/tag/consciousness

225 quotes tagged 'consciousness'

The Origins and History of Consciousness

Publisher: Princeton University Press (1954)

393

The picture we have drawn of our age is not intended as an indictment, much less as a glorification of the 'good old days'; for the phenomena we see around us are symptoms of an upheaval which, taken by and large, is necessary. The collapse of the old civilization, and its reconstruction on a lower level to begin with, will justify themselves because the new basis will have been immensely broadened. The civilization that is about to be born will be a human civilization in a far higher sense than any has ever been before, as it will have overcome important social, national, and racial limitations. These are not fantastic pipe dreams, but hard facts, and their birth pangs will bring infinite suffering upon infinite numbers of men. Spiritually, politically, and economically our world is an indivisible whole. By this standard, the Napoleonic wars were minor coups d'état and the world view of that age, in which anything outside Europe had hardly begun to appear, is almost inconceivable to us in its narrowness.

The collapse of the archetypal canon in our culture, which has produced such an extraordinary activation of the collective unconscious - or is perhaps its symptom, manifesting itself in mass movements that have a profound effect upon our personal destinies - is, however, only a passing phenomenon. Already, at a time when the internecine wars of the old canon are still being waged, we can discern, in single individuals, where the synthetic possibilities of the future lie, and almost how it will look. The turning of the mind from the conscious to the unconscious, the responsible rapprochement of human consciousness with the powers of the collective psyche, that is the task of the future. No outward tinkerings with the world and no social ameliorations can give the quietus to the daemon, to the gods and devils of the human soul, or prevent them from tearing down again and again what consciousness has built. Unless they are assigned their place in consciousness and culture they will never leave mankind in peace. But the preparation for this rapprochement lies, as always, with the hero, the individual; he and his transformation are the great human prototypes; he is the testing ground of the collective, just as consciousness is the testing ground of the unconscious.

300

The tendency of unconscious contents to swamp consciousness corresponds to the danger of being 'possessed'; it is one of the greatest 'perils of the soul' even today. A man whose consciousness is possessed by a particular content has an enormous dynamism in him, namely that of the unconscious content; but this counteracts the centroversion tendency of the ego to work for the whole rather than for the individual content.

405

Progression through the archetypal phases, the patriarchal orientation of consciousness, the formation of the superego as the representative of collective values within the personality, the existence of a collective value-canon, all these things are necessary conditions of normal, ethical development. If any one of these factors is inhibited, developmental disturbances result. A disturbance of the first two factors, which are specifically psychic, leads to neuroticism; a disturbance of the other two, which are cultural, expresses itself more in social maladjustment, delinquency, or criminality.

404

The identification of the ego with consciousness robs it of contact with the unconscious and thus of psychic wholeness. Consciousness can now claim to represent unity, but this unity is only the relative unity of the conscious mind and not that of the personality. Psychic wholeness is lost and is replaced by the dualistic principle of opposites which governs all conscious and unconscious constellations.

402

The child's fear and feeling of being threatened does not derive from the traumatic character of the world, for no trauma exists under normal human conditions or even under primitive ones; it comes rather from the 'night space,' or, to be more precise, it arises when the ego steps forth from this night space. The germinal ego consciousness then experiences the overwhelming impact of the world-and-body stimulus, either directly or in projection. The importance of family relationships lies precisely in the fact that the personal figures of the environment who are the first form of society must be able, as soon as the ego emerges from the primary security of the uroboric state, to offer it the secondary security of the human world.

389

The line runs, as we saw, from the archetype as an effective transpersonal figure to the idea, and then to the 'concept' which one 'forms.' A good example of this is the concept of God, which now derives wholly from the sphere of consciousness - or purports to derive from it, as the ego is deluded enough to pretend. There is no longer anything transpersonal, but only personal; there are no more archetypes, but only concepts; no more symbols, only signs.\n\n 'This splitting off of the unconscious leads on the one hand to an ego life emptied of meaning, and on the other hand to an activation of the deeper-lying layers which, now grown destructive, devastate the autocratic world of the ego with transpersonal invasions, collective epidemics, and mass psychoses. For an upsetting of the compensatory relationship between conscious and unconscious is not a phenomenon to be taken lightly. Even when it is not so acute as to bring on a psychic sickness, the loss of instinct and the overaccentuation of the ego have consequences which, multiplied a millionfold, constellate the crisis of civilization.

385

Compensation is the first requisite for a productive relationship between the ego and the unconscious. This means that the princess, the soul, is lost to the ego just as much in the patriarchal as in the matriarchal form of castration.\r\n \r\nBut, as we have made clear in Part I of this book, behind both forms there looms the original uroboric castration, where the tendencies to differentiation cancel out. To put it in psychological language: just as mania and melancholia are merely two forms of madness, of the devouring uroboric state which destroys all ego consciousness, so regression to the unconscious, i.e., being devoured by the Great Mother, and the flight to 'nothing but' consciousness, i.e., being devoured by the spiritual father, are two forms in which any truly compensated consciousness, and the striving for wholeness, are lost. Deflation as well as inflation destroys the efficacy of consciousness, and both of them are defeats for the ego.\r\n \r\nSpiritual inflation, a perfect example of which is the frenziedness of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, is a typical Western development carried to extremes. Behind the overaccentuation of consciousness, ego, and reason - sensible enough in themselves as the guiding aims of psychic development - there stands the overwhelming might of 'heaven' as the danger which goes beyond the heroic struggle with the earthly side of the dragon and culminates in a spirituality that has lost touch with reality and the instincts.

355

Creativity in all its forms is always the product of a meeting between the masculine world of ego consciousness and the feminine world of the soul.

344

One of the most important attainments of consciousness is its ability to dispose at will of the libido supplied to its system, and to use it more or less independently of the source from which it came. Just as the animation occasioned in the reader by a 'stimulating' book can be applied to a poem, a walk, a bridge party, or a flirtation, without there necessarily being any connection between the book and the ego's reaction, so the ego can apply as it pleases a portion of the libido accruing to it from the conscious realization of an unconscious content. This relative freedom of the ego, no matter how much it is abused, is one of its most precious accomplishments.

329

Pure existence in the unconscious, which primitive man shares with the animal, is indeed nonhuman and prehuman. The fact that the dawn of consciousness and the creation of the world are parallel processes which throw up the same symbolism indicates that the world actually 'exists' only to the degree that it is cognized by an ego. A differentiated world is the reflection of a self-differentiating consciousness. The multiple archetypes and symbol groups split off from a primordial archetype are identical with the ego's greater range of experience, knowledge, and insight. Under the total impact of experience in the dawn period no particularized forms could be recognized, for the tremendous force of it extinguished the ego in a sort of numinous convulsion. But a more informed human consciousness can experience, in the multiplicity of religions and philosophies, theologies and psychologies, the innumerable facets and meanings of the numinous, now anatomized into image and symbol, attribute and revelation. That is to say, although the primal unity can only be experienced fragmentarily, it has at least come within range of conscious experience, whereas for the undeveloped ego it was utterly overwhelming.

327

The more complex a content is, the less it can be grasped and measured by consciousness, whose structure is so one-sided that it can attain to clarity only over a limited area. In this respect consciousness is built analogously to the eye. There is one spot where vision is sharpest, and larger areas can be perceived clearly only by continuous eye-movements. In the same way, consciousness can only keep a small segment sharply in focus; consequently it has to break up a large content into partial aspects, experiencing them piecemeal, one after he other, and then learn to get a synoptic view of the whole terrain by comparison and abstraction.\n\n 'An advanced consciousness will therefore split the bivalent content into a dialectic of contrary qualities. Before being so split, the content is not merely good and bad at once; it is beyond good and evil, attracting and repelling, and therefore irritating to consciousness. But if there is a division into good and evil, consciousness can then take up an attitude.\n\n 'Rationalization, abstraction, and de-emotionalization are all expressions of the 'devouring' tendency of ego consciousness to assimilate the symbols piecemeal. As the symbol is broken down into conscious contents, it loses its compulsive effect, its compelling significance, and becomes poorer in libido. Thus the 'gods of Greece' are no longer for us, as they were for the Greeks, living forces and symbols of the unconscious requiring a ritualistic approach; they have been broken down into cultural contents, conscious principles, historical data, religious associations, and so on. They exist as contents of consciousness and no longer - or only in special cases - as symbols of the unconscious.

317

The uroboric tendency of the unconscious to reabsorb all its products by destroying them so as to give them back in new, changed form is repeated on the higher plane of ego consciousness. Here, too, the analytical process precedes the synthesis, and differentiation is the prime requisite for a later integration.\n\n 'In this sense all knowledge rests on an aggressive act of incorporation. The psychic system, and to an even greater extent consciousness itself, is an organ for breaking up, digesting, and then rebuilding the objects of the world and the unconscious, in exactly the same way as our bodily digestive system decomposes matter physiochemically and uses it for the creation of new structures.

316

At first the ego is overpowered by the content newly emerging into consciousness - namely, the archetype of the antagonist - and goes under. Only gradually, and to the degree that the ego recognizes this destructive tendency as being not just a hostile content of the unconscious, but as part of itself, does consciousness begin to incorporate it, to digest and assimilate it, in other words, to make it conscious. The destruction is now separable from its old object, the ego, and has become and ego function. The ego can now use at least a portion of this tendency in its own interests. In fact, what has happened is that the ego, as we have said, 'turns the tables' upon the unconscious.

298

Although consciousness is a product of the unconscious, it is a product of a very special sort. All unconscious contents have, as complexes, a specific tendency, a striving to assert themselves. Like living organisms, they devour other complexes and enrich themselves with their libido. We can see in pathological cases, in fixed or compulsive ideas, manias, and states of possession, and again in every creative process where 'the work' absorbs and drains dry all extraneous contents, how an unconscious content attracts all others to itself, consumes them, subordinates and co-ordinates them, and forms with them a system of relationships dominated by itself. We find the same process in normal life, too, when an idea - love, work, patriotism, or whatever else - comes to the top and asserts itself at the cost of others. One-sidedness, fixation, exclusiveness, etc., are the consequences of this tendency of all complexes to make themselves the center.\r\n \r\nThe peculiarity of the ego complex, however, is twofold; unlike all other complexes it tends to aggregate as the center of consciousness and to group the other conscious contents about itself; and secondly, it is oriented towards wholeness far more than any other complex.

297

Pain and discomfort are among the earliest factors that build consciousness. They are 'alarm-signals' sent out by centroversion to indicate that the unconscious equilibrium is disturbed. These signals were originally defense measures developed by the organism, though the manner of their development is as mysterious as that of all other organs and systems. The function of ego consciousness, however, is not merely to perceive, but to assimilate these alarm signals, for which purpose the ego, even when it suffers, has to hold aloof from them if it is to react appropriately. The ego, keeping its detachment as the center of the registering consciousness, is a differentiated organ exercising its controlling function in the interests of the whole, but is not identical with it.

292

The instincts of the collective unconscious form the substrate of this assimilative system. They are repositories of ancestral experience, of all the experience which man, as a species, has had of the world. Their 'field' is Nature, the external world of objects, including the human collective and man himself as an assimilative-reactive, psychophysical unit. That is to say, there is in the collective psyche of man, as in all animals, but modified according to species, a layer built up of man's specifically human, instinctive reactions to his natural environment. A further layer contains group instincts, namely experiences of the specifically human environment, of the collective, race, tribe, group, etc. This layer covers herd instincts, specific group reactions which distinguish a particular race or people from others, and all differentiated relationships to the nonego. A final layer is formed by instinctive reactions to the psychophysical organism and its modifications. For example hunger, hormone constellations, etc., are answered by instinctive reactions. All these layers intercommunicate. Their common factor is that the reactions are purely instinctive, the psychophysical unit reacting as a whole by means of meaningful acts which are not the outcome of individual experience, but of ancestral experience, and which are performed without the participation of consciousness.

281

Even in its waking state our ego consciousness, which in any case forms only a segment of the total psyche, exhibits varying degrees of animation, ranging from reverie, partial attention, and a diffuse wakefulness to partial concentration upon something, intense concentration, and finally moments of general and extreme alertness. The conscious system even of a healthy person is charged with libido only during certain periods of his life; in sleep it is practically or completely emptied of libido, and the degree of animation varies with age. The margin of conscious alertness in modern man is relatively narrow, the intensity of his active performance is limited, and illness, strain, old age, and all psychic disturbances take their toll of this alertness. It seems that the organ of consciousness is still at an early stage of development and relatively unstable.

274

The relation to the outside world is, in large measure actuated not directly by the individual, but by that imaginary entity the 'group,' whose incarnation is the leader or leading animal, and whose consciousness does duty for all parts of the group*.\n\n *That this same relationship still remains catastrophically in force in Western civilization is painfully obvious. Even today, the ruled are mostly supine members of the herd with no direct orientation of their own. The ruler, the State, etc., acts as a substitute for individual consciousness and sweeps us blindly into mass movements, wars, etc.

270

We must not regard our modern, waking consciousness as the obvious point of departure and then, on the analogy of hypnosis, take the participation mystique of the group psyche to be a limitation of this waking state. The reverse is true; the conscious state is the late and uncommon phenomenon, and its complete attainment is far more of a rarity than modern man so flatteringly pretends, while the unconscious state is the original, basic, psychic situation that is everywhere the rule.

267

This indivisibility of group, individual, and external world is found wherever psychic contents - contents, that is to say, which our present-day consciousness recognizes as psychic and which it therefore relegates to the world within us - are projected upon the world at large and are experienced as though they were outside ourselves. Contents of this kind are recognized readily enough as projections when they derive from earlier epochs, from alien spheres of culture, or from other people, but it becomes increasingly difficult for us to do so the more closely they approximate to the unconscious conditions of our own time, our own culture, and our own personality.

264

The uroboros come 'before' the stage of the Great Mother, and the Great Mother 'before' the dragon fight; but an absolute correlation in time is impossible because we have to consider the historical relativity of individual nations and cultures. Thus Creto-Mycenaean culture was, for the Greeks, the prehistoric Great Mother period, since in that culture her cult was dominant. Greek mythology is largely the dragon-fight mythology of a consciousness struggling for independence, and this struggle was decisive for the spiritual importance of Greece. But whereas in Greece this development falls roughly between 1500 and 500 B.C., the corresponding process in Egypt took place probably long before 3300.

261

Fundamental to analytical psychology is the theory of complexes, which recognizes the complex nature of the unconscious and defines complexes as 'living units of the unconscious psyche.' It also recognizes the complex nature of the ego, which, as the center of consciousness, forms the central complex in the psychic system.\r\n\r\nThis conception of the ego, substantiated by the psychological and psychopathological findings, is one of the distinctive features of analytical psychology:\r\n \r\n>The ego complex is a content of consciousness as well as a condition of consciousness, for a psychic element is conscious to me so far as it is related to the ego complex. But so far as the ego is only the center of my field of consciousness, it is not identical with the whole of my psyche, being merely one complex among other complexes.\r\n\r\n>Jung, Psychological Types

256

As though a Copernican revolution has taken place within the psyche, consciousness faces inward and becomes aware of the self, about which the ego revolves in a perpetual paradox of identity and nonidentity. The psychological process of assimilating the unconscious into our present-day consciousness begins at this point, and the consequent shifting of the center of gravity from the ego to the self signalizes the latest stage in the evolution of human consciousness.

171

In relation to the ego, the mother image has both a productive and a destructive aspect, but over and above that, it preserves a certain immutability and eternality. Although it is two-faced and can assume many shapes, for the ego and consciousness it always remains the world of the origin, the world of the unconscious. In general, therefore, the mother represents the instinctual side of life, which, compared with the changing positions of the ego and consciousness, proves to be constant and relatively unalterable, whether it be good or bad, helpful and productive, or hurtful and terrible.

146

The spiritual collective as we find it in all initiations and all secret societies, sects, mysteries, and religions is essentially masculine and, despite its communal character, essentially individual in the sense that each man is initiated as an individual and undergoes a unique experience that stamps his individuality. This individual accent and the elect character of the group stand in marked contrast to the matriarchal group, where the archetype of the Great Mother and the corresponding stage of consciousness are dominant. The opposed group of male societies and secret organizations is dominated by the archetype of the hero and by the dragon-fight mythology, which represents the next stage of conscious development. The male collective is the source of all the taboos, laws, and institutions that are destined to break the dominance of the uroboros and Great Mother. Heaven, the father, and the spirit go hand in hand with masculinity and represent the victory of the patriarchate over the matriarchate. This is not to say that the matriarchate knows no law; but the law by which it is informed is the law of instinct, of unconscious, natural functioning, and this law subserves the propagation, preservation, and evolution of the species rather than the development of the single individual.

143

The masculine trend, however, is towards greater co-ordination of spirit, ego, consciousness, and will. Because man discovers his true self in consciousness, and is a stranger to himself in the unconscious, which he must inevitably experience as feminine, the development of masculine culture means development of consciousness.

122

Ego formation can only proceed by way of distinction from the non-ego and consciousness only emerge where it detaches itself from what is unconscious; and the individual only arrives at individuation when he marks himself off from the anonymous collective.

120

In the great religions, the primal deed, the separation of the World Parents, is theologized. An attempt is made to rationalize and moralize the undeniable sense of deficiency that attaches to the emancipated ego. Interpreted as sin, apostasy, rebellion, disobedience, this emancipation is in reality the fundamental liberating act of man which releases him from the yoke of the unconscious and establishes him as an ego, a conscious individual. But because this act, like every act and every liberation, entails sacrifice and suffering, the decision to take such a step is all the more momentous.

116

This being opposite and no longer contained in the womb is the dark feeling that pervades consciousness wherever the ego finds itself isolated and alone.\n\n It is the mark of man to be pitted against the world, it is his sorrow and his speciality; for what at first seems loss turns out a positive gain. But not only that; on a higher level there falls to man, and to man alone, the essential mark of 'relatedness,' because he, as an individual, enters into relations with an object, be it another man, a thing, the world, his own soul, or God.

115

Ego consciousness not only brings a sense of loneliness; it also introduces suffering, toil, trouble, evil, sickness, and death into man's life as soon as these are perceived by an ego. By discovering itself, the lonely ego simultaneously perceives the negative and relates to it, so that it at once establishes a connection between these two facts, taking its own genesis as guilt, and suffering, sickness, and death as condign punishment. The whole life feeling of primitive man is haunted by the negative influences all around him, and at the same time by the consciousness that he is to blame for everything negative that befalls.

111

The activity of instinct lies behind actions which the ego coordinates with its sphere of decision and volition, and to an even higher degree instincts and archetypes are at the back of our conscious attitudes and orientations. But, whereas in modern man there is at any rate the possibility of decision and conscious orientation, the psychology of archaic man and of the child is marked by a mingling of these spheres. Volitions, moods, emotions, instincts, and somatic reactions are still for all practical purposes fused together. The same applies to the original ambivalence of affects, which are later resoved into antithetical positions. Love and hate, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion, yes and no, are at first juxtaposed and interfused, and do not possess the antithetical character they subsequently appear to have.\n\n Depth psychology has made the discovery that even today the opposites lie closer together and are more intimately connected than their actual degree of separation would lead one to suppose. Not only in the neurotic, but in the normal person too, the poles are hard side by side; pleasure turns to pain, hate to love, sorrow to joy, far more readily than we would expect. This can be seen most clearly in children. Laughing and crying, starting a thing and then stopping it, liking and disliking follow fast on one another's heels. No position is fixed, and none is a flat contradiction of its opposite, but both exist peaceably side by side and are realized in closest succession. Influences stream in and out from all sides; environment, ego, and interior world, objective tendencies, consciousness, and bodily tendencies operate simultaneously, and all the while no ego worth mentioning, or only a very diminutive ego, arranges, centers, accepts and rejects.

110

Opposition between ego and body is, as we have said, an original condition. Containment in the uroboros and its supremacy over the ego mean, on the bodily level, that ego and consciousness are at the outset continually at the mercy of the instincts, impulses, sensations, and reactions deriving from the world of the body. To begin with, this ego, existing first as a point and then as an island, knows nothing of itself and consequently nothing of its difference. As it grows stronger, it detaches itself more and more from the world of the body. This leads finally, as we know, to a state of systematized ego consciousness where the entire bodily realm is to a large extent unconscious, and the conscious system is split off from the body as the representative of unconscious processes. Through the split is not in effect so drastic as this, the illusion of it is so powerful and so real for the ego that the body region and the unconscious can only be rediscovered with a great effort. In yoga, for instance, a strenuous attempt is made to reconnect the conscious mind with the unconscious bodily processes.

110

The ego and consciousness experience their own reality by distinguishing themselves from the body. This is one of the fundamental facts of the human mind and its discovery of itself as something distinct from nature. Early man is in the same case as the infant and the small child: his body and his 'inside' are part of an alien world. The acquisition of voluntary muscular movement, i.e., the fact that the ego discovers, in its own 'person,' that its conscious will can control the body, may well be the basic experience at the root of all magic. The ego, having its seat, as it were, in the head, in the cerebral cortex, and experiencing the nether regions of the body as something strange to it, an alien reality, gradually begins to recognize that essential portions of this nether corporeal world are subject to its will and volition. It discovers that the 'sovereign power of thought' is a real and actual fact: the hand in front of my face, and the foot lower down, do what I will. The obviousness of these facts should not blind us to the enormous impression which this very early discovery must make, and unquestionably has made, on every infantile ego nucleus.

In the myth of Narcissus, the ego, seeking to break the power of the unconscious through self-reflection, succumbs to a catastrophic self-love. His suicidal death by drowning symbolizes the dissolution of ego consciousness, and the same thing is repeated in modern times in young suicides like Weininger and Seidel. Seidel's book Bewusstsein als Verhängnis and the work of the misogynist Weininger bear the clear imprint of having been written by lovers of the Great Mother. They are fatally fascinated by her, and even in the futile resistance they put up they are fulfilling their archetypal fate.

The youth struggling for self-consciousness now begins, in so far as he is an individual, to have a personal fate, and for him the Great Mother becomes the deadly and unfaithful mother. She selects one young man after another to love and destroy. In this way she becomes 'the harlot.' The sacred prostitute - which is what the Great Mother really is, as the vessel of fertility - takes on the negative character of the fickle jade and destroyer. With this, the great revaluation of the feminine begins its conversion into the negative, thereafter carried to extremes in the patriarchal religions of the West. The growth of self-consciouness and the strengthening of masculinity thrust the image of the Great Mother into the background; the patriarchal society splits it up, and while only the picture of the good Mother is retained in consciousness, her terrible aspect is relegated to the unconscious*.\n\n *Author's footnote: The splitting of the Great Mother into a conscious 'good' mother and unconscious 'evil' one is a basic phenomenon in the psychology of neurosis. The situation then is that consciously the neurotic has a 'good relation' to the mother, but in the gingerbread house of this love there is hidden the witch, who gobbles up little children and grants them, as a reward, a passive, irresponsible existence without an ego. Analysis then uncovers the companion picture of the Terrible Mother, an awe-inspiring figure who with threats and intimidations puts a ban on sexuality. The results are masturbation, real or symbolic impotence, self-castration, suicide, etc. It makes no difference whether the picture of the Terrible Mother remains unconscious or is projected; in either case the very idea of coitus, of any connection with the female, will activate the fear of castration.'

One's state of mind is the more dependent upon whether one is satisfied or not, or thirsty or not, the less one's consciousness and one's ego are developed.

Even today we can see from primitives that the law of gravity, the inertia of the psyche, the desire to remain unconscious, is a fundamental human trait. Yet even this is a false formulation, since it starts from consciousness as though that were the natural and self-evident thing. But fixation in unconsciousness, the downward drag of its specific gravity, cannot be called a desire to remain unconscious; on the contrary, that is the natural thing. There is, as a counteracting force, the desire to become conscious, a veritable instinct impelling man in this direction. One has no need to desire to remain unconscious; one is primarily unconscious and can at most conquer the original situation in which man drowses in the world, drowses in the unconscious, contained in the infinite like a fish in the environing sea. The ascent toward consciousness is the 'unnatural' thing in nature; it is specific of the species Man, who on that account has justly styled himself Homo sapiens. The struggle between the specifically human and the universally natural constitutes the history of man's conscious development.

The time of the beginning, before the coming of the opposites, must be understood as the self-description of that great epoch when there was still no consciousness. It is the wu chi of Chinese philosophy, whose symbol is the empty circle. Everything is still in the 'now and for ever' of eternal being; sun, moon, and stars, these symbols of time and therefore of mortality, have not yet been created; and day and night, yesterday and tomorrow, genesis and decay, the flux of life and birth and death, have not yet entered into the world. This prehistoric state of being is not time, but eternity, just as the time before the coming of man and before birth and begetting is eternity. And just as there is no time before the birth of man and ego, only eternity, so there is no space, only infinity.

