/tag/unity

33 quotes tagged 'unity'

Publisher: Zero Books (2014)

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)

7-8

The opposites between which Ostanes stands are thus masculine / feminine on the one hand and good / evil on the other. The way he speaks of the four luminaries - he does not know how to save himself from them - suggests that he is subject to Heimarmene, the compulsion of the stars; that is, to a transconscious factor beyond the reach of the human will. Apart from this compulsion, the injurious effect of the four planets is due to the fact t hat each of them exerts its specific influence on man and makes him a diversity of persons, whereas he should be one.^1\n\n¹ The idea of uniting the Many into One is found not only in alchemy but also in Origen, In Libr. I Reg. [I Sam.] Hom., I, 4 (Migne, P.G., vol. 12, col. 998): 'There was one man. We, who are still sinners, cannot obtain this title of praise, for each of us is not one but many...See how he who thinks himself one is not one, but seems to have as many personalities as he has moods, as also the Scripture says: A fool is changed as the moon.' In another homily, In Ezech., 9, 1 (Migne, P.G., vol. 13, col. 732) he says: 'Where there are sins, there is multitude...but where virtue is, there is singleness, there is union.' Cf. Porphyry the Philosopher to His Wife Marcella, trans. by Zimmern, p. 61: 'If thou wouldst practise to ascend into theyself, collecting together all the powers which the body hath scattered and broken up into a multitude of parts unlike their former unity...' Likewise the Gospel of Philip (cited from Epiphanius, Panarium, XXVI, 13): 'I have taken knowledge (saith the soul) of myself, and have gathered myself together out of every quarter and have not begotten (sown) children unto the Ruler, but have rooted out his roots and gathered together the members that were scattered abroad. And I know thee who thou art, for I (she saith) am of them that are from above.' (James, *The Apocryphal New Testament, p. 12.) Cf. also Panarium, XXVI, 3: 'I am thou, and thou art I, and wherever thou art, there I am, and I am scattered in all things, and from wherever thou wilt thou canst gather me, but in gathering me thou gatherest together thyself.' The inner multiplicity of man reflects his microcosmic nature, which contains within it the stars and their (astrological) influences. Thus Origen (*In Lev. Hom., V, 2; Migne, P.G., vol. 12, cols. 449-50) says: 'Understand that thou hast within thyself herds of cattle...flocks of sheep and flocks of goats...Understand that the fowls of the air are also within thee. Marvel not if we say that these are within thee, but understand that thou thyself art another world in little, and has within thee the sun and the moon, and also the stars..Thou seest that thou has all those things which the world hath.' And Dorn ('De tenebris contra naturam,' *Theatr. chem. I, p. 533) says: 'To the four less perfect planets in the heavens there correspond the four elements in our body, that is, earth to Saturn, water to Mercury [instead of the moon, see above], air to Venus, and fire to Mars. Of these it is built up, and it is weak on account of the imperfection of the parts. And so let a tree be planted from them, whose root is ascribed to Saturn,' etc., meaning the philosophical tree, symbol of the development process that results in the unity of the filius Philosophorum, or lapis. Cf. my 'The Philosophical Tree,' par. 409.

xiv

As is indicated by the very name which he chose for it - the 'spagyric' art - or by the oft-repeated saying 'solve et coagula' (dissolve and coagulate), the alchemist saw the essence of his art in separation and analysis on the one hand and synthesis and consolidation on the other. For him there was first of all an initial state in which opposite tendencies or forces were in conflict; secondly there was the great question of a procedure which would be capable of bringing the hostile elements and qualities, once they were separated, back to unity again. The initial state, named the chaos, was not given from the start but had to be sought for as the prima materia. And just as the beginning of the work was not self-evident, so to an even greater degree was its end.

Ride the Tiger

Author: Julius Evola

Publisher: Inner Traditions International (2003)

71-74

Pure action does not mean blind action. The rule is to care nothing for the consequences to the shifting, individualistic feelings, but not in ignorance of the objective conditions that action must take into account in order to be as perfect as possible, and so as not to be doomed to failure from the start. One may not succeed: that is secondary, but it should not be owing to defective knowledge of everything concerning the conditions of efficacy, which generally comprise causality, the relations of cause to effect, and the law of concordant actions and reactions. \nOne can extend these ideas to help define the attitude that the integrated man should adopt on every plane, once he has done away with the current notions of good and evil. He sets himself above the moral plane not with pathos and polemics but with objectivity, hence through knowledge — the knowledge of causes and effects — and through conduct that has this knowledge as its only basis. Thus for the moral concept of 'sin' he substitutes the objective one of 'fault,' or more precisely 'error.' For him who has centered himself in transcendence, the idea of 'sin' has no more sense than the current and vacillating notions of good and evil, licit and illicit. All these notions are burnt out of him and cannot spiritually germinate again. One might say that they have been divested of their absolute value, and are tested objectively on the basis of the consequences that in fact follow from an action inwardly free from them. \nThere is an exact correspondence with traditional teachings here, just as there was in the other behavioral elements suggested for an epoch of dissolution. To name a well-known formula that is nearly always misunderstood, thanks to overblown moralizing, there is the so-called law of karma. It concerns the effects that happen on all planes as the result of given actions, because these actions already contain their causes in potentiality: effects that are natural and neutral, devoid of moral sanction either positive or negative. It is an extension of the laws that are nowadays considered appropriate for physical phenomena, laws that contain no innate obligation concerning the conduct that should follow once one knows about them. As far as 'evil' is concerned, there is an old Spanish proverb that expresses this idea: 'God said: take what you want and pay the price'; also the Koranic saying: 'He who does evil, does it only to himself.' It is a matter of keeping in mind the possibility of certain objective reactions, and so long as one accepts them even when they are negative, one's action remains free. The determinism of what the traditional world called 'fate,' and made the basis of various forms of divination and oracles, was conceived in the same way: it was a matter of certain objective directions of events, which one might or might not take into account in view of the advantage or risk inherent in choosing a certain course. By analogy, if someone is intending to make a risky alpine climb or a flight, once he has heard a forecast of bad weather he may either abandon or pursue it. In the latter case, he accepts the risk from the start. But the freedom remains; no 'moral' factor comes into play. In some cases the 'natural sanction,' the karma, can be partially neutralized. Again by analogy: one may know in advance that a certain conduct of life will probably cause harm to the organism. But one may give it no thought and eventually resort to medicine to neutralize its effects. Then everything is reduced to an interplay of various reactions, and the ultimate effect will depend on the strongest one. The same perspective and behavior are also valid on the non-material plane. \nIf we assume that the being has reached a high grade of unification, everything resembling an 'inner sanction' can be interpreted in the same terms — positive feelings will arise in the case of one line of action, negative in the case of an opposite line, thus conforming to 'good' or 'evil' according to their meanings in a certain society, a certain social stratum, a certain civilization, and a certain epoch. Apart from purely external and social reactions, a man may suffer, feel remorse, guilt, or shame when he acts contrary to the tendency that still prevails in his depths (for the ordinary man, nearly always through hereditary and social conditioning active in his subconscious), and which has only apparently been silenced by other tendencies and by the dictate of the 'physical I.' On the other hand, he feels a sense of satisfaction and comfort when he obeys that tend ency. In the end, the negative 'inner sanction' may intervene to cause a breakdown in the case mentioned, where he starts from what he knows to be his deepest and most authentic vocation and chooses a given ideal and line of conduct, but then gives way to other pressures and passively recognizes his own weakness and failure, suffering the internal dissociation due to the uncoordinated plurality of tendencies. \nThese emotional reactions are purely psychological in character and origin. They may be indifferent to the intrinsic quality of the actions, and they have no transcendent significance, no character of 'moral sanctions.' They are facts that are 'natural' in their own way, on which one should not superimpose a mythology of moral interpretations if one has arrived at true inner freedom. These are the objective terms in which Guyau, Nietzsche, and others have treated in realistic terms such phenomena of the 'moral conscience,' on which various authors have tried to build a kind of experimental basis — moving illegitimately from the plane of psychological facts to that of pure values — for an ethics that is not overtly founded on religious commandments. This aspect disappears automatically when the being has become one and his actions spring from that unity. In order to eliminate anything implying limitation or support I would rephrase that: when the being has become one through willing it, having chosen unity; because a choice is implied even here, whose direction is not obligatory. One might even accept and will non-unity, and in the same class of superior types that we are concerned with here, there may be those who permit themselves to do so. In such a case their basal unity does not cease to exist, but rather dematerializes and remains invisibly on a deeper plane.

