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Lecture 9
UNEXPLORED DIMENSIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE VISIONARY EXPERIENCE: PARMENIDES, DANTE, AND JUNG'S SEVEN SERMONS TO THE DEAD.
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These quotations have come to me over a span of time after 1984 until the present time. I begin with a remarkable quotation I found recently: It's from Anne Baring's web site.
"It is now roughly a hundred years since William James wrote his ground-breaking book - The Varieties of Religious Experience. It is clear to me from my study of visionary experience in many cultures that a visionary is aware of the reality of worlds and presences inaccessible to the "normal" state of consciousness, as this drawing by a modern teacher of Kabbalah illustrates. So to end I would say that I am absolutely certain through my own experience and my long study of visionary experience (see The Mystic Vision) that a wider, deeper consciousness than our own is trying to reach us, trying to make itself known to us. It has been doing so for millennia. Parmenides, Dante and Jung are three individuals who have acted as conduits for this consciousness. As long as this dimension of consciousness is denied existence and dissociated from our own, it will act in the manner of an unconscious autonomous complex, influencing us without our awareness in all kinds of ways. As long as we believe that consciousness begins and ends with the brain, we will never reach what we are capable of becoming - people who, like these three remarkable men, are in conscious communion with metaphysical reality."
I would use the word 'mentally accessed reality' rather than metaphysical reality. It's the 'kingdom of heaven which is within you'. Inner content has a certain kind of visibility, I have experienced a radial change of inner content since 1984, but prior to 1984 certain inner 'events' had happened, that I could not have known were inserted, they were not my own thought productions although my own thought, at times produced the 'inserted event'.
Only one person lived a life that brought the 'kingdom of heaven which is within you' into focus, but I'd not thought about it until that detail was brought to my attention one day. I've had several minor 'mindquakes' and one of them caused me to focus on that one singular detail, that there is a 'world within you'. I read a book, The Lord of Thought by Emmett and Dougall who intended to isolate what was unique in the life of Jesus. After I'd finished the book, closed it I had a swarm of information that the authors had not mentioned or inferred about the uniqueness of that life. I was terrified at how heretical the ideas were that were in that 'bundle', only one of which was that it had inserted a point of origin in Time eventually, and that no other religious figure mentioned a 'kingdom of heaven' and that it is 'within you', among other ideas that were obviously true but unspeakable. That kind of 'swarm' of information when I closed a book has happened twice, the other incident was after I finished The Phenomenon of Man by Teilhard de Chardin. I had never thought about how 'man' remains uncategorized and then I began to wonder how man would ever 'categorize' into 'species, kind, family, order, genus as we have done to other living and nonliving entities. The author had not mentioned that which seemed a very odd thing to not write about 'man'.
I have experienced what I'm writing about, which is the result of being synchronized for a long time in my thought with events in the material world, outside of the body. A synchronization began gradually, sporadically in 1980 when inner content began to emerge from the depths of my mind which are galaxies away from waking consciousness. At least that's the best way I can understand the distance between certain thought and being able to relate to it. Recognizing that this new content had any relationship to what was outside of my body took a LONG time, and many events had to happen to force me to recognize that direct relationship.
When all the facts are in place, nothing happened that was mysterious or fantastic other than the impeccable timing of events, that in the final analysis, happened over a span of my life time, from my first memory to the present time. The first glimpse I had of that inner content began to seem miraculous, in fact the thought occurred to me one night in 1982 that it was a miracle, slowed down so that I could watch it happen. I don't know where that thought originated but it was a statement to me, at the moment of exactly what was happening then, and it remained an accurate statement even yesterday when I was librarian in our local Jung Society library and had the opportunity to read some of the newly published Red Book. His visions were unlike anything I've experienced, I have never had that kind of inner life but my particular inner life had begun when I was born, that is obvious beyond doubt, now in 2009.
These quotations came to my attention over a span of about 25 years, each was a 'bit of information' related in some way to what I was doing when I read them. I noticed each of these quotations at a point when their meaning was significant at the particular moment, even when I didn't fully understand their content at that moment. I felt some of them before I understood what caused them to seem significant, what caused me to feel strange when I read them. I have reason to believe the author of books that have a long bibliography at the end have abstracted fragments from other books in a similar way, it's the abstracted out fragments that contributed information and that content is essential to know, specifically. It's a process that can occur without attention. My attention was directed, that was a fact that took some time to recognize, then have faith in.
Form (patterns) without specific content is not enough to explain reality, the underlying reality where that kind of synchronization happens. Logic of a different kind does create the kind of language that I've experienced.
Especially if a person is to understand synchronization as a 'force' that builds information that the experiencing individual and no other person will ever 'see'. It's a new kind of 'seeing', and a new interpretation of what 'artificial intelligence' is must be understood, form and content are essential to know in each individual experience. Abstracting certain specific content at a time when it's meaning describes to that person some detail in their life points towards a kind of foresight, other than individual foresight.
These quotations are an example: They have been abstracted from Joseph Chilton Pearce's The Bond Of Power which was an entire book of information that described to me what had happened in the 1984 mindquake:
“Carl Jung on his return from a visit to India in 1937 observed that the Hindu didn’t seem to think his thoughts as we do in the West, but perceives his thought” as though thought were ready made outside the brain and simply viewed like any sensory act. Indeed, Jung’s notion agrees with Hindu and yogic theory that thoughts are not originated in the brain but are perceived from a stream of impressions impinging on the brain.