In the beginning is perfection, wholeness. This original perfection can only be 'circumscribed,' or described symbolically; its nature defies any description other than a mythical one, because that which describes, the ego, and that which is described, the beginning, which is prior to any ego, prove to be incommensurable quantities as soon as the ego tries to grasp its object conceptually, as a content of consciousness.\n\n For this reason a symbol always stands at the beginning, the most striking feature of which is its multiplicity of meanings, its indeterminate and indeterminable character.

Creative evolution of ego consciousness means that, through a continuous process stretching over thousands of years, the conscious system has absorbed more and more unconscious contents and progressively extended its frontiers.

114

The action of the ego in separating the World Parents is a struggle, a creative act, and in later sections devoted to the fight with the dragon we shall give prominence to this aspect, and also to the decisive change of personality that follows from this resolve to overcome the danger.\n\n For the moment, however, we shall concern ourselves with the other aspect of this deed: the fact that it is experienced as guilt, and moreover as original guilt, a fall. But first we have to discuss the emotional situation, and to understand that this deed, though it manifests itself as the coming of light, and as the creation of the world and consciousness, is vitiated by a sense of suffering and loss so strong as almost to offset the creative gain.

219

Perseus defeats the unconscious (symbolized by the Gorgon) through the typical act of conscious realization. He would not be strong enough to gaze directly upon the petrifying face of the uroboros, so he raises its image to consciousness and kills it 'by reflection.

The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism

Author: Hakim Bey

Publisher: Autonomedia (2003)

The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 14: Mysterium Coniunctionis

Author: Carl Gustav Jung, R.F.C. Hull (Translator)

Publisher: Princeton University Press (1963)

Ride the Tiger

Author: Julius Evola

Publisher: Inner Traditions International (2003)

168-170

In general, drugs can be divided into four categories: stimulants, depressants, hallucinogens, and narcotics. The first two categories do not concern us; for example, the use of tobacco and alcohol is irrelevant unless it becomes a vice, that is, if it leads to addiction. \nThe third category includes drugs that bring on states in which one experiences various visions and seemingly other worlds of the senses and spirit. On account of these effects, they have also been called 'psychedelics,' under the assumption that the visions project and reveal the hidden contents of the depths of one's own psyche, but are not recognized as such. As a result, physicians have even tried to use drugs like mescaline for a psychic exploration analogous to psychoanalysis. However, when all is reduced to the projection of a psychic substratum, not even experiences of this kind can interest the differentiated man. Leaving aside the perilous contents of the sensations and their artificial paradise, these illusory phantasmagoria do not take one beyond, even if one cannot exclude the possibility that what is acting may not be merely the contents of one's own subconscious, but dark influences that, finding the door open, manifest themselves in these visions. We might even say that those influences, and not the simple substratum repressed by the individual psyche, are responsible for certain impulses that can burst out in these states, even driving some compulsively to commit criminal acts. \nAn effective use of these drugs would presuppose a preliminary 'catharsis,' that is, the proper neutralization of the individual unconscious substratum that is activated; then the images and senses could refer to a spiritual reality of a higher order, rather than being reduced to a subjective, visionary orgy. One should emphasize that the instances of this higher use of drugs were preceded not only by periods of preparation and purification of the subject, but also that the process was properly guided through the contemplation of certain symbols. Sometimes 'consecrations' were also prescribed for protective purposes. There are accounts of certain indigenous communities in Central and South America whose members, only while under the influence of peyote, hear the sculpted figures on ancient temple ruins 'speak,' revealing their meaning in terms of spiritual enlightenment. The importance of the individual's attitude clearly appears from the completely different effects of mescaline on two contemporary writers who have experimented with drugs, Aldous Huxley and R. H. Zaehner. And it is a fact that in the case of hallucinogens like opium and, in part, hashish, this active assumption of the experience that is essential from our point of view is generally excluded. \nThere remains the category of narcotics and of substances that are also used for total anesthesia, whose normal effect is the complete suspension of consciousness. This corresponds to a detachment that would exclude all intermediate 'psychedelic' forms and the insidious, ecstatic, and sensual contents, leaving a void. However, if consciousness were maintained, with the pure I at the center, it could facilitate the opening to a higher reality. But the advantages would be outweighed by the extreme difficulty of any training capable of maintaining detached consciousness. \nIn general, one must keep in mind that drug use even for a spiritual end, that is, to catch glimpses of transcendence, has its price. How drugs produce certain psychic effects has not yet been determined by modern science. It is said that some, like LSD, destroy certain brain cells. One point is certain: Habitual use of drugs brings a certain psychic disorganization; one should substitute for them the power of attaining analogous states through one's own means. Therefore, when one has chosen a path based on the maximum unification of all one's psychic faculties, these drawbacks must be kept firmly in mind.

168

I have already pointed out the African polyrhythmic technique: one energy is locked into continuous stasis in order to unleash an energy of a different order. In the inferior ecstaticism of primitive peoples this opens the way for possession by dark powers. I have said that in our case, this different energy should be produced by the response of the 'being' (the Self) to the stimulus The situation created by the reaction to drugs and even alcohol is no different. But this kind of reaction almost never occurs; the reaction to the substance is too strong, rapid, unexpected, and external to be simply experienced, and thus the process cannot involve the 'being.' It is as if a powerful current penetrated the consciousness without requiring assent, leaving the person to merely notice the change of state: he is submerged in this new state, and 'acted on' by it. Thus the true effect, even if not noticed, is a collapse, a lesion of the Self, for all his sense of an exalted life or of a transcendent beatitude or sensuality. \nFor the process to proceed differently, it would go schematically as follows: at the point in which the drug frees energy x in an exterior way, an act of the Self, of 'being' brings its own double energy, x + x, into the current and maintains it up to the end. Similarly, a wave, even if unexpected, serves a skilled swimmer with whom it collides by propelling him beyond it. Thus, there would be no collapse, the negative would be transformed into positive, no condition of passivity would be formed with respect to the drug, the experience in a certain way would be deconditioned, and, as a result, one would not undergo an ecstatic dissolution, devoid of any true opening beyond the individual and only substantiated by sensations. Instead, in certain cases there would be the possibility of coming into contact with a superior dimension of reality, which was the intention of ancient, nonprofane drug use.

The Periodic Table

Author: Primo Levi

Publisher: Penguin Essentials (2012)

The Bakhtin Reader

Author: Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov, Pam Morris (Editor)

Publisher: Arnold (2001)

83-84

We know our native language - its lexical composition and grammatical structure - not from dictionaries and grammars but from concrete utterances that we hear and that we ourselves reproduce in live speech communication with people around us. We assimilate forms of language only in forms of utterances and in conjunction with these forms. The forms of language and the typical forms of utterances, that is, speech genres, enter our experience and our consciousness together, and in close connection with one another. To learn to speak means to learn to construct utterances (because we speak in utterances and not in individual sentences, and, of course, not in individual words). Speech genres organize our speech in almost the same way as grammatical (syntactical) forms do. We learn to cast our speech in generic forms and, when hearing others' speech, we guess its genre from the very first words; we predict a certain length (that is, the approximate length of the speech whole) and a certain compositional structure; we foresee the end; that is, from the very beginning we have a sense of the speech whole, which is only later differentiated during the speech process. If speech genres did not exist and we had not mastered them, if we had to originate them during the speech process and construct each utterance at will for the first time, speech communication would be almost impossible... \nMany people who have an excellent command of a language often feel quite helpless in certain spheres of communication precisely because they do not have a practical command of the generic forms used in the given spheres. Frequently a person who has an excellent command of speech in some areas of cultural communication, who is able to read a scholarly paper or engage in a scholarly discussion, who speaks very well on social questions, is silent or very awkward in social conversation. Here it is not a matter of an impoverished vocabulary or of style, taken abstractly: this is entirely a matter of the inability to command a repertoire of genres of social conversation, the lack of a sufficient supply of those ideas about the whole of the utterance that help to cast one's speech quickly and naturally in certain compositional and stylistic forms, the inability to grasp a word promptly, to begin and end correctly (composition is very uncomplicated in these genres)... \nThe sentence, like the word, is a signifying unit of language. Therefore, each individual sentence, for example, 'The sun has risen', is completely comprehensible, that is, we understand its language meaning, its possible role in an utterance. But in no way can we assume a responsive position with respect to this individual sentence unless we know that with this sentence the speaker has said everything he wishes to say, that this sentence is neither preceded nor followed by other sentences of the same speaker. But then this is no longer a sentence, but a full-fledged utterance consisting of one sentence. It is framed and delimited by a change of speech subjects and it directly reflects an extraverbal reality (situation). It is possible to respond to such an utterance...

Any motivation of one's behavior, any instance of self-awareness (fore self-awareness is always verbal, always a matter of finding some specifically suitable verbal complex) is an act of gauging oneself and one's behavior. In becoming aware of myself, I attempt to look at myself, as it were, through the eyes of another person, another representative of my social group, my class. Thus, self-consciousness, in the final analysis, always leads us to class consciousness, the reflection and specification of which it is in all its fundamental and essential respects. Here we have the objective roots of even the most personal and intimate reactions.

40-41

Freud's theory is a 'projection' of certain objective relations of the external world into the world of psyche. What finds expression there is, in the very first instance, the extremely complex social interrelationship between doctor and patient. \nIn what does this interrelationship consist? \nA patient wishes to hide from the doctor certain of his experiences and certain events of his life. He wants to foist on the doctor his own point of view on the reasons for his illness and the nature of his experiences. The doctor, for his part, aims at enforcing his authority as a doctor, endeavors to wrest confessions from the patient and to compel him to take the 'correct' point of view on his illness and its symptoms. Intertwining with all this are other factors: Between doctor and patient there may be differences in sex, in age, in social standing, and moreover, there is the difference of their professions. All these factors complicate their relationship and the struggle between them. \nAnd it is in the midst of this complex and very special social atmosphere that the verbal utterances are made - the patient's narratives and his statements in conversation with the doctor - utterances that Freud places squarely at the basis of his theory. Can we acknowledge these utterances as the expression of the patient's individual psyche? \nNot a single instance of verbal utterance can be reckoned exclusively to its utterer's account. Every utterance is the product of the interaction between speakers and the product of the broader context of the whole complex social situation in which the utterance emerges. Elsewhere we have attempted to show that any product of the activity of human discourse - from the simplest utterance in everyday life to elaborate works of literary art - derives shape and meaning in all its most essential aspects not from the subjective experiences of the speaker but from the social situation in which the utterance appears. Language and its forms are the products of prolonged social intercourse among members of a given speech community. An utterance finds language basically already prepared for use. It is the material for the utterance and it sets constraints on the utterance's possibilities. What is characteristic for a given utterance specifically - its selection of particular words, its particular kind of sentence structure, its particular kind of intonation - all this is the expression of the interrelationship between the speakers and of the whole complex set of social circumstances under which the exchange of words takes place. Those 'psychical experiences' of the speaker, the expression of which we are inclined to see in his utterance, are, however, only in fact a one-sided, simplified, and scientifically unverifiable interpretation of a more complex social phenomenon. What we have here is a special kind of 'projection', a means whereby we project into the 'individual soul' a complex set of social interrelationships. Discourse is like a 'scenario' of the immediate act of communication in the process of which it is engendered, and this act of communication is, in turn, a factor of the wider field of communication of the community to which the speaker belongs. In order to understand this 'scenario', it is essential to reconstruct all those complex social interrelations of which the given utterance is the ideological refraction.

51-52

Every ideological sign is not only a reflection, a shadow, of reality, but is also itself a material segment of that very reality. Every phenomenon functioning as an ideological sign has some kind of material embodiment, whether in sound, physical mass, color, movements of the body, or the like. In this sense, the reality of the sign is fully objective and lends itself to a unitary, monistic, objective method of study. A sign is a phenomenon of the external world. Both the sign itself and all the effects it produces (all those actions, reactions and new signs it elicits in the surrounding social milieu) occur in outer experience. \nThis is a point of extreme importance. Yet, elementary and self-evident as it may seem, the study of ideologies has still not drawn all the conclusions that follow from it. \nThe idealistic philosophy of culture and psychologistic cultural studies locate ideology in the consciousness. Ideology, they assert, is a fact of consciousness; the external body of the sign is merely a coating, merely a technical means for the realization of the inner effect, which is understanding. \nIdealism and psychologism alike overlook the fact that understanding itself can come about only within some kind of semiotic material (e.g., inner speech), that sign bears upon sign, that consciousness itself can arise and become a viable fact only in the material embodiment of signs. The understanding of a sign is, after all, an act of reference between the sign apprehended and other, already known signs; in other words, understanding is a response to a sign with signs. And this chain of ideological creativity and understanding, moving from sign to sign and then to a new sign, is perfectly consistent and continuous: from one link of a semiotic nature (hence, also of a material nature) we proceed uninterruptedly to another link of exactly the same nature. And nowhere is there a break in the chain, nowhere does the chain plunge into inner being, nonmaterial in nature and unembodied in signs. \nThis ideological chain stretches from individual consciousness to individual consciousness, connecting them together. Signs emerge, after all, only in the process of interaction between one individual consciousness and another. And the individual consciousness itself is filled with signs. Consciousness becomes consciousness only once it has been filled with ideological (semiotic) content, consequently, only in the process of social interaction... \nSigns can arise only on interindividual territory. It is territory that cannot be called 'natural' in the direct sense of the word: signs do not arise between two members of the species Homo sapiens. It is essential that the two individuals be organized socially, that they compose a group (a social unit); only then can the medium of signs take shape between them. The individual consciousness not only cannot be used to explain anything, but, on the contrary, is itself in need of explanation from the vantage point of the social, ideological medium. \n*The individual consciousness is a social-ideological fact*. Not until this point is recognized with due provision for all the consequences that follow from it will it be possible to construct either an objective psychology of an objective study of ideologies... \nNo cultural sign, once taken in and given meaning, remains in isolation: it becomes part of the unity of the verbally constituted consciousness. It is in the capacity of the consciousness to find verbal access to it. Thus, as it were, spreading ripples of verbal responses and resonances form around each and every ideological sign. Every ideological refraction of existence in process of generation, no matter what the nature of its significant material, is accompanied by ideological refraction in word as an obligatory concomitant phenomenon. \n

The Society of the Spectacle

Author: Guy Debord

Publisher: kindle import (0)

Leninism was the highest voluntaristic expression of revolutionary ideology—a coherence of the separate governing a reality that resisted it. With the advent of Stalinism, revolutionary ideology returned to its fundamental incoherence. At that point, ideology was no longer a weapon, it had become an end in itself. But a lie that can no longer be challenged becomes insane. The totalitarian ideological pronouncement obliterates reality as well as purpose; nothing exists but what it says exists. Although this crude form of the spectacle has been confined to certain underdeveloped regions, it has nevertheless played an essential role in the spectacle’s global development. This particular materialization of ideology did not transform the world economically, as did advanced capitalism; it simply used police-state methods to transform people’s perception of the world. \n\nThe ruling totalitarian-ideological class is the ruler of a world turned upside down. The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim. It is modest only on this one point, however, because this officially nonexistent bureaucracy simultaneously attributes the crowning achievements of history to its own infallible leadership. Though its existence is everywhere in evidence, the bureaucracy must be invisible as a class. As a result, all social life becomes insane. The social organization of total falsehood stems from this fundamental contradiction. \n\nStalinism was also a reign of terror within the bureaucratic class. The terrorism on which this class’s power was based inevitably came to strike the class itself, because this class has no juridical legitimacy, no legally recognized status as an owning class which could be extended to each of its members. Its ownership has to be masked because it is based on false consciousness. This false consciousness can maintain its total power only by means of a total reign of terror in which all real motives are ultimately obscured. The members of the ruling bureaucratic class have the right of ownership over society only collectively, as participants in a fundamental lie: they have to play the role of the proletariat governing a socialist society; they have to be actors faithful to a script of ideological betrayal. Yet they cannot actually participate in this counterfeit entity unless their legitimacy is validated. No bureaucrat can individually assert his right to power, because to prove himself a socialist proletarian he would have to demonstrate that he was the opposite of a bureaucrat, while to prove himself a bureaucrat is impossible because the bureaucracy’s official line is that there is no bureaucracy. Each bureaucrat is thus totally dependent on the central seal of legitimacy provided by the ruling ideology, which validates the collective participation in its “socialist regime” of all the bureaucrats it does not liquidate. Although the bureaucrats are collectively empowered to make all social decisions, the cohesion of their own class can be ensured only by the concentration of their terrorist power in a single person. In this person resides the only practical truth of the ruling lie: the power to determine an unchallengeable boundary line which is nevertheless constantly being adjusted. Stalin decides without appeal who is and who is not a member of the ruling bureaucracy—who should be considered a “proletarian in power” and who branded “a traitor in the pay of Wall Street and the Mikado.” The atomized bureaucrats can find their collective legitimacy only in the person of Stalin—the lord of the world who thus comes to see himself as the absolute person, for whom no superior spirit exists. “The lord of the world recognizes his own nature—omnipresent power—through the destructive violence he exerts against the contrastingly powerless selfhood of his subjects.” He is the power that defines the terrain of domination, and he is also “the power that ravages that terrain.”

102

The parallel between ideology and schizophrenia demonstrated in Gabel’s False Consciousness should be considered in the context of this economic materialization of ideology. Society has become what ideology already was. The repression of practice and the antidialectical false consciousness that results from that repression are imposed at every moment of everyday life subjected to the spectacle—a subjection that systematically destroys the “faculty of encounter” and replaces it with a social hallucination: a false consciousness of encounter, an “illusion of encounter.” In a society where no one can any longer be recognized by others, each individual becomes incapable of recognizing his own reality. Ideology is at home; separation has built its own world.

101

Ideology is the intellectual basis of class societies within the conflictual course of history. Ideological expressions have never been pure fictions; they represent a distorted consciousness of realities, and as such they have been real factors that have in turn produced real distorting effects. This interconnection is intensified with the advent of the spectacle—the materialization of ideology brought about by the concrete success of an autonomized system of economic production—which virtually identifies social reality with an ideology that has remolded all reality in its own image.

100

“Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself only insofar as it exists in and for another self-consciousness; that is, it exists only by being recognized and acknowledged.” —Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit.

The spectacle, considered as the reigning society’s method for paralyzing history and memory and for suppressing any history based on historical time, represents a false consciousness of time.

The Renaissance was a joyous break with eternity. Though seeking its heritage and legitimacy in the ancient world, it represented a new form of historical life. Its irreversible time was that of a never-ending accumulation of knowledge, and the historical consciousness engendered by the experience of democratic communities and of the forces that destroy them now took up once again, with Machiavelli, the analysis of secularized power, saying the previously unsayable about the state. In the exuberant life of the Italian cities, in the creation of festivals, life is experienced as an enjoyment of the passage of time. But this enjoyment of transience is itself transient. The song of Lorenzo de’ Medici, which Burckhardt considered “the very spirit of the Renaissance,” is the eulogy this fragile historical festival delivers on itself: “How beautiful the spring of life—and how quickly it vanishes.”

“The long-sought political form through which the working class could carry out its own economic liberation” has taken on a clear shape in this century, in the form of revolutionary workers councils which assume all decisionmaking and executive powers and which federate with each other by means of delegates who are answerable to their base and revocable at any moment. The councils that have actually emerged have as yet provided no more than a rough hint of their possibilities because they have immediately been opposed and defeated by class society’s various defensive forces, among which their own false consciousness must often be included. As Pannekoek rightly stressed, opting for the power of workers councils “poses problems” rather than providing a solution. But it is precisely within this form of social organization that the problems of proletarian revolution can find their real solution. This is the terrain where the objective preconditions of historical consciousness are brought together—the terrain where active direct communication is realized, marking the end of specialization, hierarchy and separation, and the transformation of existing conditions into “conditions of unity.” In this process proletarian subjects can emerge from their struggle against their contemplative position; their consciousness is equal to the practical organization they have chosen for themselves because this consciousness has become inseparable from coherent intervention in history.

In the course of this complex and terrible evolution which has brought the era of class struggles to a new set of conditions, the proletariat of the industrial countries has lost its ability to assert its own independent perspective. In a fundamental sense, it has also lost its illusions. But it has not lost its being. The proletariat has not been eliminated. It remains irreducibly present within the intensified alienation of modern capitalism. It consists of that vast majority of workers who have lost all power over their lives and who, once they become aware of this, redefine themselves as the proletariat, the force working to negate this society from within. This proletariat is being objectively reinforced by the virtual elimination of the peasantry and by the increasing degree to which the “service” sectors and intellectual professions are being subjected to factorylike working conditions. Subjectively, however, this proletariat is still far removed from any practical class consciousness, and this goes not only for white-collar workers but also for blue-collar workers, who have yet to become aware of any perspective beyond the impotence and mystifications of the old politics. But when the proletariat discovers that its own externalized power contributes to the constant reinforcement of capitalist society, no longer only in the form of its alienated labor but also in the form of the trade unions, political parties, and state powers that it had created in the effort to liberate itself, it also discovers through concrete historical experience that it is the class that must totally oppose all rigidified externalizations and all specializations of power. It bears a revolution that cannot leave anything outside itself, a revolution embodying the permanent domination of the present over the past and a total critique of separation; and it must discover the appropriate forms of action to carry out this revolution. No quantitative amelioration of its impoverishment, no illusory participation in a hierarchized system, can provide a lasting cure for its dissatisfaction, because the proletariat cannot truly recognize itself in any particular wrong it has suffered, nor in the righting of any particular wrong. It cannot recognize itself even in the righting of many such wrongs, but only in the righting of the absolute wrong of being excluded from any real life.

With the emergence of political power—which seems to be associated with the last great technological revolutions (such as iron smelting) at the threshold of a period that would experience no further major upheavals until the rise of modern industry—kinship ties begin to dissolve. The succession of generations within a natural, purely cyclical time begins to be replaced by a linear succession of powers and events. This irreversible time is the time of those who rule, and the dynasty is its first unit of measurement. Writing is the rulers’ weapon. In writing, language attains its complete independence as a mediation between consciousnesses. But this independence coincides with the independence of separate power, the mediation that shapes society. With writing there appears a consciousness that is no longer carried and transmitted directly among the living—an impersonal memory, the memory of the administration of society. “Writings are the thoughts of the state; archives are its memory” (Novalis).

The utopian currents of socialism, though they are historically grounded in criticism of the existing social system, can rightly be called utopian insofar as they ignore history (that is, insofar as they ignore actual struggles taking place and any passage of time outside the immutable perfection of their image of a happy society), but not because they reject science. On the contrary, the utopian thinkers were completely dominated by the scientific thought of earlier centuries. They sought the completion and fulfillment of that general rational system. They did not consider themselves unarmed prophets, for they firmly believed in the social power of scientific proof and even, in the case of Saint-Simonism, in the seizure of power by science. “Why,” Sombart asked, “would they want to seize through struggle what merely needed to be proved?” But the utopians’ scientific understanding did not include the awareness that some social groups have vested interests in maintaining the status quo, forces to maintain it, and forms of false consciousness to reinforce it. Their grasp of reality thus lagged far behind the historical reality of the development of science itself, which had been largely oriented by the social requirements arising from such factors, which determined not only what findings were considered acceptable, but even what might or might not become an object of scientific research. The utopian socialists remained prisoners of the scientific manner of expounding the truth, viewing this truth as a pure abstract image—the form in which it had established itself at a much earlier stage of social development. As Sorel noted, the utopians took astronomy as their model for discovering and demonstrating the laws of society; their unhistorical conception of harmony was the natural result of their attempt to apply to society the science least dependent on history. They described this harmony as if they were Newtons discovering universal scientific laws, and the happy ending they constantly evoked “plays a role in their social science analogous to the role of inertia in classical physics” (Materials for a Theory of the Proletariat).

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Author: Alan Watts

Publisher: kindle import (0)

There are the practices of yoga meditation, dervish dancing, psychotherapy, Zen Buddhism, Ignatian, Salesian, and Hesychast methods of 'prayer,' the use of consciousness-changing chemicals such as LSD and mescaline, psychodrama, group dynamics, sensory-awareness techniques, Quakerism, Gurdjieff exercises, relaxation therapies,the Alexander method, autogenic training, and self-hypnosis. The difficulty with every one of these disciplines is that the moment you are seriously involved, you find yourself boxed in some special in-group which defines itself, often with the most elegant subtlety, by the exclusion of an out-group. In this way, every religion or cult is self-defeating, and this is equally true of projects which define themselves as non-religions or universally inclusive religions, playing the game of 'I am less exclusive than you.