The Bakhtin Reader

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

Publisher: Arnold (2001)

The basic task of understanding does not at all amount to recognizing the linguistic form used by the speaker as the familiar, 'that very same', form, the way we distinctly recognize, for instance, a signal that we have not quite become used to or a form in a language that we do not know very well. No, the task of understanding does not basically amount to recognizing the form used, but rather to understanding it in a particular, concrete context, to understanding its meaning in a particular utterance, i.e., it amounts to understanding its novelty and not to recognizing its identity. \n \n In other words, the understander, belonging to the same language community, also is attuned to the linguistic form not as a fixed, self-identical signal, but as a changeable and adaptable sign. \n \n The process of understanding is on no account to be confused with the process of recognition. These are thoroughly different processes. Only a sign can be understood; what is recognized is a signal. A signal is an internally fixed, singular thing that does not in fact stand for anything else, or reflect or refract anything, but is simply a technical means for indicating this or that object (some definite, fixed object) or this or that action (likewise definite and fixed). Under no circumstances does the signal relate to the domain of the ideological; it relates to the world of technical devices, to instruments of production in the broad sense of the term...\n \n One other extremely pertinent consideration needs to be added here. The verbal consciousness of speakers has, by and large, nothing whatever to do with linguistic form as such or with language as such.

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 Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Author: Alan Watts

Publisher: kindle import (0)

