Unconscious

The unconscious is a vast, dynamic thing. I understand it as a force - one which acts upon an unsuspecting ego. (Our egos, for the lay person, are the part of us that allows us to say "I." You might say: How can there be a "part" of us that says "I?" Isn't ALL of our person the "I"? This is a common misunderstanding, but ask yourself: Is your liver a part of you? Yes. Does IT say "I"? No. So we acknowledge that there are parts of ourselves that don't have the right to say "I". The ego does.)

People used to think that our ego was ourself. They did not think that the person could be measured beyond what he consciously knew. Smart people thought this. Brilliant people thought this. In fact, many people still do think this. But psychology has laid this myth to rest. Dreams, for example, are not products of the ego. That is, there is nothing volitional about them. Another example of a clearly unconscious phenomenon is when an emotion "overtakes" us. We had no intention of experiencing this emotion, or reacting to a situation as we did, but unconscious factors caused it to be so. The unconscious can often make us feel embarrassed, or ashamed. Because we are so caught up in the idea that WE, our ego, control our life, we see it as a failure when something like this comes over us.

My view of the unconscious differs somewhat from contemporary thinking. In short, I see the unconscious as the rest of your life. I see it as the sum total of possibilities of the life you have yet to live; the experiences you have yet to experience. You may ask yourself: Where, then, does the ego figure in? If the unconscious is everything you haven't done, and the unconscious is not ego, then where is our ego? I would say that the ego is, in actuality, a very small part of our psychic economy. By psychic economy I mean that part of us which can be considered psychological.

So if the unconscious is the rest of our lives, what, then, is left for the ego to do? In my view, the ego only acts as a container, or boundary. It has nothing to with the content of psychic life, only the form. It is that which gives shape to psychic activity, not psychic activity itself. If you can imagine a river where the water is the unconscious, the ego would only be the banks. It's a rough approximation, but if you were asked what constituted "the river," you would say the water. Nobody would say the banks. So too with life: the unconscious is life, in all its dynamism and power. The ego is just the walls keeping the water in one place.

The Beginning

Somehow, slowly, psyche came into being. The wind swept off the grass, the creatures came out of the sea, civilization took hold, and a dichotomy emerged. No longer was matter the sole phenomenon on planet earth. As humans began to observe and reflect, matter, astoundingly, developed another aspect. From the tree came the thought-of tree. From water came thought-of water. Now things existed in two places: on Earth, and in psyche.

It is not enough to say that the tree reflected in the psyche is "only" in one's mind. It is not enough to say these things are "just" imagination. They have a life of their own, and they belong, irrefutably, to a grand and miraculous world. The objects in the psyche do not, however, correspond precisely to those in matter, for we can easily concoct imaginary objects which will never be reflected in matter. We can also, for that matter, imagine a tree growing instantly in a psyche, whereas the same process would take years on Earth. In other words, psychic material does not adhere to the same laws that govern matter. It is the object of this (paper) to explore the laws and patterns that do govern the psyche.

In my experience, there are two primary principles at work in the psyche. One is rhythm, the other is energy. By rhythm I mean the quality of psychic experience that gives the ego an experience of repitition, even predictability. A good way to imagine this is to think of an experience in one's own life that "keeps coming up." When the lifetime is examined from a distance, one can see the "rhythmic" nature of this theme - and perhaps even hypothesize a series of "waves" as the psychic illustration of this experience.

Energy, in the psychic sense, has proven to be a difficult thing to conceptualize. The position that psychic energy mimicks the patterns of energy on Earth (i.e. energy which is classified, broadly speaking, as matter, perhaps without even being tangible, or even sense-perceptible. The key difference being that it exists "outside" of the psyche - electromagnetic fields are just one example) cannot be maintained seriously. Some have theorized a "flow" model in which psychic energy, roughly, "travels" from place A to place B, and back again. Others have theorized a "final" viewpoint in which the "energy" is already in place, and simply moves like ripples in water. For the purposes of this paper, we need not settle on one or the other model. We need not even agree that psychic material is even composed of "energy" in the conventional sense of the term. We must only agree that the psyche has dynamic qualities, and that it is characterized, most notably, by movement.

But in order to dive further into our inquiry, we must first address the question of the unconscious. As the poast 110 years of psychological science has proven, our ego-consciousness occupies a much smaller spectrum of psychic activity than previously thought. (To be continued...)

My First Blog

Hi. This is my new voice. Or one of my new voices. I'm trying to say things. I have things to say. Wanna listen? Cool.