In times past, recognition of the impermanence of the world usually led to withdrawal. On the one hand, ascetics, monks, and hermits tried to exorcise their desires so as to regard the world with benign resignation, or to draw back and back into the depths of consciousness to become one with the Self in its unmanifest state of eternal serenity. On the other hand, others felt that the world was a state of probation where material goods were to be used in a spirit of stewardship, as loans from the Almighty, and where the main work of life is loving devotion to God and to man. Yet both these responses are based on the initial supposition that the individual is the separate ego, and because this supposition is the work of a double-bind any task undertaken on this basis—including religion—will be self-defeating. Just because it is a hoax from the beginning, the personal ego can make only a phony response to life. For the world is an ever-elusive and ever-disappointing mirage only from the standpoint of someone standing aside from it—as if it were quite other than himself—and then trying to grasp it. Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all forms of life, the world would be static, rhythmless, undancing, mummified. But a third response is possible. Not withdrawal, not stewardship on the hypothesis of a future reward, but the fullest collaboration with the world as a harmonious system of contained conflicts—based on the realization that the only real 'I' is the whole endless process. This realization is already in us in the sense that our bodies know it, our bones and nerves and sense-organs. We do not know it only in the sense that the thin ray of conscious attention has been taught to ignore it, and taught so thoroughly that we are very genuine fakes indeed.

Theory of Fiction: Henry James

Author: Henry James

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press (1972)

How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves

Author: Paul John Eakin

Publisher: Cornell University Press (1999)

...developmentally speaking, the rise of the self that is the subject of autobiographical discourse dates from the child's initiation into a lifelong practice of self-narration.

Although Keller had previous mastered a small vocabulary of finger-words spelled into her hand by her teacher, Anne Sullivan, it was only when Sullivan placed one of her hands under the spout and spelled into the other the word water that Keller achieved simultaneously a sense of language and self. It was truly a kind of intellectual and spiritual baptism: 'I knew then that 'w-a-t-e-r' meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul' (Story 23). I summarized the upshot of the well-house episode schematically as follows: 'the self ('my soul') emerges in the presence of language ('w-a-t-e-r') and the other ('Teacher')' (Fictions, 212)^1.\r\n\r\n¹ /publication/69

If Shotter argues that the individual's sense of self is generated in conversation with others, several theorists in Burkitt's survey - including George Herbert Mead and Rom Harre - propose that our subjectivity is itself structured as a conversation. Harre writes: 'The fundamental human reality is a conversation, effectively without beginning or end, to which, from time to time, individuals make contributions. All that is personal in our mental and emotional lives is individually appropriated from the conversation going on around us and perhaps idiosyncratically transformed.

Ecological experience, like the body image, belongs to the unreflexive realm of primary consciousness and is, accordingly, normally inaccessible to conscious examination and representation. [John M] Hull's blindness, however, like Sack's injury, seems to have created for him a window through which he was privileged to observe how his sense of self was shaped by the usually invisible sensory reception of data from the world. In both cases, a sensory deficit is experienced as a deficit of identity. Because Hull became blind only in midlife, in his forties, after a lifelong struggle with failing vision, his new condition sensitized him to probe the unexamined assumptions that the sighted take for granted in their conception of identity. \r\n\r\n*note*: would increased sensory experience lead to an increase of sense of identity?

The body image - here specifically proprioception - emerges as the lifeline of identity, and Sacks invokes a metaphor of property and possession to conceptualize it: \r\n\r\n>One may be said to 'own' or 'possess' one's body - at least its limbs and movable parts - by virtue of a constant flow of incoming information, arising ceaselessly, throughout life, from the muscles, joints and tendons. One has oneself, one is oneself, because the body knows itself, confirms itself, at all times, by this sixth sense [proprioception].¹ \r\n\r\nAre bodies and selves something we 'have' or something we 'are'? Interestingly, Sacks use the two formulations interchangeably to express his sense that bodies and selves are intertwined and inseparable. Identity turns on the question of the organism acknowledging or 'owning' what is proper to it; it is this sense of ownership that Sacks invokes when he speaks of the body 'knowing' itself. This bodily knowledge is the basis of selfhood in organisms endowed with consciousness.\r\n\r\n\r\n¹ /publication/64

In contrast to the unmediated, direct perception of the ecological and interpersonal selves, the reflexiveness that distinguishes Neisser's extended, private, and conceptual selves is much like the 'consciousness of consciousness' that distinguishes Edelman's higher consciousness from primary consciousness. Following the acquisition of language and the entry into symbol-making activity that accompanies it, the child now engages in the 'self-representations' that these modes of selfhood predicate. Development of these selves is normally shaped and fostered in a concerted way at home and school by the adults of the child's immediate culture. These are the selves familiar to traditional autobiographers, who relate the story of the extended and private selves by drawing on their culture's store of conceptual selves.

22-23

In a remarkable paper titled 'Five Kinds of Self-knowledge' (1988), [Ulric] Neisser attempts to distinguish 'among several kinds of self-specifying information, each establishing a different aspect of the self.' Although he speaks of 'these aspects' as 'so distinct that they are essentially different selves' with different 'origins and developmental histories' (35), he argues that these selves 'are not generally experienced as separate and distinct' (36). Self or selves? Although Neisser occasionally speaks of the self, he seems ultimately less interested in affirming the self as a single, unified entity than he is in stressing the variety of self-knowledge, the 'self-specifying information' (35) that constitutes our experience. His fivefold modeling counters the tendency toward an oversimplifying reification that is one of the principal drawbacks of self as a term, a reification that obscures the multiple registers of self-experience he seeks to display. \r\nNeisser's selves include the following: \r\n\r\n1. The ecological self: 'the self as perceived with respect to the physical environment; I am the person here in this place, engaged in this particular activity' (36). Present in infancy. \r\n2. The interpersonal self: 'the self as engaged in immediate unreflective social interaction with another person' (41); 'I am the person who is engaged, here, in this particular human interchange' (36). Present in infancy. \r\n3. The extended self: the self of memory and anticipation, the self existing outside the present moment; 'I am the person who had certain specific experiences, who regularly engages in certain specific and familiar routines' (36). By the age of three, children are aware of themselves 'as existing outside the present moment, and hence of the extended self' (47). \r\n4. The private self: the self of 'conscious experiences that are not available to anyone else' (50); 'I am, in principle, the only person who can feel this unique and particular pain' (36). Although experts differ as to the emergence of this sense of privacy in developmental chronology, many studies show as 'aware of the privacy of mental life before the age of 5' (50). \r\n5. The conceptual self: the extremely diverse forms of self-information - social roles, personal traits, theories of body and mind, of subject and person - that posit the self as a category, either explicitly or implicitly. (Neisser's discrimination of five primary kinds of self-information, of course, is one such conceptual model.)\r\n

[Gerald] Edelman's approach to the brain and to the emergence of consciousness in [his books] is resolutely Darwinian - 'spirits and ghosts are out' (113). His Theory of Neural Group Selection (TNGS) or 'neural Darwinism' articulates his sense of the way in which the brains neural organization is constantly modified - both phylogenetically and ontogenetically - to adapt to the ever-changing demands of experience.

In 1905, two French neurologists, G. Deny and P. Camus, reported the strange case of 'Madame I,' a young woman who lost 'body awareness' and lost herself in the process: \r\n\r\n> I'm no longer aware of myself as I used to be. I can no longer feel my arms, my legs, my head, and my hair. I have to touch myself constantly in order to know how I am...I cannot find myself.¹ \r\n\r\nMadame I's pathetic touching of her limbs stages a startling inversion of Descarte's thought experiment: 'I feel by body,' she seems to say, 'therefore I am.' Her troubled condition reminds us that it is possession of a body image that anchors and sustains our sense of identity.\r\n\r\n¹ /publication/62\r\n\r\n \r\n

Neural Darwinism has the potential to transform not only traditional conceptions of self but of memory as well, as the work or Israel Rosenfield, formerly Edelman's colleague and collaborator, suggests. Rosenfield believes, first of all, that memories are perceptions newly occurring in the present rather than images fixed and stored in the past and somehow mysteriously recalled to present consciousness. As perceptions, memories share the constructed nature of all brain events that TNGS posits: 'Recollection is a kind of perception...and every context will alter the nature of what is recalled' (Invention 89, emphasis added). Rosenfield's second point about memory, a corollary of his view of memory as embedded in present consciousness, is that all memories are self-referential: 'Every recollection refers not only to the remembered event or person or object but to the person who is remembering' (Strange 42). The bond between self and memory can be traced back to Locke, but Rosenfield puts a new spin on this linkage by factoring in the body as a necessary third term in the equation.

In Narrative and the Self (1991) [Anthony Paul] Kerby stakes out a position on the self's ontology that is much like Edelman's no 'spirits' or 'ethereal beings.' Ruling out any notion of the self as some kind of transcendental (Cartesian or other) entity preexisting our lives as language speakers, Kerby defines the self as the product of 'signifying practices,' especially 'narrative constructions or stories' (1).

Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives

Author: Carolyn Kay Steedman

Publisher: Rutgers University Press (1987)

Making Up the Mind

Author: Oliver Sacks

Publisher: New York Review of Books (1993)

Beginner's Guide to Revelation: A Jungian Interpretation

Author: Robin Robertson

Publisher: Nicholas-Hays Inc (1994)

137

I must at least point out here Teilhard de Chardin's concept that consciousness resides in everything: more in humans, less in animals, less still in plants, down and down endlessly, to quarks and beyond. Unless something of that sort were true, there could be no evolution.

137

Once upon a time, there was nothing but spirit, one with itself and unchanging. Then somehow (for this is perhaps the greatest mystery), it became aware of itself. It examined itself and noticed facets of itself. These facets thus attained a separate existence as well as remaining part of the whole. This is the stage where Ra created the other Gods. This is where the archetypes come into existence. They are fluid and amorphous - at their edges, one archetype flows into one another. Trying to pin any archetype down in definition ineluctably leads one to still other archetypes in an endless procession. \r\n\r\nWhen the spirit accepts more limitation, more definition, it forms matter. This is interesting to spirit because it is different than spirit, yet is part of spirit since it was created from spirit. But it is still unchanging. The world is static. Once spirit has examined all of itself, identified each of its attributes, once it has created something separate from itself, but unchanging also, there is no further place for development. \r\n\r\nOnly when spirit limits itself further, allows itself to be held within the confines of form, in an uneasy tension between the two, can continuous, evolutionary change take place. That is why mankind was created.

31-32

Each church has a particular sin, each a a characteristic flaw in a time of transition to a new belief system, a new level of consciousness. In one town, Ephesus (2:1-7), the people no longer cling to a central belief; 'thou has left thy first love.' But to those who overcome their fears and return to their deeper beliefs, 'to him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God' (2:7). \r\n\r\nAnother church, Pergamos (2:12-17), is composed of those who may hold to their beliefs inwardly, but are content to sit silently and watch as others do evil. The people of still another city, Thyatira (2:8-29), have listened to a false prophet (Jezebel) and followed her teachings instead of God's. The congregation of another church, Sardis (3:1-6), with no hope for the future, choose to live only for the day and turned to dissolution. Another city, Laodicea (3:14-22), in some ways the most condemned by the alpha and omega, is composed of the wishy-washy, the lukewarm, neither accepting nor rejecting anything anymore, content merely to go whichever way the wind blows. \r\n\r\nAnother church, Smyrna (2:8-11), is composed of those who are suffering greatly in these times, but manage to hold to their faith, even though others persecute them. They are already suffering martyrdom for their beliefs because of the sins of others in their midst: 'the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan' (2:9). The alpha and omega reassures the faithful of Smyrna: Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer...be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life (2:10). \r\n\r\nHowever, only one city, Philadelphia (3:7-13), has fully satisfied God. The people there have never deserted their faith; nor have they yielded to dissolution. They have seen the new way opening before them and have already started to make a transition to the new. Therefore, alone among the cities, their people will not suffer and will not be exposed to temptation.

The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

Author: Carl Gustav Jung, R.F.C. Hull (Translator)

Publisher: Princeton University Press (1966)

The RICH Economy

Author: Robert Anton Wilson

Publisher: Ronin Publishing, Inc (1980)

If there is one proposition which currently wins the assent of nearly everybody, it is that we need more jobs. 'A cure for unemployment' is promised, or earnestly sought, by every Heavy Thinker from Jimmy Carter to the Communist Party USA, from Ronald Reagan to the head of the economics department at the local university, from the Birchers to the New Left. \r\n \r\nI would like to challenge that idea. I don't think there is, or ever again can be, a cure for unemployment. I propose that unemployment is not a disease, but the natural, healthy functioning of an advanced technological society. \r\n \r\nThe inevitable direction of any technology, and of any rational species such as Homo sap., is toward what Buckminster Fuller calls ephemeralization, or doing-more-with-less. For instance, a modern computer does more (handles more bits of information) with less hardware than the proto-computers of the late '40's and '50's. One worker with a modern teletype machine does more in an hour than a thousand medieval monks painstakingly copying scrolls for a century. Atomic fission does more with a cubic centimeter of matter than all the engineers of the 19th Century could do with a million tons, and fusion does even more. \r\n \r\n*Unemployment is not a disease; so it has no 'cure.'* \r\n \r\nThis tendency toward ephemeralization or doing more-with-less is based on two principal factors, viz: \r\n \r\nThe increment-of-association, a term coined by engineer C.H. Douglas, a meaning simply that when we combine our efforts we can do more than the sum of what each of us could do separately. Five people acting synergetically together can lift a small modern car, but if each of the five tries separately, the car will not budge. As society evolved from tiny bands, to larger tribes, to federations of tribes, to city-states, to nations, to multinational alliances, the increment-of-association increased exponentially. A stone-age hunting band could not build the Parthenon; a Renaissance city-state could not put Neil Armstrong on the Moon. When the increment-of-association increases, through larger social units, doing-more-with-less becomes increasingly possible. \r\n\r\nKnowledge itself is inherently self-augmenting. Every discovery 'suggests' further discoveries; every innovation provokes further innovations. This can be seen concretely, in the records of the U.S. Patent Office, where you will find more patents granted every year than were granted the year before, in a rising curve that seems to be headed toward infinity. If Inventor A can make a Whatsit out of 20 moving parts, Inventor B will come along and build a Whatsit out of 10 moving parts. If the technology of 1900 can get 100 ergs out of a Whatchamacallum, the technology of 1950 can get 1,000 ergs. Again, the tendency is always toward doing-more-with-less. \r\n \r\nUnemployment is directly caused by this technological capacity to do more-with-less. Thousands of monks were technologically unemployed by Gutenberg. Thousands of blacksmiths were technologically unemployed by Ford's Model T. Each device that does-more-with-less makes human labor that much less necessary. \r\n \r\nAristotle said that slavery could only be abolished when machines were built that could operate themselves. Working for wages, the modern equivalent of slavery -- very accurately called 'wage slavery' by social critics -- is in the process of being abolished by just such self-programming machines. In fact, Norbert Wiener, one of the creators of cybernetics, foresaw this as early as 1947 and warned that we would have massive unemployment once the computer revolution really got moving. \r\n \r\nIt is arguable, and I for one would argue, that the only reason Wiener's prediction has not totally been realized yet -- although we do have ever-increasing unemployment -- is that big unions, the corporations, and government have all tacitly agreed to slow down the pace of cybernation, to drag their feet and run the economy with the brakes on. This is because they all, still, regard unemployment as a 'disease' and cannot imagine a 'cure' for the nearly total unemployment that full cybernation will create. \r\n \r\nSuppose, for a moment, we challenge this Calvinistic mind-set. Let us regard wage-work -- as most people do, in fact, regard it -- as a curse, a drag, a nuisance, a barrier that stands between us and what we really want to do. In that case, your job is the disease, and unemployment is the cure. \r\n \r\n'But without working for wages we'll all starve to death!?! Won't we?' \r\n \r\nNot at all. Many farseeing social thinkers have suggested intelligent and plausible plans for adapting to a society of rising unemployment. Here are some examples. \r\n \r\nThe National Dividend. This was invented by engineer C. H. Douglas and has been revived with some modifications by poet Ezra Pound and designer Buckminster Fuller. The basic idea (although Douglas, Pound, and Fuller differ on the details) is that every citizen should be declared a shareholder in the nation, and should receive dividends on the Gross National Product for the year. Estimates differ as to how much this would be for each citizen, but at the current level of the GNP it is conservative to say that a share would be worth several times as much, per year, as a welfare recipient receives -- at least five times more. Critics complain that this would be inflationary. Supporters of the National Dividend reply that it would only be inflationary if the dividends distributed were more than the GNP; and they are proposing only to issue dividends equal to the GNP. \r\n\r\nThe Guaranteed Annual Income. This has been urged by economist Robert Theobald and others. The government would simply establish an income level above the poverty line and guarantee that no citizen would receive less; if your wages fall below that level, or you have no wages, the government makes up the difference. This plan would definitely cost the government less than the present welfare system, with all its bureaucratic red tape and redundancy: a point worth considering for those conservatives who are always complaining about the high cost of welfare. It would also spare the recipients the humiliation, degradation and dehumanization built into the present welfare system: a point for liberals to consider. A system that is less expensive than welfare and also less debasing to the poor, it seems to me, should not be objectionable to anybody but hardcore sadists. \r\n \r\nThe Negative Income Tax. This was first devised by Nobel economist Milton Friedman and is a less radical variation on the above ideas. The Negative Income Tax would establish a minimum income for every citizen; anyone whose income fell below that level would receive the amount necessary to bring them up to that standard. Friedman, who is sometimes called a conservative but prefers to title himself a libertarian, points out that this would cost 'the government' (i.e. the taxpayers) less than the present welfare system, like Theobald's Guaranteed Annual Income. It would also dispense with the last tinge of humiliation associated with government 'charity,' since when you cashed a check from IRS nobody (not even your banker) would know if it was supplementary income due to poverty or a refund due to overpayment of last year's taxes. \r\n \r\nThe RICH Economy. This was devised by inventor L. Wayne Benner (co-author with Timothy Leary of Terra II) in collaboration with the present author. It's a four-stage program to retool society for the cybernetic and space-age future we are rapidly entering. RICH means Rising Income through Cybernetic Homeostasis.\r\n \r\n*Stage I* is to recognize that cybernation and massive unemployment are inevitable and to encourage them. This can be done by offering a $100,000 reward to any worker who can design a machine that will replace him or her, and all others doing the same work. In other words, instead of being dragged into the cybernetic age kicking and screaming, we should charge ahead bravely, regarding the Toilless Society as the Utopian goal humanity has always sought. \r\n \r\n*Stage II* is to establish either the Negative Income Tax or the Guaranteed Annual Income, so that the massive unemployment caused by Stage I will not throw hordes of people into the degradation of the present welfare system.\r\n \r\n*Stage III* is to gradually, experimentally, raise the Guaranteed Annual Income to the level of the National Dividend suggested by Douglas, Bucky Fuller, and Ezra Pound, which would give every citizen the approximate living standard of the comfortable middle class. The reason for doing this gradually is to pacify those conservative economists who claim that the National Dividend is 'inflationary' or would be practically wrecking the banking business by lowering the interest rate to near-zero. It is our claim that this would not happen as long as the total dividends distributed to the populace equaled the Gross National Product. but since this is a revolutionary and controversial idea, it would be prudent, we allow, to approach it in slow steps, raising the minimum income perhaps 5 per cent per year for the first ten years. And, after the massive cybernation caused by Stage I has produced a glut of consumer goods, experimentally raise it further and faster toward the level of a true National Dividend. \r\n \r\n*Stage IV* is a massive investment in adult education, for two reasons.\r\n\r\nPeople can spend only so much time fucking, smoking dope, and watching TV; after a while they get bored. This is the main psychological objection to the workless society, and the answer to it is to educate people for functions more cerebral than fucking, smoking dope, watching TV, or the idiot jobs most are currently toiling at. \r\n \r\nThere are vast challenges and opportunities confronting us in the next three or four decades, of which the most notable are those highlighted in Tim Leary's SMI2LE slogan -- Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension. Humanity is about to enter an entirely new evolutionary relationship to space, time, and consciousness. We will no longer be limited to one planet, to a brief, less-than-a-century lifespan, and to the stereotyped and robotic mental processes by which most people currently govern their lives. Everybody deserves the chance, if they want it, to participate in the evolutionary leap to what Leary calls 'more space, more time, and more intelligence to enjoy space and time.'\r\n \r\nWhat I am proposing, in brief, is that the Work Ethic (find a Master to employ you for wages, or live in squalid poverty) is obsolete. A Work Esthetic will have to arise to replace this old Stone Age syndrome of the slave, the peasant, the serf, the prole, the wage-worker -- the human labor-machine who is not fully a person but, as Marx said, ' a tool, an automaton.' Delivered from the role of things and robots, people will learn to become fully developed persons, in the sense of the Human Potential movement. They will not seek work out of economic necessity, but out of psychological necessity -- as an outlet for their creative potential.\r\n \r\n ('Creative potential' is not a panchreston. It refers to the inborn drive to play, to tinker, to explore, and to experiment, shown by every child before his or her mental processes are stunted by authoritarian education and operant-conditioned wage-robotry.)\r\n \r\nAs Bucky Fuller says, the first thought of people, once they are delivered from wage slavery, will be, 'What was it that I was so interested in as a youth, before I was told I had to earn a living?' The answer to that question, coming from millions and then billions of persons liberated from mechanical toil, will make the Renaissance look like a high school science fair or a Greenwich Village art show.

Food of the Gods

Author: Terence McKenna

Publisher: Bantam Books (1993)

149

And what of the psychology of alcoholism and alcohol use? Is there a gestalt of alcohol, and if there is, then what are its characteristics? I have implied that alcohol is the dominator drug par excellence. Alcohol has the effect of being libidinally stimulating at moderate doses at the same time that the ego feels empowered and social boundaries are felt to lose some of their restraining power. Often these feelings are accompanied by a sense of verbal facility ordinarily out of reach. The difficulty with all of this is that research findings suggest these fleeting effects are usually followed by a narrowing of awareness, a diminishing of ability to respond to social cues, and an infantile regression into loss of sexual performance, loss of general motor control, and consequent loss of self‑esteem. Moderation in drinking seems the obvious course. Yet alcoholism is a major and unremitting problem throughout global society. I believe that the alcohol abuse syndrome is symptomatic of the state of disequilibrium and tension existing between men and women and between the individual and society. Alcoholism is a condition of ego obsession and inability to resist the drive toward immediate gratification. The social domain in which the repression of women and the feminine is most graphically and brutally realized is that of the drunken episode or lifestyle. The darkest expressions of the terror and the anxiety engendered by severance from the maternal matrix have traditionally been acted out there. Wife beating without alcohol is like a circus without lions.

141

The ecstatic and orgiastic, visionary and boundary‑dissolving experiences, the central mysteries of the mushroom religion, were the very factors in the human situation acting to keep our ancestors human. The commonality of feeling generated by the mushroom held the community together. The divine, inspiring power of the mushroom spoke through the bards and singers. The indwelling spirit of the mushroom moved the hand that carved bone and painted stone. Such things were a commonplace of the Edenic world of the Goddess. Life was lived not as we have chosen to imagine it, on the edge of mute bestiality, but rather, close to a dimension of spontaneous magical and linguistic expression that now shines only briefly in each of us at the pinnacle of experimental intoxication but that then was the empowered and enveloping reality: the presence of the Great Goddess. History is the story of our unfocused agony over the loss of this perfect human world, and then of our forgetting it altogether, denying it and in so doing, denying a part of ourselves. It is a story of relationships, quasi‑symbiotic compacts, with plants that were made and broken. The consequence of not seeing ourselves as a part of the green engine of vegetable nature is the alienation and despair that surrounds us and threatens to make the future unbearable.

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born.

Awareness of pattern conveys the feeling that attends understanding. There presumably can be no limit to how much consciousness a species can acquire, since understanding is not a finite project with an imaginable conclusion, but rather a stance toward immediate experience. This appears self‑evident from within a world view that sees consciousness as analogous to a source of light. The more powerful the light, the greater the surface area of darkness revealed. Consciousness is the moment‑to‑moment integration of the individual's perception of the world. How well, one could almost say how gracefully, an individual accomplishes this integration determines that individual's unique adaptive response to existence.

One can hardly doubt that consciousness, like the ability to resist disease, confers an immense adaptive advantage on any individual who possesses it. In the search for a causal agent capable of synergizing cognitive activity and thereby of playing a role in the emergence of the hominid, researchers might long ago have looked to plant hallucinogens were it not for our strong, almost compulsive avoidance of the idea that our exalted position in the hierarchy of nature might be somehow due to the power of plants or natural forces of any sort. Even as the nineteenth century had to come to terms with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes. Being stoned seems to have been our unique characteristic.

Thinking about human evolution ultimately means thinking about the evolution of human consciousness. What, then, are the origins of the human mind? In their explanations, some investigators have adopted a primarily cultural emphasis. They point to our unique linguistic and symbolical capabilities, our use of tools, and our ability to store information epigenetically as songs, art, books, computers, thereby creating not only culture, but also history. Others, taking a somewhat more biological approach, have emphasized our physiological and neurological peculiarities, including the exceptionally large size and complexity of the human neocortex, a great proportion of which is devoted to complex linguistic processing, storage, and retrieval of information, as well as being associated with motor systems governing activities like speech and writing. More recently the feedback interactions between cultural influence and biological ontogeny have been recognized and seen to be involved in certain human developmental oddities, such as prolonged childhood and adolescence, the delayed onset of sexual maturity, and the persistence of many essentially neonatal characteristics through adult life. Unfortunately the union of these points of view has not yet led to the recognition of the genome‑shaping power of psychoactive and physioactive dietary constituents.