It seems almost as if to be is to quarrel, or at least to differ, to be in contrast with something else. If so, whoever does not put up a fight has no identity; whoever is not selfish has no self. Nothing unites a community so much as common cause against an external enemy, yet, in the same moment, that enemy becomes the essential support of social unity. Therefore larger societies require larger enemies, bringing us in due course to the perilous point of our present situation, where the world is virtually divided into two huge camps. But if high officers on both sides have any intelligence at all, they make a secret agreement to contain the conflict: to call each other the worst names, but to refrain from dropping bombs. Or, if they insist that there must be some fighting to keep armies in trim, they restrict it to local conflicts in 'unimportant' countries. Voltaire should have said that if the Devil did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Nevertheless, the more it becomes clear that to be is to quarrel and to pursue self-interest, the more you are compelled to recognize your need for enemies to support you. In the same way, the more resolutely you plumb the question 'Who or what am I?'—the more unavoidable is the realization that you are nothing at all apart from everything else. Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure. This understanding is at first paralyzing. You are in a trap—in the worst of all double-binds—seeing that any direction you may take will imply, and so evoke, its opposite. Decide to be a Christ, and there will be a Judas to betray you and a mob to crucify you. Decide to be a devil, and men will unite against you in the closest brotherly love. Your first reaction may be simply, 'To hell with it!' The only course may seem to be to forget the whole effort and become absorbed in trivialities, or to check out of the game by suicide or psychosis, and spend the rest of your days blabbering in an asylum. But there is another possibility. Instead of checking out, let us ask what the trap means. What is implied in finding yourself paralyzed, unable to escape from a game in which all the rules are double-binds and all moves self-defeating? Surely this is a deep and intense experience of the same double-bind that was placed upon you in infancy, when the community told you that you must be free, responsible, and loving, and when you were helplessly defined as an independent agent. The sense of paralysis is therefore the dawning realization that this is nonsense and that your independent ego is a fiction. It simply isn't there, either to do anything or to be pushed around by external forces, to change things or to submit to change. The sense of 'I,' which should have been identified with the whole universe of your experience, was instead cut off and isolated as a detached observer of that universe. In the preceding chapter we saw that this unity of organism and environment is a physical fact. But when you know for sure that your separate ego is a fiction, you actually feel yourself as the whole process and pattern of life. Experience and experiencer become one experiencing, known and knower one knowing. Each organism experiences this from a different standpoint and in a different way, for each organism is the universe experiencing itself in endless variety. One need not, then, fall into the trap which this experience holds for believers in an external, all-powerful God—the temptation to feel 'I am God' in that sense, and to expect to be worshipped and obeyed by all other organisms. Remember, above all, that an experience of this kind cannot be forced or made to happen by any act of your fictitious 'will,' except insofar as repeated efforts to be one-up on the universe may eventually reveal their futility. Don't try to get rid of the ego-sensation. Take it, so long as it lasts, as a feature or play of the total process—like a cloud or wave, or like feeling warm or cold, or anything else that happens of itself. Getting rid of one's ego is the last resort of invincible egoism! It simply confirms and strengthens the reality of the feeling. But when this feeling of separateness is approached and accepted like any other sensation, it evaporates like the mirage that it is. This is why I am not overly enthusiastic about the various 'spiritual exercises' in meditation or yoga which some consider essential for release from the ego. For when practiced in order to 'get' some kind of spiritual illumination or awakening, they strengthen the fallacy that the ego can toss itself away by a tug at its own bootstraps. But there is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to 'get culture' or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost. If, then, you ask me how to get beyond the ego-feeling, I shall ask you why you want to get there. If you give me the honest answer, which is that your ego will feel better in the 'higher spiritual status' of self-transcendence, you will thus realize that you—as ego—are a fake. You will feel like an onion: skin after skin, subterfuge after subterfuge, is pulled off to find no kernel at the center. Which is the whole point: to find out that the ego is indeed a fake—a wall of defense around a wall of defense ... around nothing. You can't even want to get rid of it, nor yet want to want to. Understanding this, you will see that the ego is exactly what it pretends it isn't. Far from being the free center of personality, it is an automatic mechanism implanted since childhood by social authority, with—perhaps—a touch of heredity thrown in. This may give you the temporary feeling of being a zombie or a puppet dancing irresponsibly on strings that lead away to unknown forces. At this point, the ego may reassert itself with the insidious 'I-can't-help-myself' play in which the ego splits itself in two and pretends that it is its own victim. 'See, I'm only a bundle of conditioned reflexes, so you mustn't get angry with me for acting just as I feel.' (To which the answer could be, 'Well, we're just zombies too, so you shouldn't complain if we get angry.') But who is it that mustn't get angry or shouldn't complain, as if there were still some choice in the matter? The ego is still surviving as the 'I' which must passively endure the automatic behavior of 'myself' and others—again, as if there were some choice which the witnessing self can make between putting up with things and attacking them violently. What has happened is that the frustrated ego has withdrawn into its last stronghold of independence, retaining its identity as a mere watcher, or sufferer, of all that goes on. Here it pities itself or consoles itself as a puppet of fate. But if this is seen as yet another subterfuge, we are close to the final showdown. A line of separation is now drawn between everything that happens to me, including my own feelings, on the one side, and on the other, I myself as the conscious witness. Isn't it easy to see that this line is imaginary, and that it, and the witness behind it, are the same old faking process automatically learned in childhood? The same old cleft between the knower and the known? The same old split between the organism/environment and the organism's feedback, or self-conscious mechanism? If, then, there is no choice in what happens to me, on one side of the line, there is equally no choice on the other, on the witnessing side, as to whether I should accept what happens or reject it. I accept, I reject, I witness just as automatically as things happen or as my emotions reflect my physiological chemistry. Yet in this moment when one seems about to become a really total zombie, the whole thing blows up. For there is not fate unless there is someone or something to be fated. There is no trap without someone to be caught. There is, indeed, no compulsion unless there is also freedom of choice, for the sensation of behaving involuntarily is known only by contrast with that of behaving voluntarily. Thus when the line between myself and what happens to me is dissolved and there is no stronghold left for an ego even as a passive witness, I find myself not in a world but as a world which is neither compulsive nor capricious. What happens is neither automatic nor arbitrary: it just happens, and all happenings are mutually interdependent in a way that seems unbelievably harmonious.

It seems almost as if to be is to quarrel, or at least to differ, to be in contrast with something else. If so, whoever does not put up a fight has no identity; whoever is not selfish has no self. Nothing unites a community so much as common cause against an external enemy, yet, in the same moment, that enemy becomes the essential support of social unity. Therefore larger societies require larger enemies, bringing us in due course to the perilous point of our present situation, where the world is virtually divided into two huge camps. But if high officers on both sides have any intelligence at all, they make a secret agreement to contain the conflict: to call each other the worst names, but to refrain from dropping bombs. Or, if they insist that there must be some fighting to keep armies in trim, they restrict it to local conflicts in 'unimportant' countries. Voltaire should have said that if the Devil did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Nevertheless, the more it becomes clear that to be is to quarrel and to pursue self-interest, the more you are compelled to recognize your need for enemies to support you. In the same way, the more resolutely you plumb the question 'Who or what am I?'—the more unavoidable is the realization that you are nothing at all apart from everything else. Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure.

The Society of the Spectacle

Author: Guy Debord

Publisher: kindle import (0)

The Middle Ages, an incomplete mythical world whose consummation lay outside itself, is the period when cyclical time, though still governing the major part of production, really begins to be undermined by history. An element of irreversible time is recognized in the successive stages of each individual’s life. Life is seen as a one-way journey through a world whose meaning lies elsewhere: the pilgrim is the person who leaves cyclical time behind and actually becomes the traveler that everyone else is symbolically. Personal historical life still finds its fulfillment within the sphere of power, whether in struggles waged by power or in struggles over disputed power; but power’s irreversible time is now shared to an unlimited degree due to the general unity brought about by the oriented time of the Christian Era—a world of armed faith, where the adventures of the masters revolve around fealty and disputes over who owes fealty to whom. Feudal society was born from the merging of “the organizational structures of the conquering armies that developed in the process of conquest” with “the productive forces found in the conquered regions” (The German Ideology), and the factors contributing to the organization of those productive forces include the religious language in which they were expressed. Social domination was divided between the Church and the state, the latter power being in turn subdivided in the complex relations of suzerainty and vassalage within and between rural domains and urban communities. This diversification of potential historical life reflected the gradual emergence (following the failure of that great official enterprise of the medieval world, the Crusades) of the era’s unnoticed innovation: the irreversible time that was silently undermining the society, the time experienced by the bourgeoisie in the production of commodities, the foundation and expansion of cities, and the commercial discovery of the planet—a practical experimentation that destroyed every mythical organization of the cosmos once and for all.

