Bringing the Self into Being
Our Conscious perspective experiences the Unconscious as something “other”, alien, and outside of ourselves. Understanding the nature of the Unconscious as it relates to Consciousness alleviates some of the mystery of why this is so. Only thru Conscious awareness of the existence of the Unconscious, and the many ways it can and does reveal itself and influence thought, can one begin to “own” it as a part of the Self.
For many ages past and present the Unconscious was experienced precisely as an alien, “other”, external world of powerful discarnate entities, and as such was referred to as the Spirit World. Tribes of archaic humans experienced this shadow realm, which surround them and infused their perspective at all times, as something that must be bargained with, appeased, and at the very least taken into account in relation to every human action, from childbirth to death to the sacralization of temples, homes, and tribal leaders. Although these earliest humans considered themselves to be as integral to nature as the Spirit World was, they did not understand the Spirit World to be an actual part of their psyche and its Conscious – Unconscious polarity. As such, they properly treated it as an Objective Reality, for to Consciousness in its “usual” state that is precisely what the Unconscious is, which is also why one must strive towards an Objective apprehension of their Self in its totality if one hopes to glimpse the full nature of their Absolute Self.
In all likelihood the intimacy and interdependence of the members of a prehistoric tribe contributed to a synchronized psychic reality amongst them that infused every aspect of their consciousness, both waking and sleeping, with a power of relation that crossed any possible divisions between an “I” and a “they”, which were in any case practically non-existent in the older, darker times at the dawn of human Consciousness. The blending of psychic reality for each member of the tribe had its correlative effect in a quite literal “Collective Unconscious” that served as a psychic substratum for their shared experience of reality, a Collective Unconscious that, according to the theories of Carl Jung, is governed by instinctive mentational patterns called Archetypes which are common to all humans, and are therefore more conducive to a boundary-less group psychic reality than is Consciousness itself, with or without the pressures of survival and conformity which predominated not only in prehistoric times, but continues to dominate our psychic life today. Yet true to the hypothesis I am extrapolating, the psyche of archaic humanity was, due to the emphasis upon group survival, much less divided between the Conscious and Unconscious than is the psyche in our own time, which is dominated by the Ego.
What this all amounts to is the fact that this shared psychic reality in both what could be seen, and in the much vaster realm of what could not be seen, bound the tribe so closely together that the disturbances and turmoil within the individual souls of its members could easily effect all of the others, and would be experienced as a threat to the survival of the entire group.
Since the Unconscious as such was not known, the danger came from the “spirit world”, which had to be appeased, bargained with, and even threatened – using magic against magic, spirit against spirit. This is where the Shaman came into play, for it was his role to personally enter into the spirit realm to extract the necessary knowledge and power to combat evil forces, and to heal the afflicted members of his tribe by driving the invading spirits out. As a medicine man and an interface with the world of the spirits, the shaman should be seen as the Psychonaut that he really was, and is, for it was precisely his ability and courage to enter into a direct encounter with the Unconscious and its contents (using whatever means where necessary, which in most cases involved a traditional ingestation of entheogens) that allowed the shaman to access the collective psychic substratum of the group as a whole, making him (sometimes a her, sometimes a hermaphrodite) the natural diplomat to the dark and invisible forces of the “spirit realm” that ruled life in the endless unknown beyond, and within, the magic circle of tribal consciousness. This theory also helps to explain why, from a modern psychological perspective, the diagnoses and ritualized cures employed by the shaman could achieve their intended effect. Strictly rationalist minds may readily scoff at rituals and chants as so much mumbo-jumbo, acknowledging their potential effects as a type of placebo at best. This attitude is entirely keeping with a consciousness-centric worldview that, by nature and definition, either completely ignores or only grudgingly accepts the polar nature of the psyche that encompasses a transpersonal structuring that predates the rise of individual consciousness itself: this proud youngster that all too readily takes itself for the sole meaning and measure of reality even as it breaks the surface of awareness as the mere tip of an iceberg that contains the prototypical wiring and programming which is the basis for all earthly sentience, including non and pre-human and ancestral forms, and is, according to the Jungian theory of the Collective Unconscious, the source of all of our myths, and mythological thinking itself.