Before we commit ourselves irrevocably to the chimera of a drugfree culture purchased at the price of a complete jettisoning of the ideals of a free and democratic planetary society, we must ask hard questions: Why, as a species, are we so fascinated by altered states of consciousness? What has been their impact on our esthetic and spiritual aspirations? What have we lost by denying the legitimacy of each individual's drive to use substances to experience personally the transcendental and the sacred?

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Author: Julian Jaynes

Publisher: University of Toronto Press (1978)

439

Consciousness is not a simple matter and it should not be spoken of as if it were. Nor have I mentioned the different modes of conscious narratization such as verbal (having imaginary conversations — certainly the most common mode in myself), perceptual (imagining scenes), behavioral (imagining ourselves doing something), physiological (monitoring our fatigue or discomfort or appetite), or musical (imagining music), all of which seem quite distinct, with properties of their own.

437

Consciousness is constantly fitting things into a story, putting a before and an after around any event. This feature is an analog of our physical selves moving about through a physical world with its spatial successiveness which becomes the successiveness of time in mind-space. And this results in the conscious conception of time which is a spatialized time in which we locate events and indeed our lives. It is impossible to be conscious of time in any other way than as a space.

437

Mind-space I regard as the primary feature of consciousness. It is the space which you preoptively are ‘introspecting on’ or ‘seeing’ at this very moment. But who does the ‘seeing’? Who does the introspecting? Here we introduce analogy, which differs from metaphor in that the similarity is between relationships rather than between things or actions. As the body with its sense organs (referred to as I) is to physical seeing, so there develops automatically an analog ‘I’ to relate to this mental kind of ‘seeing’ in mind-space. The analog ‘I’ is the second most important feature of consciousness. It is not to be confused with the self, which is an object of consciousness in later development. The analog ‘I’ is contentless, related I think to Kant’s transcendental ego. As the bodily I can move about in its environment looking at this or that, so the analog ‘I’ learns to ‘move about’ in mind-space, ‘attending to’ or concentrating on one thing or another.

431

Curiously, none of these contemporary movements tells us anything about what we are supposed to be like after the wrinkles in our nutrition have been ironed smooth, or “the withering away of the state” has occurred, or our libidos have been properly cathected, or the chaos of reinforcements has been made straight. Instead their allusion is mostly backward, telling us what has gone wrong, hinting of some cosmic disgrace, some earlier stunting of our potential. It is, I think, yet another characteristic of the religious form which such movements have taken over in the emptiness caused by the retreat of ecclesiastical certainty — that of a supposed fall of man. This strange and, I think, spurious idea of a lost innocence takes its mark precisely in the breakdown of the bicameral mind as the first great conscious narratization of mankind. It is the song of the Assyrian psalms, the wail of the Hebrew hymns, the myth of Eden, the fundamental fall from divine favor that is the source and first premise of the world’s great religions. I interpret this hypothetical fall of man to be the groping of newly conscious men to narratize what has happened to them, the loss of divine voices and assurances in a chaos of human directive and selfish privacies.

414

A further thing that schizophrenics do ‘better’ than the rest of us — although it certainly is no advantage in our abstractly complicated world — is simple sensory perception. They are more alert to visual stimuli, as might be expected if we think of them as not having to strain such stimuli through a buffer of consciousness. This is seen in their ability to block E E G alpha waves more quickly than normal persons following an abrupt stimulus, and to recognize projected visual scenes coming into focus considerably better than the normal.35 Indeed, schizophrenics are almost drowning in sensory data. Unable to narratize or conciliate, they see every tree and never the forest. They seem to have a more immediate and absolute involvement with their physical environment, a greater in-the-world-ness. Such an interpretation, at least, could be put on the fact that schizophrenics fitted with prism glasses that deform visual perception learn to adjust more easily than the rest of us, since they do not overcompensate as much.36

414

Another advantage of schizophrenia, perhaps evolutionary, is tirelessness. While a few schizophrenics complain of generalized fatigue, particularly in the early stages of the illness, most patients do not. In fact, they show less fatigue than normal persons and are capable of tremendous feats of endurance. They are not fatigued by examinations lasting many hours. They may move about day and night, or work endlessly without any sign of being tired. Catatonics may hold an awkward position for days that the reader could not hold for more than a few minutes. This suggests that much fatigue is a product of the subjective conscious mind, and that bicameral man, building the pyramids of Egypt, the ziggurats of Sumer, or the gigantic temples at Teotihuacan with only hand labor, could do so far more easily than could conscious self-reflective men.

409

Another way the dissolving of mind-space shows itself is in the disorientation in respect to time so common in the schizophrenic. We can only be conscious of time as we can arrange it into a spatial succession, and the diminishing of mind-space in schizophrenia makes this difficult or impossible. For example, patients may complain that “time has stopped,” or that everything seems to be “slowed down” or “suspended,” or more simply that they have “trouble with time.” As one former patient remembered it after he was well: \r\n\r\n>For a long time no days seemed to me like a day and no night seemed like a night. But this in particular has no shape in my memory. I used to tell time by my meals, but as I believed we were served sets of meals in each real day — about half a dozen sets of breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner in each twelve hours — this was not much help. \r\n\r\nOn the face of it, this may seem inconsistent with the hypothesis that schizophrenia is a partial relapse to the bicameral mind. For bicameral man certainly knew the hours of the day and the seasons of the year. But this knowing was, I suggest, a very different knowing from the narratization in a spatially successive time which we who are conscious are constantly doing. Bicameral man had behavioral knowing, responding to the cues for rising and sleeping, for planting and harvesting, cues so important that they were worshiped, as at Stonehenge, and were probably hallucinogenic in themselves. For someone coming from a culture where attention to such cues has been superseded by a different sense of time, the loss of that spatial successiveness leaves the patient in a relatively timeless world. It is interesting in this connection that when it is suggested to normal hypnotic subjects that time does not exist, a schizophrenic form reaction results.

390

What is it then that hypnosis supplies that does this extraordinary enabling, that allows us to do things we cannot ordinarily do except with great difficulty? Or is it ‘we’ that do them? Indeed, in hypnosis it is as if someone else were doing things through us. And why is this so? And why is this easier? Is it that we have to lose our conscious selves to gain such control, which cannot then be by us? On another level, why is it that in our daily lives we cannot get up above ourselves to authorize ourselves into being what we really wish to be? If under hypnosis we can be changed in identity and action, why not in and by ourselves so that behavior flows from decision with as absolute a connection, so that whatever in us it is that we refer to as will stands master and captain over action with as sovereign a hand as the operator over a subject? The answer here is partly in the limitations of our learned consciousness in this present millennium. We need some vestige of the bicameral mind, our former method of control, to help us. With consciousness we have given up those simpler more absolute methods of control of behavior which characterized the bicameral mind. We live in a buzzing cloud of whys and wherefores, the purposes and reasonings of our narratizations, the many-routed adventures of our analog ‘ I’s. And this constant spinning out of possibilities is precisely what is necessary to save us from behavior of too impulsive a sort. The analog ‘ I’ and the metaphor ‘me’ are always resting at the confluence of many collective cognitive imperatives. We know too much to command ourselves very far.

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If the subject is not able to narrow his consciousness in this fashion, if he cannot forget the situation as a whole, if he remains in a state of consciousness of other considerations, such as the room and his relationship to the operator, if he is still narratizing with his analog ‘I’ or 'seeing' his metaphor 'me' being hypnotized, hypnosis will be unsuccessful*. But repeated attempts with such subjects often succeed, showing that the 'narrowing' of consciousness in hypnotic induction is partly a learned ability, learned, I should add, on the basis of the aptic structure I have called the general bicameral paradigm. \r\n \r\n\r\n*The best discussion of induction procedures is that of Perry London, 'The Induction of Hypnosis,' in J. E. Gordon, pp. 44-79. And for discussions of hypnosis in general that I have found helpful, see the papers of Ronald Shor, particularly his 'Hypnosis and the Concept of the Generalized Reality-Orientation,' American Journal of Psychotherapy, 1959, 13: 582-602, and 'Three Dimensions of Hypnotic Depth,' International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 1962, 10: 23-38.

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It is at least conceivable that what Mesmer was discovering was a different kind of mentality that, given a proper locale, a special education in childhood, a surrounding belief system, and isolation from the rest of us, possibly could have sustained itself as a society not based on ordinary consciousness, where metaphors of energy and irresistible control would assume some of the functions of consciousness. How is this even possible? As I have mentioned already, I think Mesmer was clumsily stumbling into a new way of engaging that neurological patterning I have called the general bicameral paradigm with its four aspects: collective cognitive imperative, induction, trance, and archaic authorization. I shall take up each in turn.

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Hypnosis, like consciousness, begins at a particular point in history in the paraphrands of a few new metaphors. The first of these metaphors followed Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of the laws of universal gravitation and his use of them to explain the ocean tides under the attraction of the moon. The mysterious attractions and influences and controls between people were then compared to Newtonian gravitational influences. And the comparison resulted in a new (and ridiculous) hypothesis, that there are tides of attraction between all bodies, living and material, that can be called animal gravitation, of which Newton’s gravitation is a special case^1. This is all very explicit in the romantic and turbid writings of a wanton admirer of Newton‘s called Anton Mesmer, who began it all. And then came another metaphor, or rather two. Gravitational attraction is similar to magnetic attraction. Therefore, since (in Mesmer‘s rhetorical thought) two things similar to a third thing are similar to each other, animal gravitation is like magnetic attraction, and so changes its name to animal magnetism. Now at last the theory was testable in a scientific way. To demonstrate the existence of these vibrant magnetic tides in and through living things similar to celestial gravitation, Mesmer applied magnets to various hysterical patients, even prefeeding the patients with medicines containing iron so that the magnetism might work better. And it did! The result could not be doubted with the knowledge of his day. Convulsive attacks were produced by the magnets, creating in Mesmer‘s words “an artificial ebb and flow” in the body and correcting with its magnetic attraction “the unequal distribution of the nervous fluids confused movement,” thus producing a “harmony of the nerves.” He had ‘proved’ that there are flows of forces between persons as mighty as those that hold the planets in their orbits. Of course he hadn‘t proved anything about any kind of magnetism whatever. He had discovered what Sir James Braid on the metaphier of sleep later called hypnosis. The cures were effective because he had explained his exotic theory to his patients with vigorous conviction. The violent seizures and peculiar twists of sensations at the application of magnets were all due to a cognitive imperative that these things would happen, which they did, constituting a kind of self-perpetuating escalating ‘proof’ that the magnets were working and could effect a cure.\r\n \r\n¹ A full history of hypnosis is yet to be written. But see F. A. Pattie, “Brief History of Hypnotism,” in J. E. Gordon, ed., Handbook of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis (New York: Macmillan, 1967).

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hypnosis can cause this extra enabling because it engages the general bicameral paradigm which allows a more absolute control over behavior than is possible with consciousness.

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Contrary to horror fiction stories, negatory possession is chiefly a linguistic phenomenon, not one of actual conduct. In all the cases I have studied, it is rare to find one of criminal behavior against other persons. The stricken individual does not run off and behave like a demon j he just talks like one. Such episodes are usually accompanied by twistings and writh-ings as in induced possession. The voice is distorted, often guttural, full of cries, groans, and vulgarity, and usually railing against the institutionalized gods of the period. Almost always, there is a loss of consciousness as the person seems the opposite of his or her usual self. 'He' may name himself a god, demon, spirit, ghost, or animal (in the Orient it is often 'the fox'), may demand a shrine or to be worshiped, throwing the patient into convulsions if these are withheld. 'He' commonly describes his natural self in the third person as a despised stranger, even as Yahweh sometimes despised his prophets or the Muses sneered at their poets.12 And 'he' often seems far more intelligent and alert than the patient in his normal state, even as Yahweh and the Muses were more intelligent and alert than prophet or poet. As in schizophrenia, the patient may act out the suggestions of others, and, even more curiously, may be interested in contracts or treaties with observers, such as a promise that 'he' will leave the patient if such and such is done, bargains which are carried out as faithfully by the 'demon' as the sometimes similar cove-nants of Yahweh in the Old Testament. Somehow related to this suggestibility and contract interest is the fact that the cure for spontaneous stress-produced possession, exorcism, has never varied from New Testament days to the present. It is simply by the command of an authoritative person often following an induction ritual, speaking in the name of a more powerful god.

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While the universal characteristics of the new consciousness, such as self-reference, mind-space, and narratization, can develop swiftly on the heels of new language construction, the larger contours of civilization, the huge landscape of culture against which this happens, can only change with geological slowness. The matter and technic of earlier ages of civilizations survive into the new eras uneroded, dragging with them the older outworn forms in which the new mentality must live. But living also in these forms is a fervent search for what I shall call archaic authorization. After the collapse of the bicameral mind, the world is still in a sense governed by gods, by statements and laws and prescriptions carved on stelae or written on papyrus or remembered by old men, and dating back to bicameral times. But the dissonance is there. Why are the gods no longer heard and seen? The Psalms cry out for answers. And more assurances are needed than the relics of history or the paid insistences of priests. Something palpable, something direct, something immediate! Some sensible assurance that we are not alone, that the gods are just silent, not dead, that behind all this hesitant subjective groping about for signs of certainty, there is a certainty to be had.

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...the attempted reformation of Judaism by Jesus can be construed as a necessarily new religion for conscious men rather than bicameral men. Behavior now must be changed from within the new consciousness rather than from Mosaic laws carving behavior from without. Sin and penance are now within conscious desire and conscious contrition, rather than in the external behaviors of the decalogue and the penances of temple sacrifice and community punishment. The divine kingdom to be regained is psychological not physical. It is metaphorical not literal. It is 'within' not in extenso. But even the history of Christianity does not and cannot remain true to its originator. The development of the Christian Church returns again and again to this same longing for bicameral absolutes, away from the difficult inner kingdoms of agape to an external hierarchy reaching through a cloud of miracle and infallibility to an archaic authorization in an extended heaven.

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We, at the end of the second millennium A.D., are still in a sense deep in this transition to a new mentality. And all about us lie the remnants of our recent bicameral past. We have our houses of gods which record our births, define us, marry us, and bury us, receive our confessions and intercede with the gods to forgive us our trespasses. Our laws are based upon values which without their divine pendancy would be empty and unenforce-able. Our national mottoes and hymns of state are usually divine invocations. Our kings, presidents, judges, and officers begin their tenures with oaths to the now silent deities taken upon the writings of those who have last heard them.

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Scholars have long debated the reason for the decline and fall of prophecy in the post-exilic period of Judaism. They have suggested that the nabiim had done their work, and there was no more need of them. Or they have said that there was a danger that it would sink into a cult. Others that it was the corruption of the Israelites by the Babylonians, who were by this time as omen-ridden from the cradle to the grave as any nation could be. All of these are partly true, but the plainer fact to me is that the decline of prophecy is part of that much larger phenomenon going on elsewhere in the world, the loss of the bicameral mind. Once one has read through the Old Testament from this point of view, the entire succession of works becomes majestically and wonderfully the birth pangs of our subjective consciousness. No other literature has recorded this absolutely important event at such length or with such fullness. Chinese literature jumps into subjectivity in the teaching of Confucius with little before it. Indian hurtles from the bicameral Veda into the ultra subjective Upanishads, neither of which are as authentic to their times. Greek literature, like a series of steppingstones from the Iliad to the Odyssey and across the broken fragments of Sappho and Solon toward Plato, is the next best record, but is still too incomplete. And Egypt is relatively silent. While the Old Testament, even as it is hedged with great historical problems of accuracy, still remains the richest source for our knowledge of what the transition period was like. It is essentially the story of the loss of the bicameral mind, the slow retreat into silence of the remaining elohim, the confusion and tragic violence which ensue, and the search for them again in vain among its prophets until a substitute is found in right action. But the mind is still haunted with its old unconscious ways it broods on lost authorities; and the yearning, the deep and hollow-ing yearning for divine volition and service is with us still. As the stag pants after the waterbrooks, So pants my mind after you, O gods! My mind thirsts for gods! for living gods! When shall I come face to face with gods? — Psalm 42

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Paradise Lost. A further observation could be made upon the story of the Fall and how it is possible to look upon it as a myth of the breakdown of the bicameral mind. The Hebrew arum> meaning crafty or deceitful, surely a conscious subjective word, is only used three or four times throughout the entire Old Testament. It is here used to describe the source of the temptation. The ability to deceive, we remember, is one of the hallmarks of consciousness. The serpent promises that 'you shall be like the elohim themselves, knowing good and evil' (Genesis 3:5), qualities that only subjective conscious man is capable of. And when these first humans had eaten of the tree of knowledge, suddenly 'the eyes of them both were opened,' their analog eyes in their metaphored mind-space, 'and they knew that they were naked' (Genesis 3:7), or had autoscopic visions and were narratizing, seeing themselves as others see them.6 And so is their sorrow 'greatly multipled' (Genesis 3:16) and they are cast out from the garden where He-who-is could be seen and talked with like another man.

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Let no one think these are just word changes. Word changes are concept changes and concept changes are behavioral changes. The entire history of religions and of politics and even of science stands shrill witness to that. Without words like soul, liberty, or truth, the pageant of this human condition would have been filled with different roles, different climaxes. And so with the words we have designated as preconscious hypostases, which by the generating process of metaphor through these few centuries unite into the operator of consciousness.

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All this curious development of the sixth century B.C. is extremely important for psychology. For with this wrenching of psyche = life over to psyche = soul, there came other changes to balance it as the enormous inner tensions of a lexicon always do. The word soma had meant corpse or deadness, the opposite of psyche as livingness. So now, as psyche becomes soul, so soma remains as its opposite, becoming body. And dualism, the supposed separation of soul and body, has begun. But the matter does not stop there. In Pindar, Heraclitus, and others around 500 B.C., psyche and nous begin to coalesce. It is now the conscious subjective mind-space and its self that is opposed to the material body. Cults spring up about this new wonder-provoking division between psyche and soma. It both excites and seems to explain the new conscious experience, thus reinforcing its very existence. The conscious psyche is imprisoned in the body as in a tomb. It becomes an object of wide-eyed controversy. Where is it? And the locations in the body or outside it vary. What is it made of? Water (Thales), blood, air (Anaximenes), breath (Xenophanes), fire (Heraclitus), and so on, as the science of it all begins in a morass of pseudoquestions. So dualism, that central difficulty in this problem of consciousness, begins its huge haunted career through history, to be firmly set in the firmament of thought by Plato, moving through Gnosticism into the great religions, up through the arrogant assurances of Descartes to become one of the great spurious quandaries of modern psychology.

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Consciousness and morality are a single development. For without gods, morality based on a consciousness of the consequences of action must tell men what to do.

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Our sense of justice depends on our sense of time. Justice is a phenomenon only of consciousness, because time spread out in a spatial succession is its very essence. And this is possible only in a spatial metaphor of time. Instances of this increased spatialization are common. Committing violence at one time begets a punishment at some time to follow (245f.). Long and steep is the path to goodness (290). A good man is he who sees what will be better afterward (294). Add little to little and it will become great (362). Work with work upon work to gain wealth (382). These notions are impossible unless the before and after of time are metaphored into a spatial succession. This basic ingredient of consciousness, which began in Assyrian building inscriptions in 1300 B.C. (see the previous chapter), has indeed come a long way. It is important here to understand how closely coupled this new sense of time and justice is to what can be called the secularization of attention. By this I mean the shift in attention toward the everyday problems of making a living, something that is totally foreign to the mighty god-devised epics which preceded it.

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It is interesting to note parenthetically that there is no hypostasis for hearing as there is for sight. Even today, we do not hear with the mind's ear as we see with the mind's eye. Nor do we refer to intelligent minds as loud, in the same way we say they are bright. This is probably because hearing was the very essence of the bicameral mind, and as such has those differences from vision which I discussed in 1.4. The coming of consciousness can in a certain vague sense be construed as a shift from an auditory mind to a visual mind.

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temporal development of the preconscious hypostases can be roughly divided into four phases: Phase I: Objective: Occurred in the bicameral age when these terms referred to simple external observations. Phase I I : Internal: Occurred when these terms have come to mean things inside the body, particularly certain internal sensations. Phase I I I : Subjective: W h e n these terms refer to processes that we would call mental; they have moved from internal stimuli supposedly causing actions to internal spaces where metaphored actions may occur. Phase I V : Synthetic: W h e n the various hypostases unite into one conscious self capable of introspection. The reason I am setting these out, perhaps pretentiously, as four separate phases is to call your attention to the important psychological differences of transition between these phases. The transition from Phase I to Phase II occurred at the beginning of the breakdown period. It comes from the absence or the inappropriateness of gods and their hallucinated directions. The buildup of stress for want of adequate divine decisions increases the psychological concomitants of such stress until they are labeled with terms that previously applied to only external perception. The transition from Phase II to Phase III is a much more 2 Professor A. D. H. Adkins has made this drawing-together of the various mind-words into one the theme of his book From the Many to the One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970). I N T E L L E C T U A L C O N S C I O U S N E S S O F G R E E C E 261 complicated matter. And much more interesting. It is due to the paraphrand generator of metaphor described in 1.2. In that chapter, I outlined the four-part process of metaphor, how we begin with a less-known term called a metaphrand which is to be described, and then describe it by applying to it a better-known metaphier which is similar to it in some way. Usually there are simple associations of the metaphier which I have called paraphiers, which then project back as associates of the original metaphrand, these new associates being called paraphrands. Such paraphrands are generative in a sense that they are new in their association with the metaphrand. And this is how we are able to generate the kind of 'space' which we introspect upon and which is the necessary substrate of consciousness. This is really quite simple as we shall see shortly. And, finally, the synthesis of the separate hypostases into the unitary consciousness of Phase IV is a different process also. I suggest that as the subjective Phase III meanings of thumos, phrenes, et al. become established, their original anatomical bases in different internal sensations wither away, leaving them to become confused and to join together on the basis of their shared metaphiers, e.g., as 'containers' or 'persons.' But this synthetic unity of consciousness may also have been helped by what can be called the laicization of attention and its consequent recognition of individual differences in the seventh century B.C., a process which resulted in a new concept of self.

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the throwing of lots, like consciousness itself, has metaphor as its basis. In the language of I.2, the unexpressed commands of the gods compose the metaphrand which is to be lexically widened, and the metaphier is the pair or assembly of lots, be they sticks, beans, or stones. The paraphiers are the distinguishing marks or words on the lots which then project back into the metaphrand as the command of the particular god invoked. What is important here is to understand provoked divination such as sortilege as involving the same kind of generative processes that develop consciousness, but in an exopsychic nonsubjective manner.

227

The most primitive, clumsy, but enduring method of discovering the will of silent gods is the simple recording of sequences of unusual or important events. In contrast to all other types of divination, it is entirely passive. It is simply an extension of something common to all mammalian nervous systems, namely, that if an organism experiences B after A, he will have a tendency to expect B the next time that A occurs. Since omens are really a particular example of this when expressed in language, we can say that the origin of omens is simply in animal nature rather than in civilized culture per se. Omens or sequences of events that might be expected to recur were probably present in a trivial way throughout bicameral times. But they had little importance. Nor was there any necessity to study such sequences, since the hallucinated voices of gods made all the decisions in novel situations. There are, for example, no Sumerian omen texts whatever. While the first traces of omens occur among the Semitic Akkadians, it is really only after the loss of the bicameral mind toward the end of the second millennium B.C. that such omen texts proliferate everywhere and swell out to touch almost every aspect of life imaginable. By the first millennium B.C., huge collections of them are made. In the library of King Ashurbanipal at Nineveh about 650 B.C., at least 30 percent of the twenty to thirty thousand tablets come into the category of omen literature. Each entry in these tedious irrational collections consists of an if-clause or protasis followed by a then-clause or apodosis. And there were many classes of omens, terrestrial omens dealing with everyday life: If a town is set on a hill, it will not be good for the dweller within that town. If black ants are seen on the foundations which have been laid, that house will get built; the owner of that house will live to grow old. If a horse enters a man's house, and bites either an ass or a man, the owner of the house will die and his household will be scattered. If a fox runs into the public square, that town will be devastated. If a man unwittingly treads on a lizard and kills it, he will prevail over his adversary. And so on endlessly, bearing on all those aspects of life that in a previous age would have been under the guidance of gods. They can be construed as a kind of first approach to narratization, doing by verbal formulae what consciousness does in a more complex way.