“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.

The unreal unity proclaimed by the spectacle masks the class division underlying the real unity of the capitalist mode of production. What obliges the producers to participate in the construction of the world is also what excludes them from it. What brings people into relation with each other by liberating them from their local and national limitations is also what keeps them apart. What requires increased rationality is also what nourishes the irrationality of hierarchical exploitation and repression. What produces society’s abstract power also produces its concrete lack of freedom.

The spectacle was born from the world’s loss of unity, and the immense expansion of the modern spectacle reveals the enormity of this loss. The abstractifying of all individual labor and the general abstractness of what is produced are perfectly reflected in the spectacle, whose manner of being concrete is precisely abstraction. In the spectacle, a part of the world presents itself to the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is simply the common language of this separation. Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle thus reunites the separated, but it reunites them only in their separateness.

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Author: Julian Jaynes

Publisher: University of Toronto Press (1978)

249

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.

The Denial of Death

Author: Ernest Becker

Publisher: Free Press (1975)

216

There is a type of person who has difficulty fetishizing and narrowing-down; he has a vivid imagination, takes in too much experience, too large a chunk of the world—and this too must be called neurotic.11 We introduced this type in the last chapter where we talked about the creative person. We saw that these people feel their isolation, their individuality. They stick out, are less built-into normal society, less securely programmed for automatic cultural action. To have difficulty partializing experience is to have difficulty living. Not to be able to fetishize makes one susceptible to the world as a total problem—with all the living hell that this exposure raises. We said that partializing the world is biting off what an animal can chew. Not to have this talent means constantly biting off more than one can chew. Rank puts it this way: The neurotic type … makes the reality surrounding him a part of his ego, which explains his painful relation to it. For all outside processes, however unmeaningful they may be in themselves, finally concern him … he is bound up in a kind of magic unity with the wholeness of life around him much more than the adjusted type who can be satisfied with the role of a part within the whole. The neurotic type has taken into himself potentially the whole of reality.12

194

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

193

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,

Myths to live by

Author: Joseph Campbell

Publisher: Joseph Campbell Foundation (2011)

The Fourth Way

Author: P.D. Ouspensky

Publisher: Vintage (1971)

264

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

260

Q. Is creation of unity essentially preceded by inner conflict? A. By realization of inner conflict. Inner conflicts are constant. Nobody lives without inner conflicts, they are normal and always there. But when we begin to work, conflict increases. When we do not work, we run away, we do not fight. What does 'work' mean? It means struggle with conflicting things. We have a certain aim, but many of our 'I's do not want to go that way, so naturally conflict increases. But the creation of unity is not the result of conflict—it is the result of struggle with conflict. We are many and we want to be one—this is one formulation of our aim. We realize that it is inconvenient, uncomfortable and dangerous to be so many. We decide to be at least less divided, instead of five hundred to become five. I feel that I must do something and I do not want to—this is conflict, and by constantly recurring it builds up resistance and produces unification

259

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.

174

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

Q. When do we cease to be under the law of accident? A. When we develop will. To be completely free from the law of accident is very far, but there are different stages between complete freedom and our present position. In ordinary conditions accident is opposed to plan. A man who in one or another case acts according to plan escapes in these actions from the law of accident. But actions conforming to plan are impossible in ordinary life except in conditions where the combination of accidental happenings chances to coincide with the plan. The reasons why it is impossible to fulfil a plan in life are, first of all,the absence of unity and constancy in man himself, and the new lines which continually enter man's line of actions and cross it. This can be easily verified if a man tries to follow a plan in anything that does not happen or is opposed to the general trend of momentums operating in his life; for instance, if a man tries to remember himself, to struggle with habits, to observe himself, and so on. He will see that his plan is not being fulfilled and the result is quite different from what he intended, or that everything stops altogether and even the initial impulse and the understanding of the necessity and usefulness of these attempts vanishes. But if he continues to study himself, to make efforts, to work, he will see that his relation to the law of accident gradually changes. Our being subject to the law of accident is a definite fact that cannot be changed completely. Such as we are we will always be under a certain possibility of accident. Yet little by little we can make accidental happenings less possible. The theory of accidents is very simple. They happen only when the place is empty; if the place is occupied, they cannot happen. Occupied by what? By conscious actions. If you cannot produce a conscious action, at least it must be filled by intentional actions. So when work and everything connected with it becomes in truth the centre of gravity of man's life, he becomes practically free from the law of accident.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Author: Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

Publisher: Fine Communications (1998)