To their credit, the perceptive minds of our time recognize the value of myths and the role they can play in the healing of individual and collective imbalances of the psyche. The fact that myths are often ambiguous and therefore dangerous, with the potential to further exacerbate already existing psychic and cultural imbalances if they are misused (as they where in the creation of Nazi Germany) is a further testament to their power. Medicine is power, and power is ambiguous. The correct diagnosis, followed by the correct usage and dosage, can heal; an incorrect diagnosis, followed by an incorrect usage and dosage, can maim and kill.
Consciousness and Unconsciousness exist to compliment and empower each other. The psyche cannot balance itself or evolve without the cooperation of both. Consciousness becomes easily deluded and lost when it arrogantly takes itself as the sole psychic reality. Denying and ignoring the Unconscious, which predates Consciousness and supports it, can cause the Conscious mind to become prey to the hidden impulses that influence it, and which it cannot control because it is not even aware of their existence. Control requires awareness. If one does not acknowledge, one does not see. If one does not see, one is controlled by what one does not see.
On the other side of the equation, the Unconscious perpetually attempts to make its contents conscious, yet due to the tendency of the Conscious mind to be unaware of the Unconscious activity that churns away in the darkness underneath and beyond the edges of its perimeter of light, it can often only become aware of them by the most oblique, indirect methods, such as the projection of them onto sense impressions of external objects. If the Consciousness notices these threshold contents that are winking at it from behind masks and props, it will often see them inherent to the object they are projected upon, a tendency that reinforces the perception that they come from outside, and are therefore alien qualities not of oneself. In such a way the people of archaic times and cultures viewed certain geological formations, locations, and objects as inhabited by spirits, or “numens”, which are defined by Websters Collegiate Dictionary as a “spiritual force of influence often identified with a natural object, phenomenon, or place”. Accordingly, I theorize that it is the power of the Unconscious psychic substratum that is experienced as a very real yet alien “spirit” realm external to oneself.
Within the context of this theory of the Unconscious and its Archetypes, it is permissible to postulate the Spirit World as a threshold realm where unconscious energies attempt to enter the domain of consciousness, something that can benefit both psychic polarities as a form of psychic evolution, but only if one’s Consciousness can apprehend them in this way! Modern humanity lacks the cultural-mythological context by which archaic humanity integrated such experiences, and without our own frame of reference, such as a unique personal mythology and / or a “scientific” theory of the Unconscious, such experiences may inspire doubt and fear, and lead to deliberate repression and self-denial. Direct encounters with the Unconscious and its contents are usually bizarre at the least and severely traumatic at the worst, and may be experienced as an invasion of one’s mind by an alien force, spirit, or “demon” (as archaic humanity understood it) or as the threat of psychosis and other forms of mental illness as modern humanity understands it. This possibility, based on a lack of information, presents us with the paradoxical scenario of the psyche’s “natural” and legitimate methods for balancing and evolving itself going horribly awry due to the lack of a conscious orientation that can apprehend the process from either a mythological or scientific basis, or both. From this it can be seen that it is my contention that humanity requires both a mythological-cultural and scientific basis for apprehending the functions and interplay of the polar nature of the psyche.
(As an extra note, it is worth contemplating to what extent the contents of the Unconscious may personify themselves into “entities” as they directly or indirectly approach the threshold of Consciousness. Is this impulse towards personification led by the Unconscious as a way of relating to Consciousness, or is it is led by Consciousness as a way of relating to the Unconscious, or is it a partnership between both? This question obviously proceeds from the premise that the spirit world is a threshold realm where Consciousness and the Unconscious interface)
When humanity abolished the realms of spirits and myth and magic in the name of “scientism” and “rationalism” (which I denote as an irrational use of science and rationality by use of the appendage “ism”) it delivered itself into the dark powers of the Unconscious like never before. In our own time we see science and technology advance to god-like heights, while the species that creates it edges ever closer to the abyss of crudity, somnambulism, barbarity, politico-religious fanaticism, totalitarianism, and self-destruction. People do not see in what way the strident assertion of rational”ism” fuels its seeming opposite that is not so opposite – the strident assertion of irrational”ism”. This process mirrors on a broader level what occurs within the individual psyche when one over-emphasizes ego-consciousness at the expense of the psyche in its totality as a polarized Conscious-Subconscious-Unconscious structure. As Carl Jung wrote:
“The more Christian your consciousness, the more ‘heathenish’ your unconsciousness.”