217

The same dominant theme of lost gods cries out to us from the tablets known as The Babylonian Theodicy.2 This dialogue be-2 A fascinating problem is why the reference to gods at this time becomes plural even when it takes a singular verb. This occurs in contexts which in previous literature would have meant it was the personal god. This occurs in both the Ludlul, A C H A N G E O F M I N D I N M E S O P O T A M I A 227 tween a sufferer and his advising friend is of an obviously later date, perhaps 900 B.C., but wails with the same pleas. Why have the gods left us? And since they control everything, why did they shower misfortune upon us? The poem also shimmers with a new sense of an individual or what we would call an analog self denoting a new consciousness. It ends with the cry which has echoed through all later history: May the gods who have thrown me off give help, May the goddess who has abandoned me show mercy. From here to the psalms of the Old Testament is no great journey. There is no trace whatever of such concerns in any literature previous to the texts I am describing here. The consequences of the disappearance of auditory hallucinations from human mentality are profound and widespread, and occur on many different levels. One thing is the confusion of authority itself. What is authority? Rulers without gods to guide them are fitful and unsure. They turn to omens and divination, which we shall take up shortly. And as I have mentioned earlier, cruelty and oppression become the ways in which a ruler imposes his rule upon his subjects in the absence of auditory hallucinations. Even the king’s own authority in the absence of gods becomes questionable. Rebellion in the modern sense becomes possible.

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If one has a very definite biological notion of consciousness and that its origin is back in the evolution of mammalian nervous systems, I cannot see how the phenomenon of hypnosis can be understood at all, not one speck of it. But if we 398 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World fully realize that consciousness is a culturally learned event, balanced over the suppressed vestiges of an earlier mentality, then we can see that consciousness, in part, can be culturally unlearned or arrested. Learned features, such as analog ‘I,’ can under the proper cultural imperative be taken over by a different initiative, and one such instance is what we call hypnosis.

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In summary, I have sketched out several factors at work in the great transilience from the bicameral mind to consciousness: (1) the weakening of the auditory by the advent of writing; (2) the inherent fragility of hallucinatory control; (3) the unwork-ableness of gods in the chaos of historical upheaval; (4) the positing of internal cause in the observation of difference in others; (5) the acquisition of narratization from epics; (6) the survival value of deceit; and (7) a modicum of natural selection.

220

I wish to be very clear that consciousness is chiefly a cultural introduction, learned on the basis of language and taught to others, rather than any biological necessity. But that it had and still has a survival value suggests that the change to consciousness may have been assisted by a certain amount of natural selection. It is impossible to calculate what percentage of the civilized world died in these terrible centuries toward the end of the second millennium B.C. I suspect it was enormous. And death would come soonest to those who impulsively lived by their unconscious habits or who could not resist the commandments of their gods to smite whatever strangers interfered with them. It is thus possible that individuals most obdurately bicameral, most obedient to their familiar divinities, would perish, leaving the genes of the less impetuous, the less bicameral, to endow the ensuing generations. And again we may appeal to the principle of Baldwinian evolution as we did in our discussion of language. Consciousness must be learned by each new generation, and those biologically most able to learn it would be those most likely to survive. There is even Biblical evidence, as we shall see in a future chapter, that children obdurately bicameral were simply killed.

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Deceit may also be a cause of consciousness. But we must begin any discussion of the topic by making a distinction between instrumental or short-term deceit and long-term deceit, which might better be expressed as treachery. Several examples of the former have been described in chimpanzees. Female chimpanzees will ‘present5 in sexual posture to a male to whisk away his banana when his prandial interest is thus distracted. In another instance, a chimpanzee would fill his mouth with water, coax a disliked keeper over to the cage bars, and spit the water in his face. In both such instances, the deceit involved is a case of instrumental learning, a behavior pattern that is followed immediately by some rewarding state of affairs. And it needs no further explanation. But the kind of deceit that is treachery is quite another matter. It is impossible for an animal or for a bicameral man. Long-term deceit requires the invention of an analog self that can ‘do’ or ‘be’ something quite different from what the person actually does or is, as seen by his associates. It is an easy matter to imagine how 220 The Witness of History important for survival during these centuries such an ability would be. Overrun by some invader, and seeing his wife raped, a man who obeyed his voices would, of course, immediately strike out, and thus probably be killed. But if a man could be one thing on the inside and another thing on the outside, could harbor his hatred and revenge behind a mask of acceptance of the inevitable, such a man would survive. Or, in the more usual situation of being commanded by invading strangers, perhaps in a strange language, the person who could obey superficially and have 'within him' another self with 'thoughts' contrary to his disloyal actions, who could loathe the man he smiled at, would be much more successful in perpetuating himself and his family in the new millennium.

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The observation of difference may be the origin of the analog space of consciousness. After the breakdown of authority and of the gods, we can scarcely imagine the panic and the hesitancy that would feature human behavior during the disorder we have described. We should remember that in the bicameral age men belonging to the same city-god were more or less of similar opinion and action. But in the forced violent intermingling of peoples from different nations, different gods, the observation that strangers, even though looking like oneself, spoke differently, had opposite opinions, and behaved differently might lead to the supposition of something inside of them that was different. Indeed, this latter opinion has come down to us in the traditions of philosophy, namely, that thoughts, opinions, and delusions are subjective phenomena inside a person because there is no room for them in the ‘real,’ ‘objective’ world. It is thus a possibility that before an individual man had an interior self, he unconsciously first posited it in others, particularly contradictory strangers, as the thing that caused their different and bewildering behavior. In other words, the tradition in philosophy that phrases the problem as the logic of inferring other minds from one’s own has it the wrong way around. We may first unconsciously (sic) suppose other consciousnesses, and then infer our own by generalization.

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The Causes of Consciousness AN OLD SUMERIAN PROVERB has been translated as “Act promptly, make your god happy.”1 If we forget for a moment that these rich English words are but a probing approximation of some more unknowable Sumerian thing, we may say that this curious exaction arches over into our subjective mentality as saying, “Don’t think: let there be no time space between hearing your bicameral voice and doing what it tells you.” This was fine in a stable hierarchical organization, where the voices were the always correct and essential parts of that hierarchy, where the divine orders of life were trussed and girdered with unversatile ritual, untouched by major social disturbance. But the second millennium B.C. was not to last that way. Wars, catastrophes, national migrations became its central themes. Chaos darkened the holy brightnesses of the unconscious world. Hierarchies crumpled. And between the act and its divine source came the shadow, the pause that profaned, the dreadful loosening that made the gods unhappy, recriminatory, jealous. Until, finally, the screening off of their tyranny was effected by the invention on the basis of language of an analog space with an analog ‘I’. The careful elaborate structures of the bicameral mind had been shaken into consciousness.

Visual hallucinations in schizophrenia occur less commonly, but sometimes with extreme clarity and vividness. One of my schizophrenic subjects, a vivacious twenty-year-old writer of folk songs, had been sitting in a car for a long time, anxiously waiting for a friend. A blue car coming along the road suddenly, oddly, 10 J. D. Rainer, S. Abdullah, and J. C. Altshuler, 'Phenomenology of hallucinations in the deaf' in Origin and Mechanisms of Hallucinations, Wolfram Keup, ed. (New York: Plenum Press, 1970), pp. 449-465. 92 The Mind of Man slowed, turned rusty brown, then grew huge gray wings and slowly flapped over a hedge and disappeared. Her greater alarm, however, came when others in the street behaved as if nothing extraordinary had happened. Why? Unless all of them were somehow in league to hide their reactions from her. And why should that be? It is often the narratization of such false events by consciousness, fitting the world in around them in a rational way, that brings on other tragic symptoms.

In consciousness, we are never 'seeing' anything in its entirety. This is because such 'seeing' is an analog of actual behavior j and in actual behavior we can only see or pay attention to a part of a thing at any one moment. And so in consciousness. We excerpt from the collection of possible attentions to a thing which comprises our knowledge of it. And this is all that it is possible to do since consciousness is a metaphor of our actual behavior. Thus, if I ask you to think of a circus, for example, you will first have a fleeting moment of slight fuzziness, followed perhaps by a picturing of trapeze artists or possibly a clown in the center ring. Or, if you think of the city which you are now in, you will excerpt some feature, such as a particular building or tower or crossroads. Or if I ask you to think of yourself, you will make some kind of excerpts from your recent past, believing you are then thinking of yourself. In all these instances, we find no difficulty or particular paradox in the fact that these excerpts are not the things themselves, although we talk as if they were. Actually we are never conscious of things in their true nature, only of the excerpts we make of them. The variables controlling excerption are deserving of much 62 The Mind of Man more thought and study. For on them the person's whole consciousness of the world and the persons with whom he is interacting depend. Your excerptions of someone you know well are heavily associated with your affect toward him. If you like him, the excerpts will be the pleasant things; if not, the unpleasant. The causation may be in either direction. How we excerpt other people largely determines the kind of world we feel we are living in. Take for example one's relatives when one was a child. If we excerpt them as their failures, their hidden conflicts, their delusions, well, that is one thing. But if we excerpt them at their happiest, in their idiosyncratic delights, it is quite another world. Writers and artists are doing in a controlled way what happens 'in' consciousness more haphazardly. Excerption is distinct from memory. An excerpt of a thing is in consciousness the representative of the thing or event to which memories adhere, and by which we can retrieve memories. If I wish to remember what I was doing last summer, I first have an excerption of the time concerned, which may be a fleeting image of a couple of months on the calendar, until I rest in an excerption of a particular event, such as walking along a particular riverside. And from there I associate around it and retrieve memories about last summer. This is what we mean by reminiscence, and it is a particular conscious process which no animal is capable of. Reminiscence is a succession of excerptions. Each so-called association in consciousness is an excerption, an aspect or image, if you will, something frozen in time, excerpted from the experience on the basis of personality and changing situational factors.6

You cannot, absolutely cannot think of time except by spatializing it. Consciousness is always a spatialization in which the diachronic is turned into the synchronic, in which what has happened in time is excerpted and seen in side-by-sideness. This spatialization is characteristic of all conscious thought. If you are now thinking of where in all the theories of mind my particular theory fits, you are first habitually 'turning' to your mind-space where abstract things can be 'separated out' and 'put beside' each other to be 'looked at' — as could never happen physically or in actuality. You then make the metaphor of theories as concrete objects, then the metaphor of a temporal sue-C O N S C I O U S N E S S 61 cession of such objects as a synchronic array, and thirdly, the metaphor of the characteristics of theories as physical characteristics, all of some degree so they can be 'arranged' in a kind of order. And you then make the further expressive metaphor of 'fit'. The actual behavior of fitting, of which 'fit' here is the analog in consciousness, may vary from person to person or from culture to culture, depending on personal experience of arranging things in some kind of order, or of fitting objects into their receptacles, etc. The metaphorical substrate of thought is thus sometimes very complicated, and difficult to unravel. But every conscious thought that you are having in reading this book can by such an analysis be traced back to concrete actions in a concrete world.

The map-maker and map-user are doing two different things. For the map-maker, the metaphrand is the blank piece of paper on which he operates with the metaphier of the land he knows and has surveyed. But for the map-user, it is just the other way around. The land is unknown; it is the land that is the metaphrand, while the metaphier is the map which he is using, by which he understands the land. And so with consciousness. Consciousness is the metaphrand when it is being generated by the paraphrands of our verbal expressions. But the functioning of consciousness is, as it were, the return journey. Consciousness becomes the metaphier full of our past experience, constantly and selectively operating on such unknowns as future actions, decisions, and partly remembered pasts, on what we are and yet may be. And it is by the generated structure of consciousness that we then understand the world.

If understanding a thing is arriving at a familiarizing metaphor for it, then we can see that there always will be a difficulty in understanding consciousness. For it should be immediately apparent that there is not and cannot be anything in our immediate experience that is like immediate experience itself. There is therefore a sense in which we shall never be able to understand consciousness in the same way that we can understand things that we are conscious of.

We not only locate this space of consciousness inside our own heads. We also assume it is there in others’. In talking with a friend, maintaining periodic eye-to-eye contact (that remnant of our primate past when eye-to-eye contact was concerned in establishing tribal hierarchies), we are always assuming a space behind our companion’s eyes into which we are talking, similar to the space we imagine inside our own heads where we are talking from. And this is the very heartbeat of the matter. For we know perfectly well that there is no such space in anyone’s head at all! There is nothing inside my head or yours except physiological tissue of one sort or another. And the fact that it is predominantly neurological tissue is irrelevant. Now this thought takes a little thinking to get used to. It means that we are continually inventing these spaces in our own and other people’s heads, knowing perfectly well that they don't exist anatomically; and the location of these ‘spaces’ is indeed quite arbitrary.

The essential point here is that there are several stages of creative thought: first, a stage of preparation in which the problem is consciously worked over then a period of incubation without any conscious concentration upon the problem; and then the illumination which is later justified by logic. The parallel between these important and complex problems and the simple problems of judging weights or the circle-triangle series is obvious. The period of preparation is essentially the setting up of a complex struction together with conscious attention to the materials on which the struction is to work. But then the actual process of reasoning, the dark leap into huge discovery, just as in the simple trivial judgment of weights, has no representation in consciousness. Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.

It all began with a study by Karl Marbe in 1901, which was very similar to the above, except that small weights were used.16 The subject was asked to lift two weights 16 K. Marbe, Experimentell-Psychologische Untersuchungen über das Urteil, eine Einleitung in die Logik (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1901). 38 The Mind of Man in front of him, and place the one that was heavier in front of the experimenter, who was facing him. And it came as a startling discovery both to the experimenter himself and to his highly trained subjects, all of them introspective psychologists, that the process of judgment itself was never conscious. Physics and psychology always show interesting contrasts, and it is one of the ironies of science that the Marbe experiment, so simple as to seem silly, was to psychology what the so-difficult-to-set-up Mi-chaelson-Morley experiment was to physics. Just as the latter proved that the ether, that substance supposed to exist throughout space, did not exist, so the weight-judgment experiment showed that judging, that supposed hallmark of consciousness, did not exist in consciousness at all. But a complaint can be lodged here. Maybe in lifting the objects the judging was all happening so fast that we forgot it. After all, in introspecting we always have hundreds of words to describe what happens in a few seconds. (What an astonishing fact that is!) And our memory fades as to what just happened even as we are trying to express it. Perhaps this was what was occurring in Marbe’s experiment, and that type of thinking called judging could be found in consciousness, after all, if we could only remember. This was the problem as Watt faced it a few years after Marbe.17 To solve it, he used a different method, word associations. Nouns printed on cards were shown to the subject, who was to reply by uttering an associate word as quickly as he could. It was not free association, but what is technically called partially constrained: in different series the subject was required to associate to the visual word a superordinate (e.g. oak-tree), co-ordinate (oak-elm), or subordinate (oak-beam); or a whole (oak-forest), a part (oak-acorn), or another part of a common whole 17 H. J. Watt, “Experimentelle Beitrage zur einer Theorie des Denkens,” Archiv für geshihte der Psychologie, 1905, 4.: 289-436. T H E C O N S C I O U S N E S S O F C O N S C I O U S N E S S 3 9 (oak-path). The nature of this task of constrained associations made it possible to divide the consciousness of it into four periods: the instructions as to which of the constraints it was to be (e.g., superordinate), the presentation of the stimulus noun (e.g., oak), the search for an appropriate association, and the spoken reply (e.g., tree). The introspecting observers were asked to confine themselves first to one period and then to another, and thus get a more accurate account of consciousness in each. It was expected that the precision of this fractionation method would prove Marbe’s conclusions wrong, and that the consciousness of thinking would be found in Watt's third period, the period of the search for the word that would suit the particular constrained association. But nothing of the sort happened. It was the third period that was introspectively blank. What seemed to be happening was that thinking was automatic and not really conscious once a stimulus word had been given, and, previous to that, the particular type of association demanded had been adequately understood by the observer. This was a remarkable result. Another way of saying it is that one does one’s thinking before one knows what one is to think about.

Does the door of your room open from the right or the left? Which is your second longest finger? At a stoplight, is it the red or the green that is on top? How many teeth do you see when brushing your teeth? What letters are associated with what numbers on a telephone dial? If you are in a familiar room, without turning around, write down all the items on the wall just behind you, and then look. I think you will be surprised how little you can retrospect in consciousness on the supposed images you have stored from so much previous attentive experience. If the familiar door suddenly opened the other way, if another finger suddenly grew longer, if the red light were differently placed, or you had an extra tooth, or the telephone were made differently, or a new window latch had been put on the window behind you, you would know it immediately, showing that you all along ‘ knew’, but not consciously so. Familiar to psychologists, this is the distinction between recognition and recall. What you can consciously recall is a thimbleful to the huge oceans of your actual knowledge. Experiments of this sort demonstrate that conscious memory is not a storing up of sensory images, as is sometimes thought. Only if you have at some time consciously noticed your finger lengths or your door, have at some time counted your teeth, though you have observed these things countless times, can you remember. Unless you have particularly noted what is on the wall or recently cleaned or painted it, you will be surprised at what you have left out. And introspect upon the matter. Did you not in each of these instances ask what must be there? Starting with ideas and reasoning, rather than with any image? Conscious retrospection is not the retrieval of images, but the retrieval of what you have been conscious of before, and the reworking of these elements into rational or plausible patterns.

You could, as you remain where you are, just as well locate your consciousness around the corner in the next room against the wall near the floor, and do your thinking there as well as in your head. Not really just as well. For there are very good reasons why it is better to imagine your mind-space inside of you, reasons to do with volition and internal sensations, with the relationship of your body and your ‘I’ which will become apparent as we go on. That there is no phenomenal necessity in locating consciousness in the brain is further reinforced by various abnormal instances in which consciousness seems to be outside the body. A friend who received a left frontal brain injury in the war regained consciousness in the corner of the ceiling of a hospital ward looking down euphorically at himself on the cot swathed in bandages. Those who have taken lysergic acid diethylamide commonly report similar out-of-the-body or exosomatic experiences, as they are called. Such occurrences do not demonstrate anything metaphysical whatever; simply that locating consciousness can be an arbitrary matter.

If we are correct in assuming that schizophrenic hallunications are similar to the guidances of gods in antiquity, then there should be some common physiological instigation in both instances. This, I suggest, is simply stress. In normal people, as we have mentioned, the stress threshold for release of hallucinations is extremely high; most of us need to be oever our heads in trouble before we would hear voices. But in psychosis-prone persons, the threshold is somewhat lower; as in the girl I described, only anxious waiting in a parked car was necessary. This is caused, I think, by the buildup in the blood of a breakdown products of stress-produced adrenalin which the individual is, for gentical reasons, unable to pass through the kidneys as fast as a normal person.\n\n During the eras of the bicameral mind, we may suppose that the stress threshold for hallucinations was much, much lower than in either normal people or schizophrenics today. The only stress necessary was that which occurs when a change in behavior is necessary becuase of some novelty in a situation. Anything that could not be dealt with on the basis of habit, any conflict between work and fatigue, between attack and flight, any choice between whom to obey or what to do, anything that required any decision at all was sufficient to cause an auditory hallucination.\n\n It has now been clearly established that decision-making (and I would like to remove every trace of conscious connotation from the word 'decision') is precisely what stress is. If rats have to cross an electric grid each time they wish to get food and water, such rats develop ulcers*. Just shocking the rats does not do this to them. There has to be the pause of conflict or the decision-making stress of whether to cross a grid or not to produce this effect. If two monkeys are placed in harnesses, in such a way that one of the monkeys can press a bar at least once every twenty seconds to avoid a periodic shock to both monkeys' feet, within three or four weeks the decision-making monkey will have ulcers, while the other, equally shocked monkey will not*. It is the pause of unknowingness that is important. For if the experiment is so arranged that an animal can make an effective response and receive immediate feedback of his success, executive ulcers, as there are often called, do not occur*.'\n\n *W.L. Sawrey and J.D. Weisz, 'An experimental method of producing gastic ulcers,' Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 1956, 49:269-270.\n **J.V. Brady, R.W. Porter, D.G. Conrad, and J.W. Mason, 'Avoidance behavior and the development of gastro-duodenal ulcers,' Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 1958, I:69-72.\n **J.M. Weiss, 'Psychological Factors in Stress and Disease,' Scientific American, 1972, 226:106.\n\n\n

Visual hallucinations in schizophrenia occur less commonly, but sometimes with extreme clarity and vividness. One of my schizophrenic subjects, a vivacious twenty-year-old writer of folk songs, had been sitting in a car for a long time, anxiously waiting for a friend. A blue car coming along the road suddenly, oddly, slowed, turned rusty brown, then grew huge gray wings and slowly flapped over a hedge and disappeared. Her greater alarm, however, came when others in the street behaved as if nothing extraordinary had happened. Why? Unless all of them were somehow in league to hide their reactions from her. And why why should that be? It is often the narratization of such false events by consciousness, fitting the world in around them in a rational way, that brings on other tragic symptoms.

In driving a car, I am not sitting like a back-seat driver directing myself, but rather find myself committed and engaged with little consciousness. In fact my consciousness will usually be involved in something else, in a conversation with you if you happen to be my passenger, or in thinking about the origin of consciousness perhaps. My hand, foot, and head behavior, however, are almost in a different world. In touching something, I am touch; in turning my head, the world turns to me; in seeing, I am related to a world I immediately obey in the sense of driving on the road and not on the sidewalk. And I am not conscious of any of this. And certainly not logical about it. I am caught up, unconsciously enthralled, if you will, in a total interacting reciprocity of stimulation that may be constantly threatening or comforting, appealing or repelling, responding to the changes in traffic and particular aspects of it with trepidation or confidence, trust or distrust, while my consciousness is still off on other topics.\n\n Now simply subtract that consciousness and you have what a bicameral man would be like. The world would happen to him and his action would be an inextricable part of that happening with no consciousness whatever. And now let some brand-new situation occur, an accident up ahead, a blocked road, a flat tire, a stalled engine, and behold, our bicameral man would not do what you and I would do, that is, quickly and efficiently swivel our consciousness over to the matter and narratize out what to do. He would have to wait for his bicameral voice which with the stored-up admonitory wisdom of his life would tell him nonconsciously what to do.

It is not that the vague general ideas of a psychological causation appear first and then the poet gives them concrete pictorial form by inventing gods. It is, as I shall show later in this essay, just the other way around. And when it is suggested that the inward feelings of power or inward monitions or losses of judgment are the germs out of which the divine machinery developed, I return that the truth is just the reverse, that the presence of voices which had to be obeyed were the absolute prerequisite to the conscious stage of mind in which it is the self that is responsible and can debate within itself, can order and direct, and that the creation of such a self is the product of culture. In a sense, we have become our own gods.

The assigning of causes to our behavior or saying why we did a particular thing is all a part of narratization. Such causes as reasons may be true or false, neutral or ideal. Consciousness is ever ready to explain anything we happen to find ourselves doing. The thief narratizes his act as due to poverty, the poet his as due to beauty, and the scientist his as due to truth, purpose and cause inextricably woven into the spatialization of behavior in consciousness.\n\n But it is not just our own analog 'I' that we are narratizing; it is everything else in consciousness. A stray fact is narratized to fit with some other stray fact. A child cries in the street and we narratize the event into a mental picture of a lost child and a parent searching for it. A cat is up in a tree and we narratize the event into a picture of a dog chasing it there. Or the facts of mind as we can understand them into a theory of consciousness.

In consciousness, we are never 'seeing' anything in its entirety. This is because such 'seeing' is an analog of actual behavior; and in actual behavior we can only see or pay attention to a part of a thing at any one moment. And so in consciousness. We excerpt from the collection of possible attentions to a thing which comprises our knowledge of it. And this is all that it is possible to do since consciousness is a metaphor of our actual behavior.\n \nThus, if I ask you to think of a circus, for example, you will first have a fleeting moment of slight fuzziness, followed perhaps by a picturing of trapeze artists or possibly a clown in the center ring. Or, if you think of the city which you are now in, you will excerpt some feature, such as a particular building or tower or crossroads. Or if I ask you to think of yourself, you will make some kind of excerpts from your recent past, believing you are then thinking of yourself. In all these instances, we find no difficulty or particular paradox in the fact that these excerpts are not the things themselves, although we talk as if they were. Actually we are never conscious of things in their true nature, only of the excerpts we make of them.\n \nThe variables controlling excerption are deserving of much more thought and study. For on them the person's whole consciousness of the world and the persons with whom he is interacting depend. Your excerptions of someone you know well are heavily associated with your affect toward him. If you like him, the excerpts will be the pleasant things; if not, the unpleasant. The causation may be in either direction.\n \nHow we excerpt other people largely determines the kind of world we feel we are living in. Take for example one's relatives when one was a child. If we excerpt them as their failures, their hidden conflicts, their delusions, well, that is one thing. But if we excerpt them at their happiest, in their idiosyncratic delights, it is quite another world. Writers and artists are doing in a controlled way what happens 'in' consciousness more haphazardly.