791

APPENDIX LAMED: THE TACTICS OF MAGICK \r\n \r\n>The human brain evidently operates on some variation of the famous principle enunciated in The Hunting of the Snark: 'What I tell you three times is true.' \r\n>—NORBERT WEINER, Cybernetics \r\n \r\nThe most important idea in the Book of Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage is the simple-looking formula 'Invoke often.' \r\n\r\nThe most successful form of treatment for so-called mental disorders, the Behavior Therapy of Pavlov, Skinner, Wolpe, et al., could well be summarized in two similar words: 'Reinforce often.' ('Reinforcement,' for all practical purposes, means the same as the layman's term 'reward.' The essence of Behavior Therapy is rewarding desired behavior; the behavior 'as if by magic' begins to occur more and more often as the rewards continue.) Advertising, as everybody knows, is based on the axiom 'Repeat often.' Those who think they are 'materialists' and think that 'materialism' requires them to deny all facts which do not square with their definition of 'matter' are loath to admit the well-documented and extensive list of individuals who have been cured of serious maladies by that very vulgar and absurd form of magick known as Christian Science. Nonetheless, the reader who wants to understand this classic work of immortal literature will have to analyze its deepest meanings, guided by an awareness that there is no essential difference between magick, Behavior Therapy, advertising, and Christian Science. All of them can be condensed into Abra-Melin's simple 'Invoke often.' Reality, as Simon Moon says, is thermoplastic, not thermosetting. It is not quite Silly-Putty, as Mr. Paul Krassner once claimed, but is much closer to Silly-Putty than we generally realize. \r\n\r\nIf you are told often enough that 'Budweiser is the king of beers,' Budweiser will eventually taste somewhat better— perhaps a great deal better— than it tasted before this magick spell was cast. If a behavior therapist in the pay of the communists rewards you every time you repeat a communist slogan, you will repeat it more often, and begin to slide imperceptibly toward the same kind of belief that Christian Scientists have for their mantras. And if a Christian Scientist tells himself every day that his ulcer is going away, the ulcer will disappear more rapidly than it would have had he not subjected himself to this homemade advertising campaign. Finally, if a magician invokes the Great God Pan often enough, the Great God Pan will appear just as certainly as heterosexual behavior appears in homosexuals who are being handled (or manhandled) by Behavior Therapy. The opposite and reciprocal of 'Invoke often' is 'Banish often.' The magician wishing for a manifestation of Pan will not only invoke Pan directly and verbally, create Panlike conditions in his temple, reinforce Pan associations in every gesture and every article of furniture, use the colors and perfumes associated with Pan, etc.; he will also banish other gods verbally, banish them by removing their associated furnitures and colors and perfumes, and banish them in every other way. The Behavior Therapist calls this 'negative reinforcement,' and in treating a patient who is afraid of elevators he will not only reinforce (reward) every instance in which the patient rides an elevator without terror, but will also negatively reinforce (punish) each indication of terror shown by the patient. The Christian Scientist, of course, uses a mantra or spell which both reinforces health and negatively reinforces (banishes) illness.* Similarly, a commercial not only motivates the listener toward the sponsor's product but discourages interest in all 'false gods'- by subsuming them under the rubric of the despised and contemptible Brand X. * The basic Christian Science mantra, known as 'The Scientific Statement of Being,' no less, is as follows: 'There is no life, truth, intelligence nor substance in matter. All is infinite mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is all in all, Spirit is immortal truth: matter is mortal error. Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal. Spirit is God and man is His image and likeness. Therefore man is not material, he is spiritual.' The fact that these statements are, in terms of the scientific criteria, 'meaningless,' 'non-operational,' and 'footless' is actually totally irrelevant. They work. Try them and see. As Aleister Crowley, no friend of Mrs. Eddy's, wrote, 'Enough of Because! May he be damned for a dog!' Hypnotism, debate, and countless other games have the same mechanism: Invoke often and Banish often. \r\n\r\nThe reader who seeks a deeper understanding of this argument can obtain it by putting these principles to the test. If you are afraid that you might, in this Christian environment, fall into taking the Christian Science mantra too seriously, try instead the following simple experiment. For forty days and forty nights, begin each day by invoking and praising the world in itself as an expression of the Egyptian deities. Recite at dawn: I bless Ra, the fierce sun burning bright, I bless Isis-Luna in the night, I bless the air, the Horus-hawk, I bless the earth on which I walk. Repeat at moonrise. Continue for the full forty days and forty nights. We say without any reservations that, at a minimum, you will feel happier and more at home in this part of the galaxy (and will also understand better Uncle John Feather's attitude toward our planet); at maximum, you may find rewards beyond your expectations, and will be converted to using this mantra for the rest of your life. (If the results are exceptionally good, you just might start believing in ancient Egyptian gods.) \r\n\r\nA selection of magick techniques which will offend the reason of no materialist can be found in Laura Archera Huxley's You Are Not the Target (a powerful mantra, the title!), in Gestalt Therapy, by Peris, Heferline, and Goodman, and in Mind Games, by Masters and Houston. All this, of course, is programming your own trip by manipulating appropriate clusters of word, sound, image, and emotional (prajna) energy. The aspect of magick which puzzles, perplexes, and provokes the modern mentality is that in which the operator programs somebody else's trip, acting at a distance. It is incredible and insulting, to this type of person, if one asserts that our Mr. Nkrumah Fubar could program a headache for the President of the United States. He might grant that such manipulating of energy is possible if the President was told about Mr. Fubar's spells, but he will not accept that it works just as well when the subject has no conscious knowledge of the curse. The magical theory that 5 = 6 has no conviction for such a skeptic, and magicians have not yet proposed a better theory. The materialist then asserts that all cases where magic did appear to work under this handicap are illusions, delusions, hallucinations, 'coincidences,'* misapprehensions, 'luck,' accident, or downright hoax. * Look up the etymology of that word some time and see if it means anything. He does not seem to realize that asserting this is equivalent to asserting that reality is, after all, thermoplastic— for he is admitting that many people live in a different reality than his own. Rather than leave him to grapple as best he can with this self-contradiction, we suggest that he consult Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, by Ostrander and Schroder—especially Chapter 11, 'From Animals to Cybernetics: The Search for a Theory of Psi.' He might realize that when 'matter' is fully understood, there is nothing a materialist need reject in magick action at a distance, which has been well explored by scientists committed to the rigid Marxist form of dialectical materialism. \r\n\r\nThose who have kept alive the ancient traditions of magick, such as the Ordo Templi Orientalis, will realize that the essential secret is sexual (as Saul tries to explain in the Sixth Trip) and that more light can be found in the writings of Wilhelm Reich, M. D., than in the current Soviet research. But Dr. Reich was jailed as a quack by the U.S. Government, and we would not ask our readers to consider the possibility that the U.S. Government could ever be Wrong about anything. Any psychoanalyst will guess at once the most probable symbolic meanings of the Rose and the Cross; but no psychologist engaged in psi research has applied this key to the deciphering of traditional magic texts. The earliest reference to freemasonry in English occurs in Andersen's 'Muses Threnody,' 1638: \r\n\r\n>For we be brethren of the Rosey Cross \r\n>We have the Mason Word and second sight \r\n\r\nbut no parapsychologist has followed up the obvious clue contained in this conjunction of the vaginal rose, the phallic cross, the word of invocation, and the phenomenon of thought projection. That the taboos against sexuality are still latent in our culture explains part of this blindness; fear of opening the door to the most insidious and subtle forms of paranoia is another part. (If the magick can work at a distance, the repressed thought goes, which of its is safe?) A close and objective study of the anti-LSD hysteria in America will shed further light on the mechanisms of avoidance here discussed. Of course, there are further offenses and affronts to the rationalist in the deeper study of magick. We all know, for instance, that words are only arbitrary conventions with no intrinsic connection to the things they symbolize, yet magick involves the use of words in a manner that seems to imply that some such connection, or even identity, actually exists. The reader might analyze some powerful bits of language not generally