The modern theory of the Unconscious is one of many ways for modern humanity to reclaim the other, older, Unconscious portion of its psyche without surrendering the Consciousness and rationality it has worked so hard to achieve.
Leaving aside the more dramatic, direct, and rare encounters with the Unconscious, the indirect encounters with its contents can provide us with a more frequent, and therefore more common experience that we can, if we choose to, become more aware of. Proceeding from the idea that the Unconscious tries to make its contents conscious by projecting them onto sense impressions of external objects (and people) we can theoretically take a fresh look at age-old divination systems such as the Tarot, which is ideally suited to the task of capturing and framing these contents. It is possible to view Tarot cards as “mirrors” for reflecting your own Subconscious and Unconscious knowledge back at you in ways that allow the Conscious mind to grasp it in an indirect way that may not have been possible to it in any other form. Understanding the cards in this context, your perception of “divination systems” in general may be revolutionized into a rational perspective. Accordingly, the cards cannot tell you something you do not already know. To the contrary, they can only tell you what you already Do Know; yet a knowledge that is either being avoided or repressed by your conscious mind, or is altogether unexamined and Unconscious. A meaningful Tarot reading actively engages the Querent to interpret his or her own Self into the card spread, and thus ideally helps them to “see” precisely what they need to know, and already Know, but have not incorporated into Consciousness yet.
It is possible that divination systems such as the Tarot and the I-Ching, which were conceived to capture and reveal cosmic forces at work upon an individual in his or her life, were also conceived unconsciously as the perfect material means to capture and reveal the contents of the Unconscious that have throughout our lives so forcefully yet mysteriously and indirectly pressed themselves upon our consciousness in an attempt to evolve into Consciousness. If we do not consciously apprehend these attempts and integrate them into Conscious awareness, the purpose behind them will remain unfulfilled, and our progress along the path of psychic evolution will become arrested and stunted.
The “spirit world” of old is full of communications from our Unconscious self to our Conscious self. The strange, alien, “other” forces that work upon us are indeed aspects of our selves. To utilize and gain a form of control over such forces, we must recognize them as aspects of our selves, and integrate them into our Consciousness. Only when the self can be viewed from an Objective perspective that incorporates the different poles of the psyche into a Conscious partnership – does the True Self begin to come into Being.
-Werbinox
For many ages past and present the Unconscious was experienced precisely as an alien, “other”, external world of powerful discarnate entities, and as such was referred to as the Spirit World. Tribes of archaic humans experienced this shadow realm, which surround them and infused their perspective at all times, as something that must be bargained with, appeased, and at the very least taken into account in relation to every human action, from childbirth to death to the sacralization of temples, homes, and tribal leaders. Although these earliest humans considered themselves to be as integral to nature as the Spirit World was, they did not understand the Spirit World to be an actual part of their psyche and its Conscious – Unconscious polarity. As such, they properly treated it as an Objective Reality, for to Consciousness in its “usual” state that is precisely what the Unconscious is, which is also why one must strive towards an Objective apprehension of their Self in its totality if one hopes to glimpse the full nature of their Absolute Self.
In all likelihood the intimacy and interdependence of the members of a prehistoric tribe contributed to a synchronized psychic reality amongst them that infused every aspect of their consciousness, both waking and sleeping, with a power of relation that crossed any possible divisions between an “I” and a “they”, which were in any case practically non-existent in the older, darker times at the dawn of human Consciousness. The blending of psychic reality for each member of the tribe had its correlative effect in a quite literal “Collective Unconscious” that served as a psychic substratum for their shared experience of reality, a Collective Unconscious that, according to the theories of Carl Jung, is governed by instinctive mentational patterns called Archetypes which are common to all humans, and are therefore more conducive to a boundary-less group psychic reality than is Consciousness itself, with or without the pressures of survival and conformity which predominated not only in prehistoric times, but continues to dominate our psychic life today. Yet true to the hypothesis I am extrapolating, the psyche of archaic humanity was, due to the emphasis upon group survival, much less divided between the Conscious and Unconscious than is the psyche in our own time, which is dominated by the Ego.
What this all amounts to is the fact that this shared psychic reality in both what could be seen, and in the much vaster realm of what could not be seen, bound the tribe so closely together that the disturbances and turmoil within the individual souls of its members could easily effect all of the others, and would be experienced as a threat to the survival of the entire group.