Things that in the physical-behavioral world do not have a spatial quality are made to have such in consciousness. Otherwise we cannot be conscious of them. This we shall call spatialization.\n\n Time is an obvious example. If I ask you to think of the last hundred years, you may have a tendency to excerpt the matter in such a way that the succession of years is spread out, probably from left to right. But of course there is no left or right in time. There is only before and after, and these do not have any spatial properties whatever - except by analog. you cannot, absolutely cannot think of time except by spatializing it. Consciousness is always a spatialization in which the diachronic is turned into the synchronic, in which what has happened in time is excerpted and seen in side-by-sideness.'

I wish to describe what I shall mean by the term analog. An analog is a model, but a model of a special kind. It is not like a scientific model, whose source may be anything at all and whose purpose is to act as an hypothesis of explanation or understanding. Instead, an analog is at every point generated by the thing it is an analog of. A map is a good example. It is not a model in the scientific sense, not a hypothetical model like the Bohr atom to explain something unknown. Instead, it is constructed from something well known, if not completely known. Each region of a district of land is allotted a corresponding region on the map, though the materials of land and map are absolutely different and a large proportion of the features of the land have to be left out. And the relation between an analog map and its land is a metaphor. If I point to a location on a map and say, 'There is Mont Blanc and from Chamonix we can reach the east face this way,' that is really a shorthand way of saying, 'The relations between the point labeled 'Mont Blanc' and other points is similar to the actual Mont Blanc and its neighboring regions.

Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics. It allows us to shortcut behavioral processes and arrive at more adequate decisions. Like mathematics, it is an operator rather than a thing or repository.

If understanding a thing is arriving at a familiarizing metaphor for it, then we can see that there always will be a difficulty in understanding consciousness. For it should be immediately apparent that there is not and cannot be anything in our immediate experience that is like immediate experience itself. There is therefore a sense in which we shall never be able to understand consciousness in the same way that we can understand things that we are conscious of.

...it is only necessary to conclude that consciousness does not make all that much difference to a lot of our activities. ...it is perfectly possible that there could have existed a race of men who spoke, judged, reasoned, solved problems, indeed did most of the things we do, but who were not conscious at all.

...consider the following problems: Does the door of your room open from the right or the left? Which is your second longest finger? At a stoplight, is it the red or the green that is on top? How many teeth do you see when brushing your teeth? What letters are associated with what numbers on a telephone dial? If you are in a familiar room, without turning around, write down all the items on the wall just behind you, and then look.\n\n I think you will be surprised how little you can retrospect in consciousness on the supposed images you have stored from so much previous attentive experience. If the familiar door suddenly opened the other way, if another finger suddenly grew longer, if the red light were differently placed, or you had an extra tooth, or the telephone were made differently, or a new window latch had been put on the window behind you, you would know it immediately, showing that you all along 'knew', but not consciously so. Familiar to psychologists, this is the distinction between recognition and recall. What you can consciously recall is a thimbleful to the huge oceans of your actual knowledge.

Right at this moment, you are not conscious of how you are sitting, of where your hands are placed, of how fast you are reading, though even as I mentioned these items, you were. And as you read, you are not conscious of the letters or even of the words or even of the syntax or the sentences and punctuation, but only of their meaning. As you listen to an address, phonemes disappear into words and words into sentences and sentences disappear into what they are trying to say, into meaning. To be conscious of the elements of speech is to destroy the intention of the speech.\n\n And also on the production side. Try speaking with a full consciousness of your articulation as you do it. You will simply stop speaking.\n\n And so in writing, it is as if the pencil or pen or typewriter itself spells the words, spaces them, punctuates properly, goes to the next line, does not begin consecutive sentences in the same way, determines that we place a question here, an exclamation there, even as we ourselves are engrossed in what we are trying to express and the person we are addressing.\n\n For in speaking or writing we are not really conscious of what we are actually doing at the time. Consciousness functions in the decision as to what to say, how we are to say it, and when we say it, but then the orderly and accomplished succession of phonemes or of written letters is somehow done for us.

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.\n\n The timing of consciousness is also an interesting question. When we are awake, are we conscious all the time? We think so. In fact, we are sure so! I shut my eyes and even if I try not to think, consciousness still streams on, a great river of contents in a succession of different conditions which I have been taught to call thoughts, images, memories, interior dialogues, regrets, wishes, resolves, all interweaving with the constantly changing pageant of exterior sensations of which I am selectively aware. Always the continuity. Certainly this is the feeling. And whatever we're doing, we feel that our very self, our deepest of deep identity is indeed this continuing flow that only ceases in sleep between remembered dreams. This is our experience. And many thinkers have taken this spirit of continuity to be the place to start from in philosophy, the very ground of certainty which no one can doubt. Cogito, ergo sum.\n\n It is much more probable that the seeming continuity of consciousness is really an illusion, just as most of the other metaphors about consciousness are. In our flashlight analogy, the flashlight would be conscious of being on only when it is on. Though huge gaps of time occurred, providing things were generally the same, it would seem to the flashlight itself that the light had been continuously on. We are thus conscious less of the time than we think, because we cannot be conscious of when we are not conscious.

...In the first instance we should say that the person suffering a severe blow on the head loses both consciousness and what I am calling reactivity, and they are therefore different things.\n\n This distinction is also important in normal everday life. We are constantly reacting to things without being conscious of them at the time. Sitting against a tree, I am always reacting to the tree and to the ground and to my own posture, since if I wish to walk, I will quite unconsciously stand up from the ground to do so.\n\n Immersed in the ideas of this first chapter, I am rarely conscious even of where I am. In writing, I am reacting to a pencil in my hand since I hold on to it, and am reacting to my writing pad since I hold it on my knees, and to its lines since I write upon them, but I am only conscious of what I am trying to say and whther or not I am being clear to you.\n\n If a bird bursts up from the copse nearby and flies crying to the horizon, I may turn and watch it and hear it, and then turn back to this page without being conscious that I have done so.\n\n In other words, reactivity covers all stimuli my behavior takes account of in any way, while consciousness is something quite distinct and a far less ubiquitous phenomenon. We are conscious of what we are reacting to only from time to time. And whereas reactivity can be definded behaviorally and neuologically, consciousness at the present state of knowledge cannot.

What a startling doctrine [Behaviorism is]! But the really surpising thing is that, starting off almost as a flying whim, it grew into a movement that occupied center stage in psychology from about 1920 to 1960. The external reasons for the sustained triumph of such a peculiar position are both fascinating and complex. Psychology at the time was trying to wriggle out of philosophy into a separate academic discipline and used behaviorism to do so. The immediate adversary of behaviorism, Titchenerian introspectionism, was a pale and effete opponent, based as it was on a false anaology between consciousness and chemistry. The toppled idealism of World War I created a revolutionary age demanding new philosophies. The intriguing succeses of physics and general technology presented both a model and a means that seemed more compatible with behaviorism. The world was weary and wary of subjective thought and longed for objective fact. Anf in America objective fact was pragmatic fact. Behaviorism provided this in psychology. It allowed a new generation to sweep aside with one impatient gesture all the worn-out complexities of the problem of consciousness and its origin. We would turn over a new leaf. We would make a fresh start.\n\n And the fresh start was a success in one laboratory after another. But the single inherent reason for its success was not its truth, but its program. And what a truly vigorous and exciting program of research it was! with its gleaming stainless-steel promise of reducting all conduct to a handful of reflexes and conditional responses developed from them, of generalizing the spinal reflex terminology of stimulus and response and reinforcement to the puzzles of headed behavior and so seeming to solve them, of r unning rats through miles and miles of mazes into more fascinating mazes of objective theorems, and its pledge, its solemn pledge to reduce thought to muscle twitches and peronality to the woes of Little Albert. In all this there was a heady excitement that is difficult to relate at this remove. Complexity would be made simple, darkness would be made light, and philosophy would be a thing of the past.

It is William James who has given the best discussion of the conscious automaton theory*. His argument here is a little like Samuel Johnson's downing philosophical idealism by kicking a stone and crying, 'I refute it thus!' It is just plain inconceivable that consciousness should have nothing to do with a business which it so faithfully attends. If consciousness is the mere impotent shadow of action, why is it more intense when action is most hesitent? And why are we least conscious when doing something most habitual? Certainly this seesawing relationship between consciousness and actions is something that any theory of consciousness must explain. \r\n \r\n\r\nWilliam James, Principles of Psychology (New York: Holt, 1890), Vol. I, Ch. 5

Is this consciousness...this enormous influence of ideas, principles, beliefs over our lives and actions, really derivable from animal behavior? Alone of species, all alone! we try to understand ourselves and the world. We become rebels or patriots or martyrs on the basis of ideas. We build Chartres and computres, write poems and tensor equations, play chess and quartets, sail ships to other planets and listen in to other galaxies - what have these to do with rats in mazes or the threat displays of baboons? The continuity hypothesis of Darwin for the evolution of mind is a very suspicious totem of evolutionary mythology. The yearning for certainty which grails the scientist, the aching beauty which harasses the artist, the sweet thorn of justice which fierces the rebel from the eases of life, or the thrill of exultation with which we hear of true acts of that now difficult virtue of courage, of cheerful endurance of hopeless suffering - are these really derivable from matter? Or even continuous with the idiot hierarchies of speechless apes?\n\n The chasm is awesome. The emotional lives of men and of other mammals are indeed marvelously similar. But to focus upon the similarity unduly is to forget that such a chasm exists at all. The intellectual life of man, his culture and history and religion and science, is different from anything else we know of in the universe. That is fact. It is as if all life evolved to a certain point, and then in ourselves turned at a right angle and simply exploded in a different direction.

O, What a world of world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything and yet nothing at all - what is it?\n\n And where did it come from?\n\n And why?

A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Author: Karl Marx

Publisher: Progress Publishers (1977)

Teaching Today, a Practical Guide, Fourth Edition

Author: Geoff Petty

Publisher: Nelson Thornes (2009)

When we learn specific skills our needs fall into this pattern, which is summarised by the mnemonic educare? (educere, meaning ‘to lead out’, is the Latin root of the word ‘educate’). Learning a specific skill requires that the following needs be met: \r\n \r\n*E* Explanation. The students need to understand why the skill is carried out in the way it is, along with any important background information. \r\n*D* ‘Doing-detail’. The students must discover precisely what they are expected to do, and how it should be done. This is the ‘doing-detail’ which students often best learn by being ‘shown how’, for example via a demonstration or case study. These provide models of good practice to copy or adapt, and are useful precisely because they provide ‘doing-detail’. \r\n*U* Use. The students must use – that is, practise – the skill. \r\n*C* Check and correct. Students’ practice must of course be checked and corrected by the students themselves, and usually by the teacher. \r\n*A* Aide-memory. The students need some reminder or other – for example notes, handout, book, tape. \r\n*R* Review and reuse of earlier work is required to ensure that old learning is not forgotten. \r\n*E* Evaluation. Learning must be tested under realistic conditions, if the learner and the teacher are to be confi dent of the learning. \r\n*?* Queries. Learners always require an opportunity to ask questions. The ‘use’ and ‘check and correct’ needs are cyclic, and must continue until the skill is mastered. \r\n \r\nIn our thought experiment we imagined a short series of lessons, so review may not have occurred to you, though you may have thought of including a summary. When teaching covers an appreciable length of time, it is very important to revise or reuse old learning, or earlier work will be forgotten. It is very important to understand that the educare? elements are all learning experiences, not teaching methods. For example, the explanation can be provided in a multitude of ways. It could of course be provided by ‘teacher talk’, but just as effectively by the student: through reading, watching a video, carrying out an experiment, discovering for themselves, etc. What matters is that, at some time or other, the student does come across an explanation of why the activity is done in the way it is. How the explanation is obtained is not important, even if they read it on the back of a crisp packet or they find on the floor of a bus – they still get the explanation, after all!

The Denial of Death

Author: Ernest Becker

Publisher: Free Press (1975)

307

Rieff’s point is the classical one: that in order to have a truly human existence there must be limits; and what we call culture or the superego sets such limits. Culture is a compromise with life that makes human life possible. He quotes Marx’s defiant revolutionary phrase: “I am nothing and should be everything.” For Rieff this is the undiluted infantile unconscious speaking. Or, as I would prefer to say with Rank, the neurotic consciousness—the “all or nothing” of the person who cannot “partialize” his world. One bursts out in boundless megalomania, transcending all limits, or bogs down into wormhood like a truly worthless sinner. There is no secure ego balance to limit the intake of reality or to fashion the output of one’s own powers.

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we see the historical difference between the classical sinner and the modern neurotic: both of them experience the naturalness of human insufficiency, only today the neurotic is stripped of the symbolic world-view, the God-ideology that would make sense out of his unworthiness and would translate it into heroism. Traditional religion turned the consciousness of sin into a condition for salvation; but the tortured sense of nothingness of the neurotic qualifies him now only for miserable extinction, for merciful release in lonely death. It is all right to be nothing vis-à-vis God, who alone can make it right in His unknown ways; it is another thing to be nothing to oneself, who is nothing.

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Some people are more sensitive to the lie of cultural life, to the illusions of the causa-sui project that others are so thoughtlessly and trustingly caught up in. The neurotic is having trouble with the balance of cultural illusion and natural reality; the possible horrible truth about himself and the world is seeping into his consciousness. The average man is at least secure that the cultural game is the truth, the unshakable, durable truth. He can earn his immortality in and under the dominant immortality ideology, period. It is all so simple and clear-cut. But now the neurotic: [He] perceives himself as unreal and reality as unbearable, because with him the mechanisms of illusion are known and destroyed by self consciousness. He can no longer deceive himself about himself and disillusions even his own ideal of personality. He perceives himself as bad, guilt laden, inferior, as a small, weak, helpless creature, which is the truth about mankind, as Oedipus also discovered in the crash of his heroic fate. All other is illusion, deception, but necessary deception in order to be able to bear one’s self and thereby life.20 In other words, the neurotic isolates himself from others, cannot engage freely in their partialization of the world, and so cannot live by their deceptions about the human condition. He lifts himself out of the “natural therapy” of everyday life, the active, self-forgetful engagement in it; and so the illusions that others share seem unreal to him.

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But now the rub for man. If sex is a fulfillment of his role as an animal in the species, it reminds him that he is nothing himself but a link in the chain of being, exchangeable with any other and completely expendable in himself. Sex represents, then, species consciousness and, as such, the defeat of individuality, of personality. But it is just this personality that man wants to develop: the idea of himself as a special cosmic hero with special gifts for the universe. He doesn’t want to be a mere fornicating animal like any other—this is not a truly human meaning, a truly distinctive contribution to world life. From the very beginning, then, the sexual act represents a double negation: by physical death and of distinctive personal gifts. This point is crucial because it explains why sexual taboos have been at the heart of human society since the very beginning. They affirm the triumph of human personality over animal sameness. With the complex codes for sexual self-denial, man was able to impose the cultural map for personal immortality over the animal body. He brought sexual taboos into being because he needed to triumph over the body, and he sacrificed the pleasures of the body to the highest pleasure of all: self-perpetuation as a spiritual being through all eternity. This is the substitution that Roheim was really describing when he made his penetrating observation on the Australian aborigines: “The repression and sublimation of the primal scene is at the bottom of totemistic ritual and religion,”11 that is, the denial of the body as the transmitter of peculiarly human life. This explains why people chafe at sex, why they resent being reduced to the body, why sex to some degree terrifies them: it represents two levels of the negation of oneself. Resistance to sex is a resistance to fatality.

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As soon as it is fully accepted as a body by the partner, our self-consciousness vanishes; it merges with the body and with the self-consciousness and body of the partner. Four fragments of existence melt into one unity and things are no longer disjointed and grotesque: everything is “natural,” functional, expressed as it should be—and so it is stilled and justified. All the more is guilt wiped away when the body finds its natural usage in the production of a child. Nature herself then proclaims one’s innocence, how fitting it is that one should have a body, be basically a procreative animal.9 But we also know from experience that things don’t work so smoothly or unambiguously. The reason is not far to seek: it is right at the heart of the paradox of the creature. Sex is of the body, and the body is of death. As Rank reminds us, this is the meaning of the Biblical account of the ending of paradise, when the discovery of sex brings death into the world. As in Greek mythology too, Eros and Thanatos are inseparable; death is the natural twin brother of sex.10

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Is one oppressed by the burden of his life? Then he can lay it at his divine partner’s feet. Is self-consciousness too painful, the sense of being a separate individual, trying to make some kind of meaning out of who one is, what life is, and the like? Then one can wipe it away in the emotional yielding to the partner, forget oneself in the delirium of sex, and still be marvellously quickened in the experience. Is one weighed down by the guilt of his body, the drag of his animality that haunts his victory over decay and death? But this is just what the comfortable sex relationship is for: in sex the body and the consciousness of it are no longer separated; the body is no longer something we look at as alien to ourselves. As soon as it is fully accepted as a body by the partner, our self-consciousness vanishes; it merges with the body and with the self-consciousness and body of the partner. Four fragments of existence melt into one unity and things are no longer disjointed and grotesque: everything is “natural,” functional, expressed as it should be—and so it is stilled and justified. All the more is guilt wiped away when the body finds its natural usage in the production of a child. Nature herself then proclaims one’s innocence,

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This is the most remarkable achievement of the Christian world picture: that it could take slaves, cripples, imbeciles, the simple and the mighty, and make them all secure heroes, simply by taking a step back from the world into another dimension of things, the dimension called heaven. Or we might better say that Christianity took creature consciousness—the thing man most wanted to deny—and made it the very condition for his cosmic heroism.

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Kierkegaard’s torment was the direct result of seeing the world as it really is in relation to his situation as a creature. The prison of one’s character is painstakingly built to deny one thing and one thing alone: one’s creatureliness. The creatureliness is the terror. Once admit that you are a defecating creature and you invite the primeval ocean of creature anxiety to flood over you. But it is more than creature anxiety, it is also man’s anxiety, the anxiety that results from the human paradox that man is an animal who is conscious of his animal limitation. Anxiety is the result of the perception of the truth of one’s condition. What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and selfexpression—and with all this yet to die.

The body, then, is one’s animal fate that has to be struggled against in some ways. At the same time, it offers experiences and sensations, concrete pleasure that the inner symbolic world lacks. No wonder man is impaled on the horns of sexual problems, why Freud saw that sex was so prominent in human life—especially in the neurotic conflicts of his patients. Sex is an inevitable component of man’s confusion over the meaning of his life, a meaning split hopelessly into two realms—symbols (freedom) and body (fate). No wonder, too, that most of us never abandon entirely the early attempts of the child to use the body and its appendages as a fortress or a machine to magically coerce the world. We try to get metaphysical answers out of the body that the body—as a material thing—cannot possibly give. We try to answer the transcendent mystery of creation by experiences in one, partial, physical product of that creation. This is why the mystique of sex is so widely practiced—say, in traditional France—and at the same time is so disillusioning. It is comfortingly infantile in its indulgence and its pleasure, yet so self-defeating of real awareness and growth, if the person is using it to try to answer metaphysical questions. It then becomes a lie about reality, a screen against full consciousness.24 If the adult reduces the problem of life to the area of sexuality, he repeats the fetishization of the child who focusses the problem of the mother upon her genitals. Sex then becomes a screen for terror, a fetishization of full consciousness about the real problem of life.

to become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life. Everything painful and sobering in what psychoanalytic genius and religious genius have discovered about man revolves around the terror of admitting what one is doing to earn his self-esteem.

The Mind's I

Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett

Publisher: Bantam Books (1982)

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Mind is a pattern perceived by a mind.

The physicist Paul Davies, writing on just this topic in his recent book Other Worlds, says: “our consciousness weaves a route at random along the ever-branching evolutionary pathway of the cosmos, so it is we, rather than God, who are playing dice.”

We are now in a position to integrate the perspectives of three large fields: psychology, biology and physics. By combining the positions of Sagan, Crick, and Wigner as spokesmen for the various outlooks, we get a picture of the whole that is quite unexpected. First, the human mind, including consciousness and reflective thought, can be explained by activities of the central nervous system, which, in turn, can be reduced to the biological structure and function of that physiological system. Second, biological phenomena at all levels, can be totally understood in terms of atomic physics, that is, through the action and interaction of the component atoms of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and so forth. Third, and last, atomic physics, which is now understood most fully by means of quantum mechanics, must be formulated with the mind as a primitive component of the system. We have thus, in separate Rediscovering the Mind 40 Circle – from the mind, back to the mind. The results of this chain of reasoning will probably lead more aid and comfort to Eastern mystics than to neurophysiologists and molecular biologists; nevertheless, the closed loop follows from a straightforward combination of the explanatory processes of recognized experts in the three separate sciences. Since individuals seldom work with more than one of these paradigms, the general problem has received little attention. If we reject this epistemological circularity, we are left with two opposing camps: a physics with a claim to completeness because it describes all of nature, and a psychology that is all-embracing because it deals with the mind, our only source of knowledge of the world. Given the problems in both of these views, it is perhaps well to return to the circle and give it more sympathetic consideration. If it deprives us of firm absolutes, at least it encompasses the mind-body problem and provides a framework within which individual disciplines can communicate. The closing of the circle provides the best possible approach for psychological

The views of a large number of contemporary physical scientists are summed up in the essay “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question” written by Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner. Wigner begins by pointing out that most physical scientists have returned to the recognition that thought – meaning the mind – is primary. He goes on to state: “It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum physics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.” And he concludes by noting how remarkable it is that the scientific study of the world led to the content of consciousness as an ultimate reality.

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The way I see it, consciousness has got to come from a precise pattern of organization – one that we haven’t yet figured out how to describe in any detailed way. But I believe we will gradually come to understand it. In my view consciousness requires a certain way of mirroring the external universe internally, and the ability to respond to that external reality on the basis of the internally represented model. And then in addition, what’s really crucial for a conscious machine is that it should incorporate a well-developed and flexible self-model.

There seems to be no alternative to accepting some sort of incomprehensible quality in existence. Take your pick. We all fluctuate delicately between a subjective and objective view of the world, and this quandary is central to human nature.

The new way of thinking was supported by a crutch, one could cling to at least a pale version of the Lockean creed by imagining that these “unconscious” thoughts, desires, and schemes belonged to other selves within the psyche. Just as I can keep my schemes secret from you, my id can keep secrets from my ego. By splitting the subject into many subjects, one could preserve the axiom that every mental state must be someone’s conscious mental state and explain the inaccessibility of some of these states to their putative owners by postulating other interior owners for them. This move was usefully obscured in the mists of jargon so that the weird question of whether it was like anything to be a superego, for instance, could be kept at bay.

We have come to accept without the slightest twinge of incomprehension a host of claims to the effect that sophisticated hypothesis testing, memory searching, inference – in short, information processing – occurs within us though it is entirely inaccessible to introspection . It is not repressed unconscious activity of the sort Freud uncovered, activity driven out of the sight of consciousness, but just mental activity that is somehow beneath or beyond the ken of consciousness altogether. Freud claimed that his theories and clinical observations gave him the authority to overrule the sincere denials of his patients about what was going on in their minds. Similarly the cognitive psychologist marshals experimental evidence, models, and theories to show that people are engaged in surprisingly sophisticated reasoning processes of which they can give no introspective account at all. Not only are minds accessible to outsiders, some mental activities are more accessible to outsiders than to the very “owners” of those minds.

Creatures react appropriately to events within the scope of their senses; they recognize things, avoid painful experiences, learn, plan, and solve problems. They exhibit intelligence. But putting matter this way might be held to prejudge the issue. Talking of their “senses” or of “painful” circumstances, for instance suggests that we have already settled the issue of consciousness -- for note that had we described a robot in those terms, the polemical intent of the choice of words would have been obvious (and resisted by many). How do creatures differ from robots, real or imagined? By being organically and biologically similar to us – and we are the paradigmatic conscious creatures.

From the inside, our Own consciousness seems obvious and pervasive, we know that much goes on around us and even inside our bodies of which we are entirely unaware or unconscious, but nothing could be more intimately know to us than those things of which we are, individually, conscious. Those things of which I am conscious, and the ways in which I am conscious of them, determine what it is like to be me. I know in a way no other could know what it is like to be me. From the inside, consciousness seems to be an all-or-nothing phenomenon – an inner light that is either on or off. We grant that we are sometimes drowsy or inattentive, or asleep, and on occasion we even enjoy abnormally heightened consciousness, but when we are conscious, that we are conscious is not a fact that admits of degrees. There is a perspective, then, from which consciousness seems to be a feature that sunders the universe into two strikingly different kinds of things, those that have it and those that don’t. Those that have it are subjects, beings to whom things can be one way or another, beings it is like something to be. It is not like anything at all to be a brick or a pocket calculator or an apple. These things have insides, but not the right sort of insides – no inner life, no point of view. It is certainly like something to be me (Something I know “from the inside”) and almost certainly like something to be you (for you have told me, most convincingly, that it is the same with you), and probably like something to be a dog or a dolphin (if only they could tell us!) and maybe even like something to be a spider.

