the whole “look at me, hooray Big Brother for paying attention” — I think you, Tim, may have written on this. Anyway, the Newsweek thing made me wonder if I should feel guilty for having a blog and a MySpace, but now Rev Max’s comment makes me think it may be okay, although the going theme seems to be that everything I do is wrong, but that’s a whole other issue.
* Jan. 1, 2007 issue. Page 24. “Living Online” by Andrew Romano, who introduces himself as a 24-year-old with a lot of photos and info of himself online.
December 20th, 2006 at 6:33 pm
Only you can decide if and when you should or shouldn’t feel guilty for anything.
I think Rev Max is talking about not clinging to things that you believe to be your own creations but which are the common domain of all. I think there may be a significant difference with the sort of tell-all sharing that goes on with blogs and MySpace - is it done to make yourself look like something in the eyes of others? Is it made to unburden yourself of your own concepts of self?
December 20th, 2006 at 8:56 pm
Thank you, Tim, I’ll try to keep your advice in mind.
December 20th, 2006 at 9:07 pm
Hehe. Try to keep it *not* in your mind.
December 21st, 2006 at 9:55 am
… and for the bajillionth time, tim, you’re in “my” head again. wheee!! i’ve got nothing to say, naturally. but I AM going to change channels. dunno why i’m so hooked on “novelty”.