considered magical, and he will find something of the key. For instance, the 2 + 3 pattern in 'Hail Eris'/'All hail Discordia' is not unlike the 2 + 3 in 'Holy Mary, Mother of God,' or that in the 'L.S./M.F.T.' which once sold many cartons of cigarettes to our parents; and the 2 + 3 in Crowley's 'Io Pan! Io Pan Pan!' is a relative of these. Thus, when a magician says that you must shout 'Abrahadabra,' and no other word, at the most intensely emotional moment in an invocation, he exaggerates; you may substitute other words; but you will abort the result if you depart too far from the five-beat pattern of 'Abrahadabra.' A glance at the end of Appendix Beth will save the reader from misunderstanding the true tenor of these remarks. \r\n\r\nBut this brings us to the magical theory of reality. Mahatma Guru Sri Paramahansa Shivaji (Aleister Crowley again, under another pen-name) writes in Yoga for Yahoos: \r\n\r\n>Let us consider a piece of cheese. We say that this has certain qualities, shape, structure, color, solidity, weight, taste, smell, consistency and the rest; but investigation has shown that this is all illusory. Where are these qualities? Not in the cheese, for different observers give quite different accounts of it. Not in ourselves, for we do not perceive them in the absence of the cheese . . . What then are these qualities of which we are so sure? They would not exist without our brains; they would not exist without the cheese. They are the results of the union, that is of the Yoga, of the seer and seen, of subject and object... \r\n\r\nThere is nothing here with which a modern physicist could quarrel; and this is the magical theory of the universe. The magician assumes that sensed reality - the panorama of impressions monitored by the senses and collated by the brain— is radically different from so-called objective reality.¹ About the latter 'reality' we can only form speculations or theories which, if we are very careful and subtle, will not contradict either logic or the reports of the senses. This lack of contradiction is rare; some conflicts between theory and logic, or between theory and sense-data, are not discovered for centuries (for example, the wandering of Mercury away from the Newtonian calculation of its orbit). And even when achieved, lack of contradiction is proof only that the theory is not totally false. It is never, in any case, proof that the theory is totally true— for an indefinite number of such theories can be constructed from the known data at any time. For instance, the geometries of Euclid, of Gauss and Reimann, of Lobachevski, and of Fuller all work well enough on the surface of the earth, and it not yet clear whether the Gauss-Reimann or the Fuller system works better in interstellar space. \r\n\r\nIf we have this much freedom in choosing our theories about 'objective reality,' we have even more liberty in deciphering the 'given' or transactional sensed reality. The ordinary person senses as he or she has been taught to sense —that is, as they have been programmed by their society. The magician is a self-programmer. Using invocation and evocation— which are functionally identical with self-conditioning, auto-suggestion, and hypnosis, as shown above— he or she edits or orchestrates sensed reality like an artist.^{2\r\n\r\nThis} book, being part of the only serious conspiracy it describes— that is, part of Operation Mindfuck— has programmed the reader in ways that he or she will not understand for a period of months (or perhaps years). When that understanding is achieved, the real import of this appendix (and of the equation 5 = 6) will be clearer. Officials at Harvard thought Dr. Timothy Leary was joking when he warned that students should not be allowed to indiscriminately remove dangerous, habit-forming books from the library unless each student proves a definite need for each volume. (For instance, you have lost track of Joe Malik's mysterious dogs by now.) It is strange that one can make the clearest possible statements and yet be understood by many to have said the opposite. \r\n\r\nThe Rite of Shiva, as performed by Joe Malik during the SSS Black Mass, contains the central secret of all magick, very explicitly, yet most people can reread that section a dozen, or a hundred times, and never understand what the secret is. For instance, Miss Portinari was a typical Catholic girl in every way— except for an unusual tendency to take Catholicism seriously— until she began menstruating and performing spiritual meditations every day.³ One morning, during her meditation period, she visualized the Sacred Heart of Jesus with unusual clarity; immediately another image, distinctly shocking to her, came to mind with equal vividness. She recounted this experience to her confessor the next Saturday, and he warned her, gravely, that meditation was not healthy for a young girl, unless she intended to take the oath of seclusion and enter a convent. She had no intention of doing that, but rebelliously (and guiltily) continued her meditations anyway. The disturbing second image persisted whenever she thought of the Sacred Heart; she began to suspect that this was sent by the Devil to distract her from meditation. \r\n\r\nOne weekend, when she was home from convent school on vacation, her parents decided she was the right age to be introduced to Roman society. (Actually, they, like most well-off Italian families, had already chosen which daughter would be given to the church— and it wasn't her. Hence, this early introduction to la dolce vita.) One of the outstanding ornaments of Rome at that time was the 'eccentric international businessman' Mr. Hagbard Celine, and he was at the party to which Miss Portinari was taken that evening. It was around eleven, and she had consumed perhaps a little too much Piper Heidseck, when she happened to find herself standing near a small group who were listening rapt-ly to a story the strange Celine was telling. Miss Portinari wondered what this creature might be saying—he was reputedly even more cynical and materialistic than other international money-grubbers, and Miss Portinari was, at that time, the kind of conservative Catholic idealist who finds capitalists even more dreadful than socialists. She idly tuned in on his words; he was talking English, but she understood that language adequately. \r\n' 'Son, son,' Hagbbard recited, ' 'with two beautiful women throwing themselves at you, why are you sitting alone in your room jacking off?' Miss Portinari blushed furiously and drank some more champagne to conceal it. She hated the man already, knowing that she would surrender her virginity to him at the earliest opportunity; of such complexities are intellectual Catholic adolescents capable. \r\n'And the boy replied,' Hagbard went on, ' 'I guess you just answered your own question, Ma.' ' There was a shocked silence. \r\n'The case is quite typical,' Hagbard added blandly, obviously finished. 'Professor Freud recounts even more startling family dramas.' \r\n'I don't see ...' a celebrated French auto racer began, frowning. Then he smiled. 'Oh,' he said, 'was the boy an American?' \r\nMiss Portinari left the group perhaps a bit too hurriedly (she felt a few eyes following her) and quickly refilled her champagne glass. A half-hour later she was standing on the veranda, trying to clear her head in the night air, when a shadow moved near her and Celine appeared amid a cloud of cigar smoke. \r\n'The moon has a fat jaw tonight,' he said in Italian. 'Looks like somebody punched her in the mouth.' \r\n'Are you a poet in addition to your other accomplishments?' she asked coolly. 'That sounds as if it might be American verse.' \r\nHe laughed— a clear peal, like a stallion whinnying. 'Quite so,' he said. 'I just came from Rapallo, where I was talking to America's major poet of this century. How old are you?' he asked suddenly. \r\n'Almost sixteen,' she said fumbling the words. \r\n'Almost fifteen,' he corrected ungallantly. \r\n'If it's any affair of yours—' \r\n'It might be,' he replied easily. 'I need a girl your age for something I have in mind.' \r\n'I can imagine. Something foul.' He stepped further out of the shadows and closer. \r\n'Child,' he said, 'are you religious?' \r\n'I suppose you regard that as old-fashioned,' she replied, imagining his mouth on her breast and thinking of paintings of Mary nursing the Infant. \r\n'At this point in history,' he said simply, 'it's the only thing that isn't old-fashioned. What was your birthdate? Never mind— you must be a Virgo.' \r\n'I am,' she said. (His teeth would bite her nipple, but very gently. He would know enough to do that.) 'But that is superstition, not religion.' \r\n'I wish I could draw a precise line between religion, superstition, and science.' He smiled. 'I find that they keep running together. You are Catholic, of course?' His persistence was maddening. \r\n'I am too proud to believe an absurdity, and therefore I am not a Protestant,' she replied— immediately fearing that he would recognize the plagiarism. \r\n'What symbol means the most to you?' he asked, with the blandness of a prosecuting attorney setting a trap. \r\n'The cross,' she said quickly. She didn't want him to know the truth. \r\n'No.' He again corrected her ungallantly. 'The Sacred Heart.' \r\nThen she knew he was of Satan's party. \r\n'I must go,' she said. \r\n'Meditate further on the Sacred Heart,' he said, his eyes blazing like a hypnotist's (a cornball gimmick, he was thinking privately, but it might work). 