Since the Unconscious as such was not known, the danger came from the “spirit world”, which had to be appeased, bargained with, and even threatened – using magic against magic, spirit against spirit. This is where the Shaman came into play, for it was his role to personally enter into the spirit realm to extract the necessary knowledge and power to combat evil forces, and to heal the afflicted members of his tribe by driving the invading spirits out. As a medicine man and an interface with the world of the spirits, the shaman should be seen as the Psychonaut that he really was, and is, for it was precisely his ability and courage to enter into a direct encounter with the Unconscious and its contents (using whatever means where necessary, which in most cases involved a traditional ingestation of entheogens) that allowed the shaman to access the collective psychic substratum of the group as a whole, making him (sometimes a her, sometimes a hermaphrodite) the natural diplomat to the dark and invisible forces of the “spirit realm” that ruled life in the endless unknown beyond, and within, the magic circle of tribal consciousness. This theory also helps to explain why, from a modern psychological perspective, the diagnoses and ritualized cures employed by the shaman could achieve their intended effect. Strictly rationalist minds may readily scoff at rituals and chants as so much mumbo-jumbo, acknowledging their potential effects as a type of placebo at best. This attitude is entirely keeping with a consciousness-centric worldview that, by nature and definition, either completely ignores or only grudgingly accepts the polar nature of the psyche that encompasses a transpersonal structuring that predates the rise of individual consciousness itself: this proud youngster that all too readily takes itself for the sole meaning and measure of reality even as it breaks the surface of awareness as the mere tip of an iceberg that contains the prototypical wiring and programming which is the basis for all earthly sentience, including non and pre-human and ancestral forms, and is, according to the Jungian theory of the Collective Unconscious, the source of all of our myths, and mythological thinking itself.
To their credit, the perceptive minds of our time recognize the value of myths and the role they can play in the healing of individual and collective imbalances of the psyche. The fact that myths are often ambiguous and therefore dangerous, with the potential to further exacerbate already existing psychic and cultural imbalances if they are misused (as they where in the creation of Nazi Germany) is a further testament to their power. Medicine is power, and power is ambiguous. The correct diagnosis, followed by the correct usage and dosage, can heal; an incorrect diagnosis, followed by an incorrect usage and dosage, can maim and kill.
Consciousness and Unconsciousness exist to compliment and empower each other. The psyche cannot balance itself or evolve without the cooperation of both. Consciousness becomes easily deluded and lost when it arrogantly takes itself as the sole psychic reality. Denying and ignoring the Unconscious, which predates Consciousness and supports it, can cause the Conscious mind to become prey to the hidden impulses that influence it, and which it cannot control because it is not even aware of their existence. Control requires awareness. If one does not acknowledge, one does not see. If one does not see, one is controlled by what one does not see.
On the other side of the equation, the Unconscious perpetually attempts to make its contents conscious, yet due to the tendency of the Conscious mind to be unaware of the Unconscious activity that churns away in the darkness underneath and beyond the edges of its perimeter of light, it can often only become aware of them by the most oblique, indirect methods, such as the projection of them onto sense impressions of external objects. If the Consciousness notices these threshold contents that are winking at it from behind masks and props, it will often see them inherent to the object they are projected upon, a tendency that reinforces the perception that they come from outside, and are therefore alien qualities not of oneself. In such a way the people of archaic times and cultures viewed certain geological formations, locations, and objects as inhabited by spirits, or “numens”, which are defined by Websters Collegiate Dictionary as a “spiritual force of influence often identified with a natural object, phenomenon, or place”. Accordingly, I theorize that it is the power of the Unconscious psychic substratum that is experienced as a very real yet alien “spirit” realm external to oneself.