At issue here is not the merit of Western and Eastern logics but a larger definition of mental experience. The relation of mind, grain and world is not a one-way street. Traffic moves on many levels and incorporates a surprisingly wide terrain. In sight is surely a perfect example of a level of thought not generated by our ordinary brain process. So the suggestion of a perceptual background which includes thought as one of its components is strange to us and academically suspect but is demonstrated in insight and can be experience through meditation.
Brain research indicates that new process of thought and experience open for us through synchronization of right and left hemispheres of the brain. The attempts of Eastern thought to break into Western logic on some serious level today may indicate the attempt of this thinking sphere of Earth to balance the fragmentations of technology.” 888888
"Amid the nonsense of a world of folly, the great syntheses are made by genius, syntheses which sooner or later, with luck filter down to the level of the common domain.”
Those quotations are from The Bond Of Power which has been re-issued under a different name, but it's an incredible book under it's old name, which is very appropriate in my opinion. I read it under a kind of compulsion that could have been the 'force' of a deeply entrenched habit when it's contents but not the form reversed into it's opposite. I read fictions only, until about 1983, when I went into 'therapy' and noticed a book Reality Therapy by William Glasser. I asked what it was about and the psychiatrist handed it to me to read. I could read the words but they seemed to fall into a black hole, there was no understanding. I had noticed that about myself in the past a few times, but this change of content forced me to not put the book aside and choose one I could understand.
That habit hasn't changed until recently. I read Twilight, saw the movie, heard a wisp of music in one scene, (Phasination Phase) and became entranced. I spent the next 3 months reading, re-reading, re-watching the series and The Host by the same author. The series is about a family of vampires that has struggled to restrain their natural habit, diverting it to preserving human traits in themselves. They also had special talents, each had a unique talent that was useful to the family. It turns out in the last book Breaking Dawn that the frail, clumsy female that Edward Cullen loved enough to restrain his 'thirst' had the most difficult to discover talent. That was not what I would name a 'mindquake', I don't know how to name it yet. Time and events usually happen to reveal the meaning to me. A sense of having been taken on a trip of about 75 years duration overall has wafted into my understanding but I didn't leave the physical territory. Just like the Machine in Carl Sagan's Contact where it seemed the Machine didn't leave the site. Carl Sagan's book Contact is a pattern for my experiences after 1984. I worked at Boeing in 1985 and I'd just begun to do the work that other world was bringing about on our planet.
Some 'extra sense' reads through my eyes, it's not only my eyes that look outside of my body.
That was a different experience, I have no name for it yet but I have been able to read fictions lately, and I enjoy them the way I used to do. Steppenwolfe by Herman Hesse is convinced he is divided, he was.
The "Bond of Power" is about the inner realm. I had barely begun to understand it was 'speaking' when I read this book, which is about the 'insight realm; the 'postulate arrived full blown in the mind'; folie aux duex; William Blake; Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End and other ideas that were actually details about my life when I understood them. That 'understanding' happened 15 years after the mindquake in 1984, after I recognized a familiar, repeating pattern at Boeing. It's culminated now in globalization and all that has happened. Everything has changed. There's nothing magical, a person I knew quite intimately was the embodiment of the pattern, which is not unusual, its an old pattern, but a lot of information is necessary to understand that. I suggest reading the Life Against Death by Norman O. Brown and think deeply about the way he described how psychiatry was described by Freud. Freud discovered (or recognized in his own life) that there was meaning in 'dreams, slips of the tongue, forgetting, mistakes, and every day pathology' That means every day life conceals meaningful, but usually ignored 'information' that has to be 'decoded'. I went through 'hell' and felt utterly alone after 1984, yet I became aware I was not alone...ever.
I had to discover that precise timing of specific content myself and a special new sense brought that information to my attention. I had to discover everything I'm writing about myself, every detail was new information to me at the time. Recognizing this new kind of information when it was abstracted from every day life and its events, affected my body. It taught me the language using a few events that had happened in my early life that had been brought to my attention because they re-occurred often enough that I noticed them and became curious about their re-occurrences.
One surprising fact has been that I recognized the precise timing of events in my life with the content of books I just happened to find somewhere. The content described to me what I was doing at the time quite often, or some detail I needed to understand! That was almost impossible to believe once I noticed it, but that has never stopped happening. Somehow I am information because what's outside of my body found an exact match already there in my body, after that special sense was initiated, slowly, gradually through ordinary experiences. It's possible that authors who write books that have a huge bibliography at the end have acquired information in the same way I became aware of!
It's an abstracting process and it is abstract itself, creating new meanings and contexts spontaneously.
The presence of certain thoughts before they met their match somewhere outside of my body puzzled me after I noticed it happen which was not immediately. How could such specific content be repeated in the exterior world, even once? It has been occurring all my life, but I didn't have the special sense or information to grasp that detail.
I had no words of my own to describe the 'strange kind of
events' that made me feel 'dizzy' literally when they happened. A few events
almost made me feel I couldn't stand up. I believe this effect was because there
was no similar events in my past, but that took a long time and many events of
that kind had to happen before I understood my 'dizzy'-ness. I noticed at
times my attention was drawn towards articles in a newspaper, magazines, the
books from Theodore Reik especially, a
cartoon by Jim Unger.