'Meditate on it deeply, child. You will find in it the essential of Catholicism — and the essential of all other religion.' \r\n'I think you are mad,' she responded, leaving the veranda with undignified haste. But two weeks later, during her morning meditation, she suddenly understood the Sacred Heart. At lunchtime she disappeared—leaving behind a note to the Mother Superior of the convent school and another note for her parents— and went in search of Hagbard. She had even more potential than he realized, and (as elsewhere recorded) within two years he abdicated in her favor. They never became lovers.⁴ \r\n\r\nThe importance of symbols— images— as the link between word and primordial energy demonstrates the unity between magick and yoga. Both magick and yoga— we reiterate—are methods of self-programming employing synchronistically connected chains of word, image, and bio-energy. Thus, rationalists, who are all puritans, have never considered the fact that disbelief in magick is found only in puritanical societies. The reason for this is simple: Puritans are incapable of guessing what magick is essentially all about. It can even be surely ventured that only those who have experienced true love, in the classic Albigensian or troubadour sense of that expression, are equipped to understand even the most clear-cut exposition of the mysteries.⁵ \r\n\r\nThe eye in the triangle; for instance, is not primarily a symbol of the Christian Trinity, as the gullible assume— except insofar as the Christian Trinity is itself a visual (or verbal) elaboration on a much older meaning. Nor is this symbol representative of the Eye of Osiris or even of the Eye of Horus, as some have ventured; it is venerated, for instance, among the Cao Dai sect in Vietnam, who never heard of Osiris or Horus. The eye's meaning can be found quite simply by meditating on Tarot Trump XV, the Devil, which corresponds, on the Tree of Life, to the Hebrew letter ayin, the eye. The reader who realizes that 'The Devil' is only a late rendering of the Great God Pan has already solved the mystery of the eye, and the triangle has its usual meaning. The two together are the union of Yod, the father, with He, the Mother, as in Yod-He-Vau-He, the holy unspeakable name of God. Vau, the Holy Ghost, is the result of their union, and final He is the divine ecstasy which follows. One might even venture that one who contemplates this key to the identities of Pan, the Devil, the Great Father, and the Great Mother will eventually come to a new, more complete understanding of the Christian Trinity itself, and especially of its most mysterious member, Vau, the elusive Holy Ghost. \r\n\r\nThe pentagram comes in two forms but always represents the fullest extension of the human psyche— the male human psyche in particular. The pentagram with one horn exalted is, quite naturally, associated with the right-hand path; and the two-horned pentagram with the left-hand path. (The Knights Templar, very appropriately, inscribed the head of Baphomet, the goat-headed deity who was their equivalent of Pan or the Devil, within the left-handed pentagram in such wise that each 'horn' contained one of Baphomet's horns.) It is to be observed that the traditionally sinister⁷ left-hand pentagram contains an internal pentagon with one point upward, whereas the right-hand pentagram contains an internal pentagon with one point downward; this nicely illustrates the Law of Opposites.⁸ The pentagon in the Sacred Chao is tilted from the perpendicular so that it cannot be said to have any points directly upward or directly downward—or perhaps can be said to have 1 ½ points up and 1 ½ points down⁹ — thereby illustrating the Reconciliation of Opposites. All that can be said against the method of the left-hand pentagram, without prejudice, is that this form of the sacrament is always destructive of the Holy Spirit, in a certain sense. It should be remembered that the right-hand pentagram method is also destructive in most cases, especially by those practitioners so roundly condemned in Chapter 14 of Joyce's Ulysses— and this group is certainly the majority these days. In view of the ecological crisis, it might even be wise to encourage the left-hand method and discourage the right-hand method at this time, to balance the Sacred Numbers. \r\n\r\nVery few readers of the Golden Bough have pierced Sir Prof. Dr. Frazer's veil of euphemism and surmised the exact method used by Isis in restoring life to Osiris, although this is shown quite clearly in extant Egyptian frescoes. Those who are acquainted with this simple technique of resurrecting the dead (which is at least partially successful in all cases and totally successful in most) will have no trouble in skrying the esoteric connotations of the Sacred Chao— or of the Taoist yin-yang or the astrological sign of cancer. The method almost completely reverses that of the pentagrams, right or left, and it can even be said that in a certain sense it was not Osiris himself but his brother, Set, symbolically understood, who was the object of Isis's magical workings. In every case, without exception, a magical or mystical symbol always refers to one of the very few¹⁰ variations of the same, very special variety of human sacrifice: the 'one eye opening' or the 'one hand clapping'; and this sacrifice cannot be partial— it must culminate in death if it is to be efficacious. The literal-mindedness of the Saures, in the novel, caused them to become a menace to life on earth; the reader should bear this in mind. The sacrifice is not simple. It is a species of cowardice, epidemic in Anglo-Saxon nations for more than three centuries, which causes most who seek success in this field to stop short before the death of the victim. Anything less than death—that is, complete oblivion—simply will not work.¹¹ (One will find more clarity on this crucial point in the poetry of John Donne than in most treatises alleging to explain the secrets of magick.) \r\n\r\nThe symbolism of the swastika is quite adequately explained in Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism. Ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail, is chiefly emblematic of the Mass of the Holy Ghost.¹² The Roman Catholic symbolism of the Sacred Heart is strikingly overt, especially to readers of Frazer and Payne-Knight. In essence, it is the same notion conveyed by the cartoonist's conventional rendering of Cupid shooting his arrow into a red pulsating heart. This is the basic meaning of the Dying God and the Resurrection. The identification of Christ with the pelican who stabs its own heart with its beak (to feed its young) is an analogous rendering of the same motif. We repeat that it was only because the Saure family so misread these simple symbols that they became cruel and sadistic. In essence, then, the basic symbols, of magic, mythology, and religion—whether Eastern or Western, ancient or modern, 'right-hand' or 'left-hand'—are so simple that only the pernicious habit of looking for alleged 'profundities' and 'mysteries' prevents people from automatically understanding them almost without thinking. The meaning of the hexagram— the female equivalent of the male pentagram— was explicated by Freud himself, but most students, convinced that the answer could not be so elementary and down-to-earth, continue to look into the clouds. \r\n\r\n¹ See the anthology Perception, edited by Robert Blake, Ph.D., and especially the chapter by psychologist Carl Rogers, which demonstrates that people's perceptions change while they are in psychotherapy. As William Blake noted, 'The fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees.' \r\n² Everybody, of course, does this unconsciously; see the paragraph about the cheese. The magician, doing it consciously, controls it. \r\n³ These two signs of growth often appear at the same time, being DNA-triggered openings of the fourth neural circuit. \r\n⁴ They were quite good friends, though, and he did fuck her occasionally. \r\n⁵ This book has stated it as clearly as possible in a number of places, but some readers are still wondering what we are holding back. \r\n⁶ This being has more in common with the ordinary nocturnal visitor, sometimes called a 'ghost,' than is immediately evident to the uninitiated. Cf. the well-documented association of poltergeist disturbances with adolescents. \r\n⁷ This association, attributing diabolism to the left-hand path, is oversimplified, prejudiced, and superstitious. In general, it can be said that the left-hand pentagram is suitable for both invocations and evocations, whereas the right-hand pentagram is suitable only for evocations, and mat is the only important difference. (It is assumed that the reader understands the pentagram as an exclusively male symbol.) \r\n⁸ Cf. the Tarot trumps II and III—the Magus, holding one arm upward and one downward, and the High Priestess, sitting between the pillars of Day and Night. (The Priestess is also associated with the Hebrew letter gimmel, the camel, and part of the meaning of this symbolism is contained in the shapes of the camel's back and the Hebrew letter.) \r\n⁹ This makes it quite useless for summoning werewolves. The Sacred Chao, however, is intended to teach a philosophical lesson, not to attract individuals with dubious pastimes. \r\n¹⁰ Fewer than seventy, according to a classical enumeration. \r\n¹¹ The magician must always identify fully with the victim, and share every agonized contortion to the utmost. Any attitude of standing aside and watching, as in a theatrical performance, or any intellectualization during the moments when the sword is doing its brutal but necessary work, or any squeamishness or guilt or revulsion, creates the two-mindedness against which Hagbard so vehemently warns in Never Whistle While You're Pissing. In a sense, only the mind dies. \r\n¹² See Israel Regardie, The Tree of Life.\r\n