Our ordinary concept of consciousness seems to be anchored to two separable sets of considerations that can be captured roughly by the phrases “from the inside” and “from the outside.”

Myths to live by

Author: Joseph Campbell

Publisher: Joseph Campbell Foundation (2011)

267

...we are the children of this beautiful planet that we have lately seen photographed from the moon. We were not delivered into it by some god, but have come forth from it. We are its eyes and mind, its seeing and its thinking. And the earth, together with its sun, this light around which it flies like a moth, came forth, we are told, from a nebula; and that nebula, in turn, from space. So that we are the mind, ultimately, of space.

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Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception where he describes the sense that he experienced in his first mescalin adventure of his mind opening to ranges of wonder such as he had never before even imagined. \r\n\r\n\r\n>Reflecting on my experience [Huxley wrote], I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, 'that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.' \r\n\r\n\r\nAccording to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. . . Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary by-passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate 'spiritual exercises,' or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception 'of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe' (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at Large), but something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of

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Father Thomas Merton, in a brief but perspicacious article entitled Symbolism: Communication or Communion?\n \n'But when one comes to a better understanding of those religions, and when one sees that the experiences which are the fulfillment of religious belief and practice are most clearly expressed in symbols, one may come to recognize that often the symbols of different religions may have more in common than have the abstractly formulated official doctrines.' \n \n'The true symbol,' he states again, 'does not merely point to something else. It contains in itself a structure which awakens our consciousness to a new awareness of the inner meaning of life and of reality itself. A true symbol takes us to the center of the circle, not to another point on the circumference. It is by symbolism that man enters affectively and consciously into contact with his own deepest self, with other men, and with God.

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The leading aim of all Oriental mystic teaching, consequently, might be described as that of enabling us to shift our focus of self-identification from, so to say, this light bulb to its light; from this mortal person to the consciousness of which our bodies are but the vehicles. That, in fact, is the whole sense of the famous saying of the Indian Chhandogya Upanishad, tat tvam asi, 'Thou art That,' 'You yourself are that undifferentiated universal ground of all being, all consciousness, and all bliss.

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The aim of the ascending serpent is to clarify and increase the light of consciousness within, and the first step to the gaining of this boon -- as told in the Bhagavad Gita, as in many another wisdom text -- is to abandon absolutely all concern for the fruits of action, whether in this world or in the next. As the Lord Krishna on the battlefield said to the warrior prince Arjuna, 'To the work alone are you entitled, never to its fruit. . . He who knows that the way of renunciation and the way of action are one, he verily knows.'6

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I am told that in the old days a young person desiring to learn swordsmanship in Japan would be left by the master largely unattended for a time, doing chores about the school, washing dishes, and so on; and every now and again the master himself would come popping out from somewhere and give him a smack with a stick. After a season of that sort of thing, the victim will have begun to be prepared. But that will be of no use to him, either; for when ready for the blow to come at him, say, from over there, he will get it from back here; and next, from nowhere at all. At last the baffled youth will arrive at the realization that he will do best not to ready himself in any specific direction, because if one has a notion of where the danger may be lurking, he will be attentive in the wrong direction. The only protection, then, is to be in a perpetual state of centeredness in undirected alertness, every ready for sudden attack and immediate response. \n\nThere is an amusing anecdote of a certain master of this kind who told the young men of his school that he would himself bow before anyone who, in any way whatsoever, could catch him by surprise. Days passed, and the master was never caught. He was never off guard. But then, one day when he had returned from an afternoon in the garden, he asked for some water with which to bathe his feet, and it was brought to him by a ten-year-old. The water was a bit cold. He asked the youngster to warm it. The little fellow returned with it hot, and the master, without thinking, put his feet in, quickly pulled them out, and went down on his knees in a very deep bow before the smallest boy in his school.

The word yoga itself, from a Sanskrit verbal root yuj, meaning 'to yoke, to link one thing to another,' refers to the act of linking the mind to the source of mind, consciousness to the source of consciousness; the import of which definition is perhaps best illustrated in the discipline known as knowledge yoga, the yoga, that is to say, of discrimination between the knower and the known, between the subject and the object in every act of knowing, and the identification of oneself, then, with the subject. 'I know my body. My body is the object. I am the witness, the knower of the object. I, therefore, am not my body.' Next: 'I know my thoughts; I am not my thoughts.' And so on: 'I know my feelings; I am not my feelings.' You can back yourself out of the room that way. And the Buddha then comes along and adds: 'You are not the witness either. There is no witness.' So where are you now? Where are you between two thoughts? That is the way known as jnana yoga, the way of sheer knowledge.

The word Buddha means simply, 'awakened, an awakened one, or the Awakened One.' It is from the Sanskrit verbal root budh, 'to fathom a depth, to penetrate to the bottom'; also, 'to perceive, to know, to come to one's senses, to wake.' The Buddha is one awakened to identity not with the body but with the knower of the body, nor with thought but with the knower of thoughts, that is to say, with consciousness; knowing, furthermore, that his value derives from his power to radiate consciousness -- as the value of a lightbulb derives from its power to radiate light. What is important about a lightbulb is not the filament or the glass but the light which these bulbs are to render; and what is important about each of us is not the body and its nerves but the consciousness that shines through them. And when one lives for that, instead of for protection of the bulb, one is in Buddha consciousness.

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The sin of inadvertence, not being alert, not quite awake, is the sin of missing the moment of life; whereas the whole of the art of the nonaction that is action (wu-wei) is unremitting alertness. One is then fully conscious all the time, and since life is an expression of consciousness, life is then lived, as it were, of itself. There is no need to instruct it or direct it.

The Fourth Way

Author: P.D. Ouspensky

Publisher: Vintage (1971)

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Nearly all other systems begin with aims at least ten thousand miles ahead which have no practical meaning; but this system begins in this room. That is the difference and that is what must be understood first of all. Again and again we must return to this question of what we want from the work. Do not use the terminology of the system but find what you yourself want. If you say you want to be conscious, that is all very good, but why? What do you want to get by being conscious? You must not think that you can answer this question immediately. It is very difficult. But you must keep coming back to it. And you must understand that before the time comes when you will be able to get what you want, you must know what it is. This is a very definite condition. You can never get anything until you can say, 'I want this'. Then perhaps you may get it or perhaps you may not; but you can never get it unless you know what it is. You can formulate it in your own way, and you must be sincere with yourself. Then you can ask yourself: 'Will the system be able to help me to get it?' If we remember our aim, think about it, find more and more reasons why we should work, our will will move in one direction and will get stronger. If we forget our aim, we get slack. I have spoken about the question of aim because I advise you to think about it, to revise what you have already thought about aim and think how you would define your aim now, after a study of these ideas. I would say that what a man can get, what can be promised him on condition that he works, is that after some time of work he will see himself. Other things that he may get, such as consciousness, unity, connection with higher centres, all come after this— and we do not know in what order they come. But we must remember one thing; until we get this— until we see ourselves—we cannot get anything else. Until we begin to work with this aim in view we cannot say that we have begun to work. So, after some time we must be able to formulate our immediate aim as being able to see oneself. Not even to know oneself (this comes later), but to see oneself. Man is afraid to see himself. But he can decide to take courage and see what he is

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Q. Is self-imposed discipline good, or must it be school discipline? A. Discipline is good if it is discipline. But if it is just an arbitrary invention, then it can give no result. The most important aspect of discipline is not expressing negative emotions and not indulging in negative emotions. Mechanical tasks cannot give any result, but if you catch yourself at a moment of negative emotion and stop it—this is discipline. If we want to be in the work, we must verify all our thoughts, words and actions from the point of view of the work. So if you want to work, you are no longer free— you must lose the illusion of freedom. The question is, have you freedom? Have you something to lose? This is why self-remembering is necessary. Self-remembering is not only elf awareness, it means also a certain capacity to act in a certain way, to do what you want. You see, in our logical thinking, logical knowledge, we divide consciousness from will. Consciousness means will. In Russian, for instance, the same word is used for will and for freedom. Consciousness means will, and will means freedom.

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We can 'do' some inner actions, for we have a certain control. For instance, we have a certain control of our thoughts: we can think about one thing or another. This is the beginning of the possibility. If we continue to keep our interests directed in a certain line, our thinking process acquires a certain power and, after some time, it can create at least moments of self-awareness which, when it comes more often and stays longer, can begin to change other things. So there are ways out of this absolute mechanicalness. But if one is in conditions of ordinary life, without knowing that everything happens, one can do nothing. The real possibility of changing these conditions begins with control of thoughts and control as far as possible of consciousness, that is, with inner work on ourselves. By doing this inner work, by trying to acquire control of oneself, one learns how to 'do'. It does not mean one can 'do', for one cannot; but if one begins, then, little by little, one learns how to 'do

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Q. You said no will was possible for us? A. Will is a relative term: there are different wills on different levels. A mechanical man who never thinks of development has only a multitude of small wills that are quite mechanical. He has a certain desire: one side of him wants to do something and another side is afraid he will be punished if he does it. A struggle ensues between the different tendencies and the result of this struggle we call 'will'. Q. Then in order to develop will one must go against desires? A. First of all you must become one. You are many and you have hundreds of 'I's and hundreds of wills. If you want to develop an independent will you must become one and conscious. Will depends on unity and consciousness.

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every kind of work, every kind of state, needs a certain definite minimum of effort and minimum of time given to it, and the work we are trying to do needs more than many other things if we want to get even perceptible results. What does it mean to work practically? It means to work not only on intellect but also on emotions and on will. Work on intellect means thinking in a new way, creating new points of view, destroying illusions. Work on emotions means not expressing negative emotions, not identifying, not considering and, later on, also work on the emotions themselves. But what does work on will mean? It means work on one's actions. First you must ask yourselves: What is will in men No. 1, 2 and 3? It is the resultant of desires. Will is the line of combined desires, and as our desires constantly change, we have no permanent line. So ordinary will depends on desires and we can have many desires going in different directions. The line constructed out of all these angles is the resultant. This is our will. It may go in one direction one day and in another direction another day, and we think it is straight. So it is really the resultant of our blindness. We have to ask ourselves on what the will of man No. 7 could be based. It must be based on full consciousness, and this implies knowledge and understanding connected with objective consciousness and a permanent 'I'. So three things are necessary: knowledge, consciousness and a permanent 'I'. Only those people who have these three things can have real will; that means a will that is independent of desires or anything else

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Our four centres, intellectual, emotional, moving and instinctive, are so co ordinated that one movement in one centre immediately produces a corresponding movement in another centre. Certain movements or certain postures are connected with certain thoughts; certain thoughts are connected with certain feelings, sensations, emotions—everything is connected. Such as we are, with all the will that we can concentrate, we can acquire some degree of control over one centre, but only one, and even that for only a short period of time. But other centres will go on by themselves and will immediately corrupt the centre we want to control and bring it again to mechanical reaction. Suppose I know all I should know, and suppose I decide to think in a new way. I begin to think in a new way but sit in the ordinary posture, or smoke a cigarette in the usual way, and I again find myself in the old thoughts. It is the same with emotions; one decides to feel in a new way about something, and then one thinks in the old way and so negative emotions come again as before, without control. So in order to change we must change things in all four centres at the same time, and this is impossible since we have no will to control four centres. In school there are special methods for attaining this control, but without a school it cannot be done. On the whole, our machine is very cleverly thought out. From one point of view it has wonderful possibilities of development, but from another point of view this development is made very difficult. You will understand why it is made like that when you finally realize what consciousness and will mean, and then you will understand that neither consciousness nor will can develop mechanically. Every small thing has to be developed by struggle, otherwise it would not be consciousness or will. It has to be made difficult.

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We take the human machine as a three-storied factory. The three stories represent the head, the middle part of the body and the lower part of the body with the spinal cord. Food enters the top story and passes to the bottom story as Oxygen 768. In the body it meets with a certain Carbon 192 and, mixing with this Carbon, becomes Nitrogen 384. Nitrogen 384 meets with another Carbon, 96, and with the help of this Carbon changes from Oxygen 384 to Nitrogen 192. It is an ascending octave, so these stages represent the notes do, re, mi. After mi there is an interval and the octave cannot develop any further by itself. It is very interesting that up to this point and one step further we can follow its development with the help of ordinary physiological knowledge. When food enters the mouth it meets with several different sorts of saliva and is mixed with them in the process of mastication; then it passes into the stomach and is worked on by gastric juices, which break down sugars, proteins and fats. From there it goes into the intestines and meets with bile, pancreatic and intestinal juices, which transform it into the smallest elements. These go through the wall of the bowel into venous blood, which is taken to the liver, where it meets with other carbons which change it chemically, and so to the heart, which pumps the venous blood to the lungs. Here it is oxygenated by the entry of air and returned to the heart as arterial blood. In this diagram all the various matters present in the body which the food meets with up to mi are divided into two categories: Carbon 192 and Carbon 96. Venous blood is mi 192 and arterial blood is fa 96. At the point when mi 192 cannot develop any further, another kind of food enters—air. It enters as Oxygen 192, meets with a certain Carbon 48 and with its help is transformed into re 96, and this production of re 96 gives a shock to mi 192 of the food octave enabling it to pass to fa 96. Beyond this, physiological knowledge cannot go. Re 96 of the air octave meets a corresponding Carbon and produces mi 48; and with the help of the same Carbon fa 96 of the food octave transforms into sol 48. Sol 48 can develop further, but mi 48 cannot, so the development of the air octave stops at this point. Sol 48 of the food octave passes into la 24 and la 24 into si 12, and stops there. Impressions enter as do 48, but cannot develop any further, because at their place of entry there is no Carbon 12 to help them. Nature has not provided it, or rather has not provided enough to produce any considerable effect, so do 48 does not transform and the three octaves stop at that. Think about this diagram and connect it with what has been said earlier, that nature brings man to a certain state and then leaves him to develop himself. Nature gives man possibilities, but does not develop these possibilities. It enables him to live, provides air, for otherwise the first octave could not go on, but the rest he must do himself. The machine is so arranged that air enters at the right moment and in the right consistency and gives a mechanical shock. It is important to understand that the Food Diagram or the Diagram of Nutrition consists of three stages. The first stage that I have just described shows how things happen in ordinary normal man: the food octave goes on all the way from do 768 to si 12; there are three notes of the air octave and one note of the impressions octave. If we want to develop further, we must increase the production of higher matters, and in order to do that we must understand and know how to do it, not only theoretically but in actual fact, because it needs a long time to learn how to use this knowledge and to make the right efforts. If we know how to bring Carbon 12 to the right place and if we make the necessary effort, the development of the air and impressions octaves goes further. The second stage shows what happens when the right shock has been given. Do 48 of the impressions octave is transformed into re 24 and mi 12. The air octave receives a shock from the impressions octave and mi 48 transforms into fa 24, sol 12 and even a small quantity of la 6. You must understand that the air is saturated with higher hydrogens which, in certain cases, can be retained by the organism in the process of breathing. But the amount of higher hydrogens that we can get from the air is very small. This stage represents the work of the human machine with one mechanical and one conscious shock. The third stage shows what happens when a second conscious shock is given at the right place. The first conscious shock is necessary at do 48. The second conscious shock is needed where mi 12 of the impressions octave and si 12 of the food octave have stopped in their development and cannot go on any further by themselves. Although there are carbons in the organism which would help them to be transformed, they are far away and cannot be reached, so another effort is necessary. If we know its nature and can produce this second conscious shock, mi 12 will develop into fa 6 and si 12 into do 6. The effort must begin from mi 12, so we must understand what mi 12 is psychologically. We can call it our ordinary emotions, that is to say, all strong emotions that we may have. When our emotions reach a certain degree of intensity, there is mi 12 in them. But in our present state only our unpleasant emotions actually reach mi 12; our ordinary pleasant emotions usually remain 24. It is not that our intense unpleasant emotions actually are mi 12, but they are based on it and need it in order to be produced. So the beginning of this second effort and preparation for it is work on negative emotions. This is the general outline of the work of the human organism and of how this work can be improved. It is important to understand where conscious shocks are necessary, because if you understand this it will help you to understand many other difficulties in the Food Diagram. You must understand, too, that these three octaves are not of equal force. If you take the force of the food octave, you will see that it gives certain results, certain effects that can be measured. Although the matter taken from air plays a very important part, the air octave represents a very small quantity of hydrogens, whereas the impressions octave is very powerful and may have an enormous meaning in relation to self remembering, states of consciousness, emotions and so on. So we can say that the relationship of the three octaves is not equal, because one has more substance, another less substance. This is our inner alchemy, the transmutation of base metals into precious metals. But all this alchemy is inside us, not outside

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You must understand that you cannot even begin to work on the level you are; you have to change certain things first. You can find what to change only as a result of your observations. Sometimes it becomes very clear, and only then does the fight begin, because false personality begins to defend itself. You must know false personality first. All that we speak about now, refers to the first stage—understanding that we do not know false personality, that in order to know it we must study, that all the work we do is done at the expense of false personality, that all the work we can do on ourselves means diminishing the power of false personality, and that if we begin to try and work, leaving false personality without disturbing it, all the work will come to nothing. I repeat again—you must understand that false personality is a combination of all lies, features and 'I's that can never be useful in any sense, either in life or in the work—just like negative emotions. Yet false personality always says 'I' and always ascribes to itself many capacities, such as will, self-consciousness and so on, and if it is not checked it remains an obstacle to all the work. So one of the first and most important factors, in trying to change oneself, is this division of oneself into 'I' and whatever your name may be. If this division is not made, if one forgets it and continues to think of oneself in the usual way, or if one divides oneself in a wrong way, work stops. Work on oneself can only progress on the basis of this division, but it must be the right division. It often happens that people make a wrong division: what they like in themselves they call 'I' and what they dislike, or what in their opinion is weak or unimportant, they call false personality. This is quite a wrong division; it changes nothing and one remains as one was. This wrong division is simply lying, lying to oneself, which is worse than anything, because the moment one meets with the smallest difficulty it will show itself by inner arguing and wrong understanding. If one uses a wrong division, it will not be reliable and will fail one in a moment of need. To make a right division of oneself one must understand what is 'I' and what is 'Ouspensky', 'Brown' or 'Jones', in other words, what is lying and what is oneself. As I said, even if you admit this possibility of dividing yourself, you are bound to call what you like in yourself 'I' and what you dislike 'Not I', for the right division cannot be found at once; you must find some indications in connection with the work which will help. For instance, if you say that your aim is to be free, it is first of all necessary to understand that you are not free. If you understand to what extent you are not free and if you formulate your desire to be free, you will then see in yourself which part of you wants to be free and which part does not. This would be a beginning

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But first of all, as I said before, it is necessary to understand what self-remembering is, why it is better to self-remember, what effect it will produce, and so on. It needs thinking about. Besides, in trying to selfremember it is necessary to keep the connection with all the other ideas of the system. If one takes one thing and omits another thing—for instance, if one seriously works on self-remembering without knowing about the idea of the division of 'I's, so that one takes oneself as one (as a unity) from the beginning—then self-remembering will give wrong results and may even make development impossible. There are schools, for instance, or systems which, although they do not formulate it in this way, are actually based on false personality and on struggle against conscience. Such work must certainly produce wrong results. At first it will create a certain kind of strength, but it will make the development of higher consciousness an impossibility. False personality either destroys or distorts memory. Self-remembering is a thing that must be based on right function. At the same time as working on it you must work on the weakening of false personality. Several lines of work are suggested and explained from the beginning, and all must go together. You cannot just do one thing and not another. All are necessary for creating this right combination, but first must come the understanding of the struggle with false personality. Suppose one tries to remember oneself and does not wish to make efforts against false personality. Then all its features will come into play, saying, 'I dislike these people', 'I do not want this', 'I do not want that', and so on. Then it will not be work but quite the opposite. As I said, if one tries to work in this wrong way it may make one stronger than one was before, but in such a case the stronger one becomes, the less is the possibility of development. Fixing before development—that is the danger

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Q. Could you explain a little more what you mean by buffers? A. Buffers are very difficult to describe or define. As I said, they are a kind of partitions in us that keep us from observing ourselves. You may have different emotional attitudes (they always refer to emotional attitudes) towards the same thing in the morning, at midday, and in the evening, without noticing it. Or in a certain set of circumstances you have one kind of opinions and in other circumstances another kind of opinions, and buffers are walls that stand between them. Generally each buffer is based on some kind of wrong assumption about oneself, one's capacities, one's powers, inclinations, knowledge, being, consciousness and so on. They differ from ordinary wrong ideas because they are permanent; in given circumstances one always feels and sees the same thing; and you must understand that in man 1, 2 and 3 nothing must be permanent. The only chance he has of changing is that there is nothing permanent in him. Opinions, prejudices, preconceived ideas are not buffers yet, but when they become very firm, and always the same, and always have the same trick of shutting things off from our sight, they become buffers. If people have some kind of constant wrong attitude, based on wrong information, wrong work of centres, negative emotion, if they always use the same kind of excuse, they prepare buffers. And when a buffer is established and becomes permanent, it stops all possible progress. If buffers continue to develop, they become fixed ideas, and that is already insanity, or the beginning of insanity. Buffers can be very different. For instance, I knew a man who had a very interesting buffer. Every time he did something wrong, he said that he did it on purpose, as an experiment. This is a very good example of a buffer. Another man had a buffer that he was never late; so, with this buffer firmly established he was always late but never noticed it, and if his attention was drawn to it, he was always astonished and said, 'How can I be late? I am never late!