For the first time in my life I began to clip, save,
tape to the refrigerator various items and accumulate non-fiction books. This
was a change, a very great change. I wasn't curious about it when I did
strange things like tape a cartoon to a door jamb where it remained for a span
of months! My habit of reading all the time didn't change, but the content
changed so that I could not read fictions anymore, I felt compelled to read
non-fictions.
There were a few important exceptions such as Carl Sagans' Contact which was the first fiction book I paid full price to own in 1985. I saw my hand reach for the book, I read the jacket and I saw my hand write the check without the sense I was doing it, I saw my body in a different way when that happened.
A few of them literally fell from a shelf in front of me, some were in the wrong place (such as Korzybski's Science and Sanity which was in the place were Morals and Dogma the book I was looking for, should have been). I don't know how I would have found Science and Sanity because I've never read a reference to it anywhere since my 'accidentally' finding it where it was out of place.
What I did recognize eventually was that the words I needed to describe what was happening were coming to me as though they knew where I was at the time, on the planet. This was said to me several years before I realized how it was said: I read the specific words in Ralph Waldo Emerson's Oversoul, a kind of literature I'd never understood. It became evident my location on the planet was established because such events involved other people and situations where I had no control. That attribute was not easy to identify until several events happened that made it unmistakable, impossible not to notice. Learning to understand the word 'attribute' was not easy to do, that happened when learning to use a computer somewhat introduced the idea to me, then later in the early 1990's when I began to read mathematical history I understood the concept better.
Other people have written better than I can their descriptions of contact with what I experienced except that I became aware of the language and the process without knowing others had written about it. A process of discovery, unlike any I've read about anywhere showed me that hidden in every individuals life are events that are inserted for future use, in a natural life process. If there is foresight in the individual life, and I've experienced that there is, then intelligent operation is at work in our level of Time. Which has changed radically since 1984. I can write that I felt 'wired' even before 1984, trembly, unable to rest and my habits changed into their opposite content.
My life was basically isolated in a small town. I had never tried to describe non-physical objects, events, circumstances, all of the immaterial world was unknown to me in 1980 when Mt. St. Helens erupted 60 miles from where I lived, May 18, 1980 at 8:32 a. m. My dusty inner content began to erupt then also. I am not a visionary, a mystic, I've become a believer in an intelligent operation behind our lives as a result of being made aware in a way I can never doubt that my presence on this planet was 'told to me' in a surprising way. What I was doing was described to me, in very great detail, bit of information by bit of information. In basically ordinary daily waking state because I have never meditated or tried active imagination. Different states of mind, many of them just 'happened' at times, and often in the 5 years between 1984 and 1989 I felt a sense of being 'asked' to notice something or felt 'driven' without knowing what was to be achieved until the task had been accomplished. That was a very subtle 'sense' and I remember feeling rewarded the way I had been when I was in school and a teacher complimented me on doing well. I suspect a memory from my past was retrieved and 'replayed'. More about that later.
I repeat this part, because it's the most important information:
" As long as this dimension of consciousness is denied existence and dissociated from our own, it will act in the manner of an unconscious autonomous complex, influencing us without our awareness in all kinds of ways. As long as we believe that consciousness begins and ends with the brain, we will never reach what we are capable of becoming - people who, like these three remarkable men, are in conscious communion with metaphysical reality."
It's not as simple as 'integrating our dark side', or identifying the 'shadow' as some have named it.
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These are a few relevant quotations concerning the affects of an encounter with the 'Voice' by different people. They came to me fairly recently. I had learned after1989 when two mindquakes happened to understand what my mind was doing, creating 'words' from what I was physically doing
These authors had different experience than my own encounter because I knew nothing and learned from it, that 'voice' what this site is about. I had early life experiences that clearly prepared for future events that I named 'mindquakes'. If I'd not had 'mindquakes' I would not be attempting to describe the 'voice' and how it was an instructor, it described it's self to me, but it had to be discovered. Reading what the variety of different experiencers that I read about after about 1995 made me aware such a pattern has become embedded in Time. I had noticed it's primary attributes when I was a very young girl. It's a kind of experience that's been written about throughout recent as well as ancient recorded history, but I knew nothing about 'it' myself in 1984 when I had the first mindquake. That event began with a 'thought' voice that spoke only once: "You are correct." A memory from my past was retrieved complete in every detail as it had occurred when I was 13 years old, and it was associated with what exactly "You are correct.' meant. Then that same thought voice spoke again: "Patterns of the past are to be the patterns of the future." Many strings of memories from my past were retrieved, they told a story in a flash of time.
What is psychoanalysis about?
1. psychoanalysis: a set of
techniques for exploring underlying motives and a method of treating various
mental disorders; based on the theories of Sigmund Freud; "his physician
recommended psychoanalysis"
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From Ann Baring's site I quote a paragraph that requires an encyclopedia of information to be understood.
"In Fischer’s own words: “What I propose is that normality, creativity, schizophrenia, and mystical states, though seemingly disparate, actually lie on a continuum. Furthermore, they represent increasing levels of arousal and a gradual withdrawal from the synchronized physical-sensory-cerebral spacetime of the normal state. Specifically, there is a retreat first to sensory-cerebral spacetime and, ultimately, to cerebral spacetime only. The gradual withdrawal from physical spacetime is an expression of the dissolution of ego boundaries, that is, the fusion of object and subject, and it implies that an existence solely in spacetime is an oceanic experience, the most intense mirroring of the ego in its own meaning.”