258

Two universes flowing in opposite directions. Two together form a third entity which is synergetically more than the sum of its two parts. Thus two always leads to three. Two and Three. Duality and trinity. Every unity is a duality and a trinity. A pentagon. Sheer energy, no matter involved. From the pentagon depend five more pentagons, like the petals of a flower. A white rose. Five petals and a center: six. Two times three. The flower interlocks with another flower just like it, forming a polyhedron made of pentagons. Each such polyhedron could have common surfaces with other polyhedrons, forming infinite latticework based on the pentagonal unit. They would be immortal. Self-sustaining. Not computers. Beyond computers. Gods. All space for their habitation. Infinitely complex.

Living Buddha, Living Christ

Author: Thich Nhat Hanh

Publisher: Riverhead Trade (2007)

Mere Christianity

Author: C.S. Lewis

Publisher: HarperOne (2001)

The Origins and History of Consciousness

Author: Erich Neumann

Publisher: Princeton University Press (1954)

417

Humanity as a whole and the single individual have the same task, namely, to realize themselves as a unity. Both are cast forth into a reality, one half of which confronts them as nature and external world, while the other half approaches them as psyche and the unconscious, spirit and daemonic power. Both must experience themselves as the center of this total reality.

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.

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.

272

Common descent from the same tribe, the sharing of a common life, and, above all, common experiences create emotional bonds even today, as we well know. Social, religious, aesthetic, and other collective experiences of whatever coloring - from the tribal head-hunt to the modern mass meeting - activate the unconscious emotional foundations of the group psyche. The individual has not yet broken loose from the emotional undercurrent, and any excitation of one part of the group can affect the whole, as a fever seizes upon all parts of the organism. The emotional fusion then sweeps away the still feebly developed differences of conscious structure in the individuals concerned and continually restores the original group unity.