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Conscience is a state in which one cannot hide anything from oneself, and it must be developed in man. This development is parallel and simultaneous with the development of consciousness. We cannot say that we do not have it, so it does not mean a special development of something that does not exist in us, only in our life it is behind the scenes, buried very deep down in us and asleep. It may awake for a moment in ordinary life, and when it does, particularly at first, it always brings suffering, for it is very unpleasant to face the truth about oneself

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Q. Can we easily do something wrong if we just act according to our upbringing, mechanically? Would it be better to act against it? A. To act against it would be equally mechanical, you will only oppose one mechanicalness to another mechanicalness. If you do something against what you are accustomed to, it will not necessarily be right. Besides, it does not mean that everything you are taught or accustomed to is wrong. That would be too simple. Take some examples of your actions and you will see that when things happen, when you let them happen, they may be right or they may be wrong. But if you were conscious you could choose; that would be quite a different situation

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Aim means direction, a certain line. If my aim is to go home from here, it will be right for me to turn to the right and wrong to turn to the left. This is how the principle of good and evil can be established. There can be no definition of good and evil, or right and wrong, without first establishing an aim or direction. When you have an aim, then what is opposed to your aim or takes you away from it is wrong, and what helps your aim is right. It must be your personal aim. If it corresponds to the possibilities of development, then the system explains these possibilities. And if you understand that what keeps us from reaching our aim is mechanicalness and what helps us is consciousness, it will follow that consciousness represents good and mechanicalness evil. So, instead of 'good' and 'evil' the system uses the words 'conscious' and 'mechanical'. This is quite sufficient for all practical purposes

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Q. I think I have not got the right idea about identification. Does it mean that things control us and not that we control things? \nA. Identification is a very difficult thing to describe, because no definitions are possible. Such as we are we are never free from identifying. If we believe that we do not identify with something, we are identified with the idea that we are not identified. You cannot describe identification in logical terms. You have to find a moment of identification, catch it, and then compare things with that moment. Identification is everywhere, at every moment of ordinary life. When you begin self-observation, some forms of identification already become impossible. But in ordinary life almost everything is identification. It is a very important psychological feature that permeates the whole of our life, and we do not notice it because we are in it. The best way to understand it is to find some examples. For instance, if you see a cat with a rabbit or a mouse — this is identification. Then find analogies to this picture in yourself. Only, you must understand that it is there every moment, not only at exceptional moments. Identification is an almost permanent state in us. You must be able to see this state apart from yourself, separate it from yourself, and that can only be done by trying to become more conscious, trying to remember yourself, to be aware of yourself. Only when you become more aware of yourself are you able to struggle with manifestations like identification. \n\nQ. I find when I am identified it is nearly always with things inside me. \nA. Perhaps you are right; perhaps you are not right. You may think you are identified with one thing when in reality you are identified with quite a different thing. This does not matter at all; what matters is the state of identification. In the state of identification you cannot feel right, see right, judge right. But the subject of identification is not important: the result is the same. \n\nQ. So what is the way to overcome identification? \nA. That is another thing. It is different in different cases. First it is necessary to see; then it is necessary to put something against it. \n\nQ. What do you mean by 'put something against it'? \nA. Just turn your attention to something more important. You must learn to distinguish the important from the less important, and if you turn your attention to more important things you become less identified with unimportant things. You must realize that identification can never help you; it only makes things more confused and more difficult. If you realize even that—that alone may help in some cases. People think that to be identified helps them, they do not see that it only makes things more difficult. It has no useful energy at all, only destructive energy. \n\nQ. Is identification mainly emotion? \nA. It always has an emotional element—a kind of emotional disturbance, but sometimes it becomes a habit, so that one does not even notice the emotion. \n\nQ. I realize that it is important to be emotional in the right way, but when I feel something emotionally in the work, I soon destroy the whole thing. \nA. Only identification is destructive. Emotion can only give new energy, new understanding. You take identification for emotion. You do not know emotion without identification, so, in the beginning, you cannot visualize an emotion free from it. People often think they speak about an emotional function when in reality they speak about identification. \n\nQ. Is it possible for us, as we are now, to have any feeling at all without identifying? \nA. Very difficult, unless we begin to watch ourselves. Then easy kinds of identification—I mean easy individually—will respond to treatment. But everyone has his own specialties in identification. For instance, it is easy for me not to identify with music, for another it may be very difficult. \n\nQ. Is love without identification possible? \nA. I would say love is impossible with identification. Identification kills all emotions, except negative emotions. With identification only the unpleasant side remains. \n\nQ. Non-identifying does not mean aloofness? \nA. On the contrary, aloofness needs identification. Non-identifying is quite a different thing. \n\nQ. If you are identified with an idea, how can you stop it? \nA. First by understanding what identification means and then by trying to remember yourself. Begin with simple cases, then later you can deal with the more difficult. \n\nQ. As you develop self-remembering do you acquire a sort of detached attitude, more free from identification? \nA. Detached attitude in the sense that you know your attitudes better; you know what is useful to you and what is not useful. If you do not remember yourself it is easy to make a mistake about it. For instance, one can undertake some kind of study that is really quite useless. Self-remembering helps understanding, and understanding always means bringing everything to a certain centre. You must have a central point in all your work, in all your attitudes, and self-remembering is a necessary condition for that. We must talk more about identifying if it is not clear. It will become more clear when you find two or three good examples. It is a certain state in which you are in the power of things. \n\nQ. If I look closely and think deeply, does it mean I have become identified? \nA. No, identifying is a special thing, it means losing oneself. As I said, it is not so much a question of what one is identified with. Identification is a state. You must understand that many things you ascribe to things outside you are really in you. Take for instance fear. Fear is independent of things. If you are in a state of fear, you can be afraid of an ash-tray. This often happens in pathological states, and a pathological state is only an intensified ordinary state. You are afraid, and then you choose what to be afraid of. This fact makes it possible to struggle with these things, because they are in you. \n\nQ. Can we have any understanding with identification? \nA. How much can you understand in deep sleep, which is what identification is? If you remember your aim, realize your position and see the danger of sleep, it will help you to sleep less. \n\nQ. What is the difference between sympathy and identification? \nA. It is quite another thing; it is a normal and legitimate emotion and can exist without identification. There may be sympathy without identification and sympathy with identification. When sympathy is mixed with identification, it often ends in anger or another negative emotion. \n\nQ. You spoke of losing oneself in identification. Which self? \nA. All, everything. Identifying is a very interesting idea. There are two stages in the process of identifying. The first stage denotes the process of becoming identified, the second a state when identification is complete. \n\nQ. The first stage is quite harmless? \nA. If it attracts too much attention and occupies too much time, it leads to the second. \n\nQ. When you desire something, can you desire it without identification? \nA. Identification is not obligatory. But if you desire to hit someone, you cannot do it without identification; if identification disappears, you do not want to any longer. It is possible not to lose oneself; losing oneself is not a necessary element at all. \n\nQ. Is it possible to identify with two things at once? \nA With ten thousand! It is necessary to observe and observe. From one point of view struggling with identification is not so difficult, because, if we can see it, it becomes so ridiculous that we cannot remain identified. Other people's identification always seems ridiculous and ours may become so too. Laughter may be useful in this respect if we can turn it on ourselves. \n\nQ. I cannot see why identification is a bad thing. \nA. Identification is a bad thing if you want to awake, but if you want to sleep, then it is a good thing. \n\nQ. Would not everything we do suffer if we kept our minds on keeping awake instead of attending to what we are doing? \nA. I have already explained that it is quite the opposite. We can do well whatever we are doing only as much as we are awake. The more we are asleep, the worse we do the thing we are doing—there are no exceptions. You take it academically, simply as a word, but between deep sleep and complete awakening there are different degrees, and you pass from one degree to another. \n\nQ. If we feel more awake, we should not overtax these moments, should we? \nA. How can we overtax them? These moments are too short even if we have glimpses. We can only try not to forget them and act in accordance with these moments. This is all we can do. \n\nQ. Can you say that identification is being in the grip of something, not being able to shake off some idea in mind? \nA. Being in the grip of things is an extreme case. There are many small identifications which are very difficult to observe, and these are the most important because they keep us mechanical. We must realize that we always pass from one identification to another. If a man looks at a wall, he is identified with the wall. \n\nQ. How does identification diner from associations? \nA. Associations are quite another thing; they can be more controlled or less controlled, but they have nothing to do with identification. Different associations are a necessary part of thinking; we define things by associations and we do everything with the help of associations. \n\nQ. I cannot see why an 'I' changes. Can the cause always be seen in some identification? \nA. It is always by associations. A certain number of 'I's try to push their way to the front, so as soon as one loses oneself in one of them it is replaced by another. We think that 'I's are just passive, indifferent things, but emotions, associations, memories, always work. That is why it is useful to stop thinking, even occasionally, as an exercise. Then you will begin to see how difficult it is to do it. Your question simply shows that you have never tried, otherwise you would know. \n\nQ. Is concentration identification? \nA. Concentration is controlled action; identification controls you. \n\nQ. Is concentration possible for us? \nA. There are degrees. Intentional concentration for half an hour is impossible. If we could concentrate without external help, we would be conscious. But everything has degrees. \n\nQ. Is the beginning of a new observation identification with the object you observe? \nA. Identification happens when you are repelled or attracted by something. Study or observation does not necessarily produce identification, but attraction and repulsion always does. Also, we use too strong a language, and this automatically produces identification. We have many automatic appliances of this sort. \n\nQ. What can I do about identification? I feel that I always lose myself in whatever I do. It does not seem possible to be different. \nA. No, it is possible. If you have to do something, you have to do it, but you may identify more or identify less. There is nothing hopeless in it so long as you remember about it. Try to observe; you do not always identify to the same extent; sometimes you identify so that you can see nothing else, at other times you can see something. If things were always the same, there would be no chance for us, but they always vary in degree of intensity, and that gives a possibility of change. Everything we do, we have to learn in advance. If you want to drive a car, you have to learn beforehand. If you work now, in time you will have more control. \n\nQ. Why is it wrong to be completely absorbed in one's work? \nA. It will be bad work. If you are identified, you can never get good results. It is one of our illusions to think that we must lose ourselves to get good results, for in this way we only get poor results. When one is identified, one does not exist; only the thing exists with which one is identified. \n\nQ. Is the aim of non-identifying to free the mind from the object? \nA. The aim is to awake. Identifying is a feature of sleep; identified mind is asleep. Freedom from identifying is one of the sides of awakening. A state where identifying does not exist is quite possible, but we do not observe it in life and we do not notice that we are constantly identified. Identifying cannot disappear by itself; struggle is necessary. \n\nQ. How can anyone awake if identification is universal? \nA. One can only awake as a result of effort, of struggle against it. But first one must understand what to identify means. As in everything else, so in identification there are degrees. In observing oneself one finds when one is more identified, less identified or not identified at all. If one wants to awake, one must and can get free from identification. As we are, every moment of our life we are lost, we are never free, because we identify. \n\nQ. Can you give an example of identification? \nA. We identify all the time, that is why it is difficult to give an example. For instance, take likes and dislikes, they all mean identification, especially dislikes. They cannot exist without identification and generally they are nothing but identification. Usually people imagine that they have many more dislikes than they actually have. If they investigate and analyse them, they will probably find that they only dislike one or two things. When I studied it, there was only one real dislike that I could find in myself. But you must find your own examples; it must be verified by personal experience. If at a moment of a strong identification you try to stop it, you will see the idea. \n\nQ. But I still do not understand what it is! \nA. Let us try from the intellectual side. You realize that you do not remember yourself? Try to see why you cannot and you will find that identification prevents you. Then you will see what it is. All these things are connected. \n\nQ. Is non-identifying the only way to know what identifying is? \nA. No, as I explained, by observing it, because it is not always the same. We do not notice the temperature of our body except when it becomes a little higher or lower than normal. In the same way we can notice identification when it is stronger or weaker than usual. By comparing these degrees we can see what it is. \n\nQ. In struggling with identification is it necessary to know why one is identified? \nA. One is identified not for any particular reason or purpose, but in all cases because one cannot help it. How can you know why you identify? But you must know why you struggle. This is the thing. If you do not forget the reason why, you will be ten times more successful. Very often we begin struggling and then forget why. There are many forms of identification, but the first step is to see it; the second step is to struggle with it in order to become free from it. As I said, it is a process, not a moment; we are in it all the time. We spend our energy in the wrong way on identification and negative emotions; they are open taps from which our energy flows out. \n\nQ. Can one suddenly change the energy of anger into something else? One has tremendous energy at these moments. \nA. One has tremendous energy, and it works by itself, without control, and makes one act in a certain way. Why? What is the connecting link? Identification is the link. Stop identification and you will have this energy at your disposal. How can you do this? Not at once; it needs practice at easier moments. When emotion is very strong you cannot do it. It is necessary to know more, to be prepared. If you know how not to identify at the right moment, you will have great energy at your disposal. What you do with it is another thing; you may lose it again on something quite useless. But it needs practice. You cannot learn to swim when you fall into the sea during a storm— you must learn in calm water. Then, if you fall in, you may perhaps be able to swim. I repeat again: it is impossible to be conscious if you are identified. This is one of the difficulties that comes later, because people have some favourite identifications which they do not want to give up, and at the same time they say they want to be conscious. The two things cannot go together. There are many incompatible things in life, and identification and consciousness are two of the most incompatible. \n\nQ. How can one avoid the reaction which comes after feeling very enthusiastic? Is it due to identification? \nA. Yes, this reaction comes as a result of identification. Struggle with identification will prevent it from happening. It is not what you call enthusiasm that produces the reaction, but the identification. Identification is always followed by this reaction. \n\nQ. Is a bored man identified with nothing? \nA. Boredom is also identification—one of the biggest. It is identification with oneself, with something in oneself. \n\nQ. It seems to me I cannot study a person without losing myself in him or her, yet I understand that this is wrong? \nA. It is a wrong idea that one cannot study a person or anything else without losing oneself. If you lose yourself in anything, you cannot study it. Identifying is always a weakening element: the more you identify the worse your study is and the smaller the results. You may remember that in the first lecture I said that identifying with people takes the form of considering. There are two kinds of considering: internal and external. Internal considering is the same as identifying. External considering needs a certain amount of self-remembering; it means taking into account other people's weaknesses, putting oneself in their place. Often in life it is described by the word 'tact'; only tact may be educated or accidental. External considering means control. If we learn to use it consciously, it will give us a possibility of control. Internal considering is when we feel that people do not give us enough, do not appreciate us enough. If one considers internally one misses moments of external considering. External considering must be cultivated, internal considering must be eliminated. But first observe and see how often you miss moments of external considering and what an enormous role internal considering plays in life. Study of internal considering, of mechanicalness, of lying, of imagination, of identification shows that they all belong to us, that we are always in these states. When you see this, you realize the difficulty of work on oneself. Such as you are you cannot begin to get something new; you will see that first you must scrub the machine clean; it is too covered with rust. We think we are what we are. Unfortunately we are not what we are but what we have become; we are not natural beings. We are too asleep, we lie too much, we live too much in imagination, we identify too much. We think we have to do with real beings, but in reality we have to do with imaginary beings. Almost all we know about ourselves is imaginary. Beneath all this agglomeration man is quite different. We have many imaginary things we must throw off before we can come to real things. So long as we live in imaginary things, we cannot see the value of the real; and only when we come to real things in ourselves can we see what is real outside us. We have too much accidental growth in us. \n\nQ. If one retired from the world, surely one would overcome identification, considering and negative emotion? \nA. This question is often asked, but one cannot be at all sure that it would be easier. Besides you can find descriptions in literature of how people attained a very high degree of development in seclusion, but when they came in contact with other people they at once lost all they had gained. In schools of the Fourth Way it was found that the best conditions for study and work on oneself are a man's ordinary conditions of life, because from one point of view these conditions are easier and from another they are the most difficult. So if a man gets something in these conditions he will keep it in all conditions, whereas if he gets it in special conditions he will lose it in other conditions.

Q. Can we direct or mould the law of accident now, or must we wait till we have full consciousness? \r\n\r\nA. There is no question of waiting: if one waits, one never gets anything—at every moment one must do what one can. At the present moment we can to a certain extent mould the law of accident only by moulding ourselves. The more control we have of ourselves, the more the law of accident changes and, as I said, later accidents may even practically disappear, although theoretically the possibility will always remain.

126

Consciousness is a force, and force can only be developed by overcoming obstacles. Two things can be developed in man—consciousness and will. Both are forces. If man overcomes unconsciousness, he will possess consciousness; if he overcomes mechanicalness he will possess will.

Every centre is adapted to work with a certain kind of energy, and it receives exactly what it needs; but all the centres steal from one another, and so a centre that needs a higher kind of energy is reduced to working with a lower kind, or a centre suited for working with a less potent energy uses a more potent, more explosive energy. This is how the machine works at present. Imagine several furnaces—one has to work on crude oil, another on wood, a third on petrol. Suppose the one designed for wood is given petrol: we can expect nothing but explosions. And then imagine a furnace designed for petrol and you will see that it cannot work properly on wood or coal. We must distinguish four energies working through us: physical or mechanical energy—for instance, moving this table; life energy which makes the body absorb food, reconstruct tissues, and so on; psychic or mental energy, with which the centres work, and most important of all, energy of consciousness. Energy of consciousness is not recognized by psychology and by scientific schools. Consciousness is regarded as part of psychic functions. Other schools deny consciousness altogether and regard everything as mechanical. Some schools deny the existence of life energy. But life energy is different from mechanical energy, and living matter can be created only from living matter. All growth proceeds with life energy. Psychic energy is the energy with which centres work. They can work with consciousness or without consciousness, but the results are different, although not so different that the difference can be easily distinguished in others. One can know consciousness only in oneself. For every thought, feeling or action, or for being conscious, we must have corresponding energy. If we have not got it, we go down and work with lower energy—lead merely an animal or vegetable life. Then again we accumulate energy, again have thoughts, can again be conscious for a short time. Even an enormous amount of physical energy cannot produce a thought. For thought a different, a stronger solution is necessary. And consciousness requires a still quicker, more explosive energy.

It must be clearly understood that consciousness and functions are quite different things. To move, to think, to feel, to have sensations—these are functions; they can work quite independently of whether we are conscious or not; in other words, they can work mechanically. To be conscious is something quite different. But if we are more conscious it immediately increases the sharpness of our functions

it is a great sacrifice not to see the things we are accustomed to see. We are accustomed to think that we live in a more or less comfortable world. Certainly there are unpleasant things, such as wars and revolutions, but on the whole it is a comfortable and well-meaning world. It is most difficult to get rid of this idea of a well-meaning world. And then we must understand that we do not see things themselves at all. We see like in Plato's allegory of the cave only the reflections of things, so that what we see has lost all reality. We must realize how often we are governed and controlled not by the things themselves but by our ideas of things, our views of things, our picture of things. This is the most interesting thing. Try to think about it.

It must be clearly understood that consciousness and functions are quite different things. To move, to think, to feel, to have sensations—these are functions; they can work quite independently of whether we are conscious or not; in other words, they can work mechanically. To be conscious is something quite different. But if we are more conscious it immediately increases the sharpness of our functions.

The being of a man is all that he is. Many things enter into being. You can be more conscious or more asleep, more divided or more whole, more interested in some things and less interested in other things; you can lie more or lie less, dislike lying or lie without any embarrassment, be more consistent or less consistent, have a feeling of mechanicalness or not; you may have no great conflicts in yourself or you may consist of conflicts, have comparatively few negative emotions or be immersed in negative emotions. Generally, state of being means a greater or lesser consecutiveness of actions. When one thing contradicts another too much, it means weak being. We do not realize that if a man is very inconsistent it makes his knowledge unreliable.

It is very important to understand what is a complete being and what is an incomplete being, because if this is not understood from the beginning it will be difficult to go further. Perhaps an example will help to illustrate what I mean. Let us compare a horse-carriage with an aeroplane. An aeroplane has many possibilities that an ordinary carriage does not have, but at the same time an aeroplane can be used as an ordinary carriage. It would be very clumsy and inconvenient and very expensive, but you can attach two horses to it and travel in an aeroplane by road. Suppose the man who has this aeroplane does not know that it has an engine and can move by itself and suppose he learns about the engine— then he can dispense with the horses and use it as a motor car. But it will still be too clumsy. Suppose that the man studies this machine and discovers that it can fly. Certainly it will have many advantages which he missed when he used the aeroplane as a carriage. This is what we are doing with ourselves; we use ourselves as a carriage, when we could fly. But examples are one thing and facts are another. There is no need of allegories and analogies, for we can speak about actual facts if we begin to study consciousness in the right way

The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Author: Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

Publisher: Fine Communications (1998)

701

Listen,' Drake said with sudden emotion. 'We're both lying. It's not all this philosophical or cosmic. The simple fact is that I couldn't sleep nights, and nothing I tried in conventional 'cures' could help me, until I began to help myself by systematically rebelling against everything that seemed stronger than me.' \r\n\r\n\r\n'I know. I didn't know it was insomnia. It might have been nightmares or dizzy spells or sexual impotence. But there was some way that the scenes you saw in Chateau-Thierry lived on and goaded you to wake out of the dream of the sleepwalkers on the streets. You are waking: You stand on the abyss.' She pointed to the Fool and the dog who barks at his heels. 'And I am the noisy little bitch barking to warn you that you can still choose the right-hand path.

Every fact of science was once Damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and 'progress,' everything on earth that is manmade and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man's refusal to bow to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, 'Disobedience was man's Original Virtue.' The human brain, which loves to read descriptions of itself as the universe's most marvelous organ of perception, is an even more marvelous organ of rejection. The naked facts of our economic game, are easily discoverable and undeniable once stated, but conservatives— who are usually individuals who profit every day of their lives from these facts— manage to remain oblivious to them, or to see them through a very rosy-tinted and distorting lens. (Similarly, the revolutionary ignores the total testimony of history about the natural course of revolution, through violence, to chaos, back to the starting point) We must remember that thought is abstraction. In Einstein's metaphor, the relationship between a physical fact and our mental reception of that fact is not like the relationship between beef and beef-broth, a simple matter of extraction and condensation; rather, as Einstein goes on, it is like the relationship between our overcoat and the ticket given us when we check our overcoat. In other words, human perception involves coding even more than crude sensing. \r\n \r\nThe mesh of language, or of mathematics, or of a school of art, or of any system of human abstracting, gives to our mental constructs the structure, not of the original fact, but of the symbol system into which it is coded, just as a map-maker colors a nation purple not because it is purple but because his code demands it. But every code excludes certain things, blurs other things, and overemphasizes still other things. Nijinski's celebrated leap through the window at the climax of Le Spectre d'une Rose is best coded in the ballet notation system used by choreographers; verbal language falters badly in attempting to convey it; painting or sculpture could capture totally the magic of one instant, but one instant only, of it; the physicist's equation, Force = Mass X Acceleration, highlights one aspect of it missed by all these other codes, but loses everything else about it. Every perception is influenced, formed, and structured by the habitual coding habits— mental game habits— of the perceiver. All authority is a function of coding, of game rules. Men have arisen again and again armed with pitchforks to fight armies with cannon; men have also submitted docilely to the weakest and most tottery oppressors. It all depends on the extent to which coding distorts perception and conditions the physical (and mental) reflexes. It seems at first glance that authority could not exist at all if all men were cowards or if no men were cowards, but flourishes as it does only because most men are cowards and some men are thieves. Actually, the inner dynamics of cowardice and submission on the one hand and of heroism and rebellion on the other are seldom consciously realized either by the ruling class or the servile class. Submission is identified not with cowardice but with virtue, rebellion not with heroism but with evil. To the Roman slave-owners, Spartacus was not a hero and the obedient slaves were not cowards; Spartacus was a villain and the obedient slaves were virtuous. The obedient slaves believed this also. The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly.

The only religion consistent with the whole Wheel is private and personal; the only government consistent with it is self-government. Whoever tries to lay his trip on others is acting from terror, and will soon resort to terror as a weapon if the others won't accept the trip through persuasion. Nobody who understands the whole Wheel will do that, however, for such people understand that every man and every woman and every child is the Self-Begotten One — Jesus motherfucking Christ.

Science and Salvation

Author: Robert S. DeRopp

Publisher: St Martins Press (1972)

Living Buddha, Living Christ

Author: Thich Nhat Hanh

Publisher: Riverhead Trade (2007)

Suffering, Suicide and Immortality

Author: Arthur Schopenhauer

Publisher: Dover Publications (2006)

Mere Christianity

Author: C.S. Lewis

Publisher: HarperOne (2001)

This Is It

Author: Alan Watts

Publisher: Vintage (1973)

But then - [the 1950's] - it was not as easy to see as it is today that when you make a powerful technology available to human beings with normal form of egocentric consciousness, planetary disaster is inevitable. Moreover, the point had to be made that the egocentric predicament was not a moral fault to be corrected by willpower, but a conceptual hallucination requiring some basic alterations of common sense; a task comparable to persuading people that the earth is round rather than flat.

The problem is this: man is a self-conscious and therefore self-controlling organism, but how is he to control the aspect of himself which does the controlling? All attempts to solve this problem seem to end in a snarl, whether at the individual level or at the social. At the individual level the snarl manifest itself in what we call acute self-consciousness, as when a public speaker frustrates himself by his very effort to speak well. At the social level it manifests itself as a loss in freedom of movement increasing with every attempt to regulate action by law. In other words, there is a point beyond which self-control becomes a form of paralysis - as if I wanted simultaneously to throw a ball and hold it to its course with my hand.

The point is simply that, if there is to be any life and movement at all, the attitude of faith must be basic - the final and fundamental attitude - and the attitude of doubt secondary and subordinate. This is another way of saying that toward the vast and all-encompassing background of human life, with which the philosopher as artist is concerned, there must be total affirmation and acceptance. Otherwise there is no basis at all for caution and control with respect to details in the foreground. But it is all too easy to become so absorbed in these details that all sense of proportion is lost, and for man to make himself mad by trying to bring everything under his control. We become insane, unsound, and without foundation when we lose consciousness of and faith in the uncontrolled and ungraspable background world which is ultimately what we ourselves are. And there is a very slight distinction, if any, between complete, conscious faith and love.

Lost in the Cosmos

Author: Walker Percy

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (1983)

What Do You Say After You Say Hello?

Author: Eric Berne

Publisher: Grove Press (1972)

The Book of Merlyn

Author: T.H. White

Publisher: Berkley (1978)

The Portable Nietzsche

Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

Publisher: Portable Library (1977)

613

The very word 'Christianity' is a misunderstanding: in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. The 'evangel' died on the cross. What has been called 'evangel' from that moment was actually the opposite of that which he had lived: 'ill tidings,' a dysangel. It is false to the point of nonsense to find the mark of the Christian in a 'faith,' for instance, in the faith in redemption through Christ: only Christian practice, a life such as he lived who died on the cross, is Christian. \r\n \r\nSuch a life is still possible today, for certain people even necessary: genuine, original Christianity will be possible at all times. \r\n \r\nNot a faith, but a doing; above all, a not doing of many things, another state of being. States of consciousness, any faith, considering something true, for example - every psychologist knows this - are fifth-rank matters of complete indifference compared to the value of the instincts: speaking more strictly, the whole concept of spiritual causality is false. To reduce being a Christian, Christianism, to a matter of considering something true, to a mere phenomenon of consciousness, is to negate Christianism.

530

Whatever we have words for, that we have already got beyond.

496

Most of our general feelings - every kind of inhibition, pressure, tension and explosion in the play and counterplay of our organs, and particularly the state of the nervus sympathicus - excite our causal instinct: we want to have a reason for feeling this way or that - for feeling bad or for feeling good. We are never satisfied merely to state the fact that we feel this way or that: we admit this fact only - become conscious of it only - when we have furnished some kind of motivation. Memory, which swings into action in such cases, unknown to us, brings up earlier states of the same kind, together with the causal interpretations associated with them - not their real causes. The faith, to be sure, that such representations, such accompanying conscious processes, are the causes, is also brought forth by memory. Thus originates a habitual acceptance of a particular causal interpretation, which, as a matter of fact, inhibits any investigation into the real cause - even precludes it.

The Brothers Karamazov

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Publisher: Penguin Classics (2003)