Her lectures are excellent. She included this below almost as an afterthought, when it seems important information that many non-professionally educated people do not know. Even most educated individuals seem to have a very shallow understanding of what these statement imply: a pattern that is almost ignored and misunderstood instantly.
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2. Ronald David Laing (19271989) is regarded as one of the most controversial and groundbreaking psychiatrists of the 1960s. Often associated with the AntiPsychiatry movement and the New Left, Laing became an icon for individual freedom by highlighting the sociopolitical construction of madness within mental health institutions; arguing that madness is an inherently human language.
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3. "I quite admit the difficulty of believing that in every man there is an eye of the soul which when by other pursuits (is) lost and dimmed, is (however) by these (the study of arithmetic/geometry) purified and illumined; and is more precious far than ten thousand bodily eyes, for by it alone is truth seen (Is more worthy of development than all the bodily senses...another translation from a different author. ) Now there are two classes of persons: one class of those who will agree with you and will take your words as a revelation; another class to whom they will be utterly unmeaning, and who will naturally deem them to be idle tales, for they see no sort of profit which is to be obtained from them. And therefore you had better decide at once with which of the two you are proposing to argue. "
Plato , Education of the Philosopher Kings, Sophia Project
,*when by other pursuits (is) lost and dimmed, is (however) by these (the study of arithmetic/geometry) purified and illumined;
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4. "The philosopher is usually interested in a central idea that evolves over a long period of time, which may never be successfully completed and formulated into words , one that may appear to be mysterious and beyond scientific validation." Piaget
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5. Let the one that has an ear listen to what THE Spirit sayeth unto* the CHURCHES(CONGREGATIONS). To him that conquers I will give some of the hidden manna. and I will give him a white pebble and upon the pebble a new name written which no one knows except the one receiving it.". *((The fact that the word 'unto' the Churches is used, rather than 'in' the churches signifies that there is only one Voice, speaking to ALL churches. ))
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6. Eternal truth needs a human language that alters with the spirit of the times." C. G. Jung
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7. The following paragraph seems to me to be the same idea, written by another person 1600 years later in Time:
FROM Arcana Coelestia 9407 p. 4: [4] But a person who is unable to think on a higher level of understanding, that is, on a level altogether above material things, cannot grasp any of this, not even the idea that it is possible for a sense to exist in the Word other than the one perceived in the letter. If that person is told that the letter holds within itself a spiritual sense which has to do with truth, and that this in turn holds within itself a celestial sense which has to do with good, and also that these senses shine through the literal sense, he will be taken aback at first, then dismiss the idea as nonsense, and finally ridicule it. Actual experience has shown me that this is what people are like in the Christian world at the present day, especially the learned, and that those who reason against that truth boast of being wiser than those who uphold it. Yet the learning in earliest times, which were called golden and silver ages, had consisted in speaking and in writing in ways in which no attention was be paid to the literal meaning other than to enable hidden wisdom to shine through it, as becomes perfectly clear from the oldest books, including those by gentile authors, as well as from fragments in their languages. For their knowledge was primarily the knowledge of correspondences and the knowledge of representations, which forms of knowledge at the present day are some of those which have been lost.
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9. After my experiments......I understood that for centuries and thousands of years human thought has been circling and circling round something that it has never succeeded in expressing." P.D. Ouspensky, A New Model Of the Universe, page 304 in the Alfred A. Knopf, Inc edition.
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10. Ernst Cassirer, Mythic Consciousness page 235
Thus far we have attempted in line with the general task of the philosophy of
Symbolic Forms to represent myth as a unitary energy of the human spirit: a
selfcontained form of interpretation which asserts itself amid all the
diversity of the objective material it presents. From this standpoint we have
attempted to disclose the objective categories of mythical thinking—not as
though we were dealing with rigid schemata of the spirit, fixed once and for
all, but with a view to finding definite original trends of formation. Behind
the vast abundance of mythical forms we have thus sought to lay bare a unitary
formative power and the laws according to which this power operates. But
myth would be no truly spiritual form if its unity signified merely a simplicity
without contradictions. Its basic form does not unfold and imprint itself on new
motifs and figures in the manner of a simple natural process; its development is
not the tranquil growth of a seed which was present and ready made from the very
first, which merely requires certain definite outward conditions in order to
unfold and make itself manifest. The separate stages of its development do not
simply follow but rather confront one another often in sharp opposition. The
progress of myth does not mean merely that certain basic traits, certain
spiritual determinations of earlier stages are developed and completed but also
that they are negated and totally eradicated. And this dialectic can be shown
not only in the transformation of the contents of the mythical consciousness but
in its dominant "inner form." It seizes upon the function of mythical
formation as such and transforms it from within. This function can operate
only by continuously producing new form—objective expressions of the inner and
outwards universe as it presents itself to the eye which the law that governs it
becomes a problem. This may seem strange at first glance for we do not usually
give the naïve mythical consciousness credit for such a change of attitude.
And indeed we have not to do with an act of conscious theoretical reflection, in
which myth apprehends itself and in which it turns against its own foundations
and presuppositions. Even in this turn the mythical consciousness remains
within itself. It does not move out of its sphere or pass into a
totally different "principle" but in completing its own cycle it ends by
breaking through it. This fulfillment which is at the same time a transcendence,
results from the relation of myth toward its own image world. Myth can manifest
itself only in this image world; as the mythical consciousness advances it comes
to see this manifestation as something "outside" which is not wholly adequate to
its own drive for expression.