Within the context of this theory of the Unconscious and its Archetypes, it is permissible to postulate the Spirit World as a threshold realm where unconscious energies attempt to enter the domain of consciousness, something that can benefit both psychic polarities as a form of psychic evolution, but only if one’s Consciousness can apprehend them in this way! Modern humanity lacks the cultural-mythological context by which archaic humanity integrated such experiences, and without our own frame of reference, such as a unique personal mythology and / or a “scientific” theory of the Unconscious, such experiences may inspire doubt and fear, and lead to deliberate repression and self-denial. Direct encounters with the Unconscious and its contents are usually bizarre at the least and severely traumatic at the worst, and may be experienced as an invasion of one’s mind by an alien force, spirit, or “demon” (as archaic humanity understood it) or as the threat of psychosis and other forms of mental illness as modern humanity understands it. This possibility, based on a lack of information, presents us with the paradoxical scenario of the psyche’s “natural” and legitimate methods for balancing and evolving itself going horribly awry due to the lack of a conscious orientation that can apprehend the process from either a mythological or scientific basis, or both. From this it can be seen that it is my contention that humanity requires both a mythological-cultural and scientific basis for apprehending the functions and interplay of the polar nature of the psyche.
(As an extra note, it is worth contemplating to what extent the contents of the Unconscious may personify themselves into “entities” as they directly or indirectly approach the threshold of Consciousness. Is this impulse towards personification led by the Unconscious as a way of relating to Consciousness, or is it is led by Consciousness as a way of relating to the Unconscious, or is it a partnership between both? This question obviously proceeds from the premise that the spirit world is a threshold realm where Consciousness and the Unconscious interface)
When humanity abolished the realms of spirits and myth and magic in the name of “scientism” and “rationalism” (which I denote as an irrational use of science and rationality by use of the appendage “ism”) it delivered itself into the dark powers of the Unconscious like never before. In our own time we see science and technology advance to god-like heights, while the species that creates it edges ever closer to the abyss of crudity, somnambulism, barbarity, politico-religious fanaticism, totalitarianism, and self-destruction. People do not see in what way the strident assertion of rational”ism” fuels its seeming opposite that is not so opposite – the strident assertion of irrational”ism”. This process mirrors on a broader level what occurs within the individual psyche when one over-emphasizes ego-consciousness at the expense of the psyche in its totality as a polarized Conscious-Subconscious-Unconscious structure. As Carl Jung wrote:
“The more Christian your consciousness, the more ‘heathenish’ your unconsciousness.”
The modern theory of the Unconscious is one of many ways for modern humanity to reclaim the other, older, Unconscious portion of its psyche without surrendering the Consciousness and rationality it has worked so hard to achieve.
Leaving aside the more dramatic, direct, and rare encounters with the Unconscious, the indirect encounters with its contents can provide us with a more frequent, and therefore more common experience that we can, if we choose to, become more aware of. Proceeding from the idea that the Unconscious tries to make its contents conscious by projecting them onto sense impressions of external objects (and people) we can theoretically take a fresh look at age-old divination systems such as the Tarot, which is ideally suited to the task of capturing and framing these contents. It is possible to view Tarot cards as “mirrors” for reflecting your own Subconscious and Unconscious knowledge back at you in ways that allow the Conscious mind to grasp it in an indirect way that may not have been possible to it in any other form. Understanding the cards in this context, your perception of “divination systems” in general may be revolutionized into a rational perspective. Accordingly, the cards cannot tell you something you do not already know. To the contrary, they can only tell you what you already Do Know; yet a knowledge that is either being avoided or repressed by your conscious mind, or is altogether unexamined and Unconscious. A meaningful Tarot reading actively engages the Querent to interpret his or her own Self into the card spread, and thus ideally helps them to “see” precisely what they need to know, and already Know, but have not incorporated into Consciousness yet.
It is possible that divination systems such as the Tarot and the I-Ching, which were conceived to capture and reveal cosmic forces at work upon an individual in his or her life, were also conceived unconsciously as the perfect material means to capture and reveal the contents of the Unconscious that have throughout our lives so forcefully yet mysteriously and indirectly pressed themselves upon our consciousness in an attempt to evolve into Consciousness. If we do not consciously apprehend these attempts and integrate them into Conscious awareness, the purpose behind them will remain unfulfilled, and our progress along the path of psychic evolution will become arrested and stunted.
The “spirit world” of old is full of communications from our Unconscious self to our Conscious self. The strange, alien, “other” forces that work upon us are indeed aspects of our selves. To utilize and gain a form of control over such forces, we must recognize them as aspects of our selves, and integrate them into our Consciousness. Only when the self can be viewed from an Objective perspective that incorporates the different poles of the psyche into a Conscious partnership – does the True Self begin to come into Being.
-Werbinox
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