Here lies the basis of the conflict which becomes gradually sharper which
creates a cleavage within the mythical consciousness and yet in this very
cleavage discloses the ultimate depths of myth. The positivistic philosophy
of history and culture as formulated especially by Comte assumes a hierarchy of
cultural development by which mankind gradually rises from the primitive phases
of consciousness.
NOTE WELL: The goal of myth and religion must
here be sought outside themselves in a fundamentally different sphere.
But then it becomes impossible to apprehend the true nature and the
purely inward dynamic of the mythicalreligious spirit. This dynamic is truly
disclosed only if it can be shown that myth and religion have within them their
own source of motion, that from their beginnings down to their supreme
productions they are determined by their own motives and fed from their own
wellsprings. Even where they pass far beyond these first beginnings they do not
abandon their native spiritual soil. Their positions do not suddenly and
immediately shift into negations; rather it can be shown that every step they
take even in their own sphere, bears as it were a two fold omen. To the
continuous building up of the mythical world there corresponds a continuous
drive to surpass it but in such a way that both the position and the negation
belong to the form of the mythical –religions consciousness itself and in it
join to constitutes a single indivisible act. The process of destruction proves
on closer scrutiny to be a process of self assertion; conversely the later can
only be effected on the basis of the former and it is only in their permanent
cooperation that the two together produce the true essence and meaning of
mythicalreligious form.
In the development of linguistic forms we
differentiated three stages which we designated as those of mimetic, analogical
and symbolic expression. Ernst Cassirer
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11. "By a playful thinking that is more persuasive than the rigor of science," Heidegger tells us, the Greek words for interpreting and interpretation—hermeneuein, hermeneiacan be traced back to the god Hermes.1 However questionable the etymological connection between Hermes and hermeneuein may be, hermeneutics, as the art of understanding and of textual exegesis, does stand under the sign of Hermes. Hermes is messenger who brings the word from Zeus (God); thus, the early modern use of the term hermeneutics was in relation to methods of interpreting holy scripture. An interpreter brought to mortals the message from God. Although the usage was broadened in the eighteenth and nineteenth century to take in methods of understanding and explicating both sacred and secular texts from antiquity, the term "hermeneutics" continued to suggest an interpretation which discloses something hidden from ordinary understanding and mysterious. Ancient texts are, for moderns, doubly alien: they are ancient and they are in another language. Their interpreter, poring over a text in Hebrew, Greek, or Latin, cannot fail to convey the impression that he has access to a body of knowledge from elsewhere, is a bridge to somewhere else, he is a mediator between a mysterious other world and the clean, welllighted intelligible world in which we live and move and 'have our being.
Hermes is just such a mediator. He is the messenger between Zeus and mortals, also between Zeus and the underworld and between the underworld and mortals. Hermes crosses these ontological thresholds with ease. A notorious thief, according to legend, he crosses the threshold of legality without a qualm. "Marshal of dreams," he mediates between waking and dreaming, day and night. Wearer of a cap of invisibility, he can become invisible or visible at will. Master of nighttricks, he can cover himself with night. Master of sleep, he can wake the sleeping or put the waking to sleep. Liminality or marginality is his very essence.
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12. Emerson, The Oversoul:
The things that are really for thee gravitate to thee. You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your mind need not. ……….O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear! Every proverb, every book, every byword that belongs to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or winding passages. Every friend whom not thy fantastic will, but the great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this, because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.
“….So come I to live in thoughts, and act with energies, which are immortal. Thus revering the soul, and learning, as the ancient said, that "its beauty is immense," man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders; he will learn that there is no profane history; that all history is sacred; that the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time. He will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live with a divine unity. He will cease from what is base and frivolous in his life, and be content with all places and with any service he can render. He will calmly front the morrow in the negligency of that trust which carries God with it, and so hath already the whole future in the bottom of the heart….”Emerson, The Oversoul
8888888888888888 This is the first 'word' I experienced, it described to me a detail in my life, at the time I read it! It described in detail a condition I did not know about myself, at the time! These paragraphs are from a fictional book: Myrtle Reed: The Weaver of Dreams 1909. The idea of 'two kinds of people' took root in my thought, and then I recognized them in my actual life.. This was a particular kind of synchronicity, it described to me, a detail of my real world life, relating to a psychological condition, symbiosis.
13.`"I don't believe you can live with other people and not absorb something from their ways of thinking and manner of expressing themselves. Moreover Aunt Cynthia has a very penetrating personality."
"All strong natures have." Chandler answered. "Some people are shaped wholly by their environment, as plastic material conforms to the receptacle in which it is placed. Others mould their environment to meet the demands of individuality."
"Can it be done?" asked Judith, thoughtfully.
"Always, if one is strong enough. From mysterious sources we draw to ourselves that which we require or expect. If a tree may lift into it's trunk the materials for sap and fibre, and if the moon may control the tides why should not thought which is the most wonderful and powerful of forces bring that which we require or expect into one's daily life, if not the absolute control of circumstances."
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14. G. Jung, 1934:
The great events of world history are at bottom profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history; here alone do the great transformations first take place and the whole future, the whole history of the world ultimately springs as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources: in individuals. In our most private and subjective lives we are not only the passive witness of our age and its suffers but also it’s makers. We make our epoch.
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15. It seemed to her that he was ready to live and die for emotional errors as women did, but that like most men he did not call them emotional errors; he called them history, philosophy, metaphysics, science." Anaïs Nin, The FourChambered Heart
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16. excerpt from: "The Politics of Experience" by R.D.Laing, chapter 3
The Mystification of Experience
It is not enough to destroy one's own and other people's experience. One must overlay this devastation by a false consciousness inured, as Marcuse puts it, to its own falsity.
Exploitation must not be seen as such. It must be seen as benevolence. Persecution preferably should not need to be invalidated as the figment of a paranoid imagination; it should be experienced as kindness. Marx described mystification and showed its function in his day. Orwell's time is already with us. The colonists not only mystify the natives, in the wasy that Fanon so clearly shows, they have to mystify themselves. We in Europe and North America are the colonists, and in order to sustain our amazing images of ourselves as God's gift to the vast majority of the starving human species, we have to interiorize our violence upon ourselves and our children and to employ the rhetoric of morality to describe this process.
In order to rationalize our industrialmilitary complex, we have to destroy our capacity to see clearly any more what is in front of, and to imagine what is beyond, our noses. Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste to our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.'s, if possible.
From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth century mother, the baby is subjected to those forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful. By the time the new human being is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves, a halfcrazed creature more or less adjusted to a mad world. This is normality in our present age.
Love and violence, properly speaking, are polar opposites. Love lets the other be, but with affection and concern. Violence attempts to constrain the other's freedom, to force him to act in the way we desire, but with ultimate lack of concern, with indifference to the other's own existence or destiny.
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
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17. "I've always
believed in numbers. In the equations and logics that lead to reason. But after
a lifetime of such pursuits, I ask, what truly is logic? Who decides reason? My
quest has taken me through physical, the metaphysical, the delusional, and
back. And I have made the most important discovery of my career.
The most important discovery of my life.
It is only in the mysterious equations of love, that any logical reasons can be
found."
~John Nash(Russell Crowe), A Beautiful Mind.
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18. "There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the form of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action. When a situation occurs which corresponds to a given archetype that archetype becomes activated and a compulsiveness appears, which, like an instinctual drive, gains its way against all reason and will, or else produces a conflict of pathological dimensions, that is to say, a neurosis."
C. G. Jung Concept of the Collective Unconscious 9.1
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19. The following paragraph is abstracted from out of a book that I read recently: "War In Heaven" by Charles Williams. I've taken this segment out to make a point about a function of mind that can be thought about as the 'abstracting sense'. It does abstract out, by a process that can be visible to anyone that notices what is going on in the mind and notices certain specific content such as in this example. It's purpose is to make certain words, events, circumstances and situations 'significant' as a 'body felt' experience. It's a kind of mental highlighter. Read the paragraph through ignoring the underlined words. Then read only the underlined words that have been abstracted out.
"When Mr. Batesby had spoken that morning it had seemed as if two streams of thingsactual events and his own meditations had flowed gently together; as if not he but Life were solving the problem in the natural process of the world. He reminded himself now that such a simplicity was unlikely; explanations did not lucidly arise from mere accidents and present themselves as all but an ordered whole."
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Hello: My purpose in providing a selection of quotations that have been abstracted out of various books, at widely varying points in Time, is to give an example of how the mind works towards finding words, where ever they occur, that create the 'voice' of the World Teacher, although I named it the Larger Domain myself. I believe Rudolph Steiner used the term 'World Teacher',
C. G. Jung wrote that there was a need for a language that changes, alters with the time.
Ideas in the past were expressed in quite different words than were popular 21 years ago. In the past 21 years language has exploded into new forms, so how can the past, reach into a moment of any individuals' 'now'?
R. D. Laing gives a very good case for the circumstance, which I can believe in myself, since the language of psychiatry itself, is derived from a drive, and it's a real drive, to 'name everything, then at some point, name everything something else, artistically, symbolically, etc.
""madness is an inherently human language.""
There is only one book that I've ever read that has a single idea that I had to have brought to my attention, over a span of several decades! The idea was in The Bridge Of San Luis Rey: An abbess is speaking to a visitor from Spain and she asks a question: "How is it with the insane in Spain? I watch them sometimes and it seems to me there is a secret about the, just around the corner, just out of sight."
“
Our unconscious is surely located in the body, and you mustn't think this is a
contradiction to the statement I usually make, that the collective unconscious
is everywhere; for if you could put yourself into your sympathetic system, you
would know what sympathy is. you would understand why the nervous system is
called sympathetic. You would then feel that you were in everything; you would
not feel yourself as an isolated being, would not experience the world and life
as your own private experience as we most certainly do inasmuch as we are
conscious persons. In the sympathetic nervous system you would experience not as
a person but as mankind, or even as belonging to the animal kingdom; you would
experience nothing in particular, but the whole phenomena of life as if it were
one. Of course you can only get hints of such an experience, as, for example,
you experience the mood of a crowd or of a place as if you were in everything
that constitutes the situation; you feel the mood of everybody and swing into it
together with the crowd. That would illustrate it to a small degree. Also on
account of the possibility of such extension you must necessarily assume that
such awareness would be without time. You would need time in order to transfer
your head consciousness to a distance and into everybody, while the kind of
perception in the sympathetic system needs no time; it is at the same time
everywhere. But you see, this collective unconscious in spite of its being
everywhere, or in spite of its universal awareness, is located in the body; the
sympathetic nervous system of the body is the organ by which you have the
possibility of such awareness; therefore you can say the collective unconscious
is in the lower centers of the brain and the spinal cord and the sympathetic
system. Speaking accurately, this is the organ by which you experience the
collective unconscious, which means as if there were nothing but you and the
world whether you are the world, or extend over the whole world, or the whole
world is in you, is all the same.
(page 174175)Jung's seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra, abridged edition,
edited and abridged by James L. Jarret; Bollingen Series XCIX(Princeton,
Princeton university press 1998) .
"...I define the unconscious as the totality of all psychic phenomena that lack
the quality of consciousness. These contents might fittingly be called
'subliminal,' on the assumption that every psychic content must possess a
certain energy value in order to become conscious at all. The lower the value of
a conscious content falls, the more easily it disapperas below the threshold.
From this it follows that the unconscious is the receptacle of all lost memories
and of all contents that are still too weak to become conscious. These contents
are products of an unconscious associative activity which also gives rise to
dreams. Besides these we must include all more or less intentional repressions
of painful thoughts and feelings. I call the sum of all these contents the
'personal unconscious.' But, over and above that, we also find in the
unconscious qualities that are not individually acquired but are inherited,
e.g., instincts as impulses to carry out actions from necessity, without
conscious motivation. In this 'deeper' stratum we also find the a priori, inborn
forms of 'intuition,' namely the archetypes of perception and apprehension,
which are the necessary a priori determinants of all psychic processes. Just as
his instincts compel man to a specifically human mode of existence, so the
archetypes force his ways of perception and apprehension into specifically human
patterns. The instincts and the archetypes together form the 'collective
unconscious.' I call it 'collective' because, unlike the personal unconscious,
it is not made up of individual and more or less unique contents but of those
which are universal and of regular occurrence. Instinct is an essentially
collective, i.e., universal and regularly occurring phenomenon which has nothing
to do with individuality. Archetypes have this quality in common with the
instincts and are likewise collective phenomena..." (From "Instinct and the
Unconscious.")
"...Just as we have been compelled to postulate the concept of an instinct
determining or regulating our conscious actions, so, in order to account for the
uniformity and regularity of our perceptions, we must have recourse to the
correlated concept of a factor determining the mode of apprehension. It is this
factor which I call the archetype or primodial image. This primodial image might
suitably be described as the instinct's perception of itself, or as the
selfportrait of the instinct, in exactly the same way as consciousness is an
inward perception of the objective lifeprocess. Just as conscious apprehension
gives our actions form and direction, so unconscious apprehension through the
archetype determines the form and direction of instinct..." (From "Instinct and
the Unconscious.")
"...In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly
personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we
tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic
system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in
all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but
is inherited. It consists of preexistent forms, the archetypes, which can only
becomce conscious secondarily and which give definte form to certain psychic
contents..." (From "The Concept of the Collective Unconscious.")
"...PSYCHOID. A concept applicable to virtually any archetype, expressing the
essentially unknown but experienceable connection between psyche and matter.
Psyche is essentially conflict between blind instinct and will (freedom of
choice). Where instinct predominates, psychoid processes set in which pertain to
the sphere of the unconscious as elements incapable of consciousness. The
psychoid process is not the unconscious as such, for this has a far greater
extension. (From “On the Nature of the Psyche.")
"...I have therefore suggested that the term 'psychic' be used only where there
is evidence of a will capable of modifying reflex or instinctual processess...The
somatic basis of the ego consists, then, of conscious and unconscious factors.
The same is true of the psychic basis: on the one hand the ego rests on the
total field of consciouness, and on the other, on the sum total of unconscious
contents...Although its bases are in themselves relatively unknown and
unconscious, the ego is a conscious factor par excellence. It is even acquired,
empirically speaking, during the individual's lifetime. It seems to arise in the
first place from the collision between the somatic factor and the environment,
and, once established as a subject, it goes on developing from further
collisions with the outer and the inner..."
Anima.
The inner feminine side of a man. (See also animus, Eros, Logos and
soulimage.)...
"The anima is both a personal complex and an archetypal image of woman in the
male psyche. It is an unconscious factor incarnated anew in every male child,
and is responsible for the mechanism of projection. Initially identified with
the personal mother, the anima is later experienced not only in other women but
as a pervasive influence in a man's life.
The anima is the archetype of life itself.["Archetypes of the Collective
Unconscious," CW 9i, par. 66.]...
"There is [in man] an imago not only of the mother but of the daughter, the
sister, the beloved, the heavenly goddess, and the chthonic Baubo. Every mother
and every beloved is forced to become the carrier and embodiment of this
omnipresent and ageless image, which corresponds to the deepest reality in a
man. It belongs to him, this perilous image of Woman; she stands for the loyalty
which in the interests of life he must sometimes forego; she is the much needed
compensation for the risks, struggles, sacrifices that all end in
disappointment; she is the solace for all the bitterness of life. And, at the
same time, she is the great illusionist, the seductress, who draws him into life
with her Mayaand not only into life's reasonable and useful aspects, but into
its frightful paradoxes and ambivalences where good and evil, success and ruin,
hope and despair, counterbalance one another. Because she is his greatest danger
she demands from a man his greatest, and if he has it in him she will receive
it.[The Syzygy: Anima and Animus," CW 9ii, par. 24]..."
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Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue by Maurice S. Friedman
Part Six -- Between Man and God
David Douglas lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he writes on environmental and religious issues. He is the author of Wilderness Sojourn, Harpers, l987, and heads the non-profit organization WATERLINES that provides clean drinking water to villages in developing countries. Martin Buber (1878-1965).was a Viennese Jewish philosopher and religious leader who translated the Old Testament into German. He was a Zionist. He sought understanding between Jews and Arabs. Published by The University of Chicago Press, 1955 and reprinted in 1960 by Harpers, N.Y. as a First Harper Torchbook edition. This material prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.
Chapter 24: Symbol, Myth, and History
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/weekrd2.htm
D132 Buber, Martin. "Myth in Judaism." Trans. Ralph Manheim. Commentary, 9(1950), 562-66.
Martin Buber:
"When the editor of Commentary suggested that a translation of this essay be published, I re-read it for the first time in many years. (It was the fourth of my seven Speeches' on Judaism and dates from 1913; my last reading of it was in preparation for the issuing of a collected edition of the Speeches; in 1923). Upon re-reading, I have the impression that it may be of some importance even today for those wanting to know about the spiritual history of Israel, and so I willingly agreed. But I should like to inform the reader that had I written the essay some years later, I would have made it clearer that real myth is the expression, not of an imaginative state of mind or of mere feeling, but of a real meeting of two Realities."
http://www.religion-online.org/cgi-bin/relsearchd.dll/showchapter?chapter_id=394
Since Ich und Du (1923) Buber’s dialogical understanding of myth has become increasingly clear. ‘Real myth,’ he wrote in 1950, ‘is the expression, not of an imaginative state of mind or of mere feeling, but of a real meeting of two Realities.’ (Introductory note by Buber, written in 1950, to Martin Buber, ‘Myth in Judaism,’ trans. by Ralph Manheim, Commentary, Vol. IX ([June 1950], p. 565 f. For the original of this essay see ’Der Mythos der Juden,’ in Vom Geist des Judentums op. cit., also reprinted in Reden über das Judentum, op. cit.) Myth is not a human narrative of a one-sided divine manifestation, as Buber once thought, but a ‘mythization’ of the memory of the meeting between God and man. Some myths contain within themselves the nexus of a concrete historical event experienced by a group or by an individual while many have lost their historical character and contain only the symbolic expression of a universal experience of man. To this latter class belong the Jewish and Zoroastrian myths of the origin of evil which Buber uses to illustrate his anthropological treatment of good and evil. He writes concerning them: ‘We are dealing here, as Plato already knew, with truths such as can be communicated adequately to the generality of mankind only in the form of myths.’ (Moses, op. cit., p. 17; Israel and the World, op. cit., ‘Biblical Leadership,’ p. 119 f.; Images of Good and Evil, op. cit., p. 12.) It is important to recognize, however, that even here countless concrete meetings of I and Thou have attained symbolic expression in the relatively abstract form. It is just this in fact which gives these myths their universality and profundity. Because these myths are products of actual human experience, they tell us something of the structure of human reality which nothing else can tell us. (Images of Good and Evil, op. cit., p. 12)
Buber’s characterization of myth as a product of the I-Thou relation finds significant support in the thought of two important modern writers on myth, Ernst Cassirer and Henri Frankfort. Buber’s distinction between the I-It and the I-Thou relations is closely similar to Cassirer’s distinction between ‘discursive’ and ‘mythical’ thinking. Discursive thinking, writes Cassirer, denotes what has already been noticed. It classifies into groups and synthesizes parts into a whole. It does not contemplate a particular case but instead gives it a fixed intellectual ‘meaning’ and definite character through linking it with other cases into a general framework of knowledge. The particular is never important in itself but only in terms of its relation to this framework. Mythical thought, on the contrary, is not concerned with relating data but with a sudden intuition, an immediate experience in which it comes to rest. ‘The immediate content . . . so fills his consciousness that nothing else can exist beside and apart from it.’ This content ‘is not merely viewed and contemplated, but overcomes a man in sheer immediacy.’ (Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. by Suzanne Langer [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946], pp. 11, 18, 27.)
This similarity between mythical thinking and the I-Thou relation is made explicit through Professor (and Mrs.) Frankfort’s use of Buber’s distinction between I-It and I-Thou, their identification of myth with the dynamically reciprocal I-Thou relation in which every faculty of man is involved, and their recognition of the unique and unpredictable character of the Thou -- ‘a presence known only in so far as it reveals itself.’
‘Thou’ is not contemplated with intellectual detachment; it is experienced as life confronting life.... The whole man confronts a living ‘Thou’ in nature; and the whole man--motional and imaginative as well as intellectual). -- gives expression to the experience. (H. and H. A. Frankfort, et. al., The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1946], p. 4 ff.)
History
Buber goes significantly beyond Cassirer and even Frankfort, however, in his understanding of the relation between history and myth. Identifying history with discursive thinking, Cassirer speaks of the historical fact as meaningful only as a member of a course of events or a teleological nexus and not in its particularity and uniqueness. Frankfort recognizes that myth arises not only in connection with man’s relation to nature, the cosmos, and the change of the seasons, but also in his relation to a transcendent God in the course of history. But when he speaks of the will of God, the chosen people, and the Kingdom of God as ‘myths,’ he tends to remove from history that concreteness which is of its very essence.
The danger of too fragile a
container. The conscious
personality cannot assimilate
the numinous impact of the
transpersonal experience and is
either fragmented by it or takes
the visions or messages
literally instead of
allowing time to assimilate and
reflect on them - a process
which may take many years.