The cell phone. The television. The movie camera. The computer. All exist, all at one time did not exist, and all have always had the potential to exist. Therefore, all are mere locations on the spaceless, timeless map of collective psychic terrain.
Think about it. We didn't just invent the stuff that cell phones, TVs and computers are made of. The stuff was here. The universe, remarkably, made it possible for these things to exist. Satellites, spaceships, remote controls - all this stuff works. The Earth could have very easily
not had the materials to make these things, but it did. Surely it took human ingenuity to assemble them - but these technologies were all bound to happen because they were possible. It's kind of amazing, when you stop to ponder it: all these things are of the Earth - from the Earth. They have forever been possible to make. The difference is that now they are manifest. Now our minds have stumbled upon the pathways to make them.
So we should not delude ourselves in thinking that our prized technological creations are pure invention. They are discoveries, to be sure, but not invention. Nor should we fool ourselves into believing they are "advancements." Technology is not making our lives "easier." This is a misguided fiction that is circulating, and it needs to stop. A thing like the internet may make it easier to communicate with your relatives in India, and a thing like the satellite may make it easier to detect the weather patterns of the next few days. These things unequivocally help - they may even save lives - but they have not made life, as a phenomenon, easier. Life is always hard, and it will continue to be hard ten generations of technological evolution down the road.
What is really happening is change. This should not, I must stress again, be confused with "progress." There is absolutely no forward line of development that we are cruising upon. This worldview is only an illusion produced by the psyche. The psyche naturally makes images, and, in the example of Time, when the psyche has not expanded enough to make room for alternate conceptions of Time, creates a straight line by default. But there is evidence to suggest a view of time that is circular, or even shapeless.
It may help, in this exposition, to imagine the collective psychic activity of human beings - all thoughts, images, emotions, actions (both conscious and unconscious) that ever were and ever will be - as a gigantic "cloud" in an invisible, psychic sphere. This "cloud" is of course only a crude pictoral representation, but it is far from ridiculous, as the facts of mythology (where similar - even identical - motifs appear in disparate cultures without their intermingling) - not to mention Buddhism and other religious/philosophical traditions - seem to support some such phenomenon, regardless of whether or not it looks like a cloud. It (and here we are talking about psychic, not physical, reality) could just as easily be called "the human experience." It just requires a little imagination. (And if we cannot imagine, what can we do?)
My cartoonish illustration of the psychic world aids in communicating a crucial fact: when individual humans encounter any psychic territory at all (as happens in every mind in every moment of every day) it becomes manifest, lifting it out of a state of "unmanifest." As I mentioned above, the unconscious comes to us consciously in four discrete forms. Put another way, we might say that there are only four things that we can be conscious of: physical action, emotion, image, and thought. If you think you've been conscious of something else, look closer and you'll notice that it is either a combination of the above that can be broken down into two or more of the four elementary forms, or a "hint" of (or vague "push" from) the not-yet-formed, unmanifest (and unconscious) cloud.
(One example of this is an "impression" or psychic "graze." For example, you can be impressed by a great pass and catch at a football game, but until you speak it or make a point of thinking to yourself, "That was a great pass," it is not consicous. It was only lingering in an impression-state. These "impressions" cannot be given a distinct category, but they are everywhere. They are almost conscious, but not quite.)
So now, to return to technology: we must of course distinguish between the minds of the few who created the technology, and the minds of the many that use it. It seems, just as is the case with prophets and seers, that the idea for a new technology enters the world through a single, or a relatively small number of psyches, and then, as it spreads to other, more numerous, using minds enters the collective psyche. Thomas Edison is a good example. Things like a more efficient way to use electricity to light things, and the phonograph, seemingly came through this unique personality. But no matter who the idea came from, it soon started showing up on the psychic registers of everybody who witnessed it. This is what I mean by psychic territory.
Now, the psychic territory that the lightbulb occupies is new, but, as detailed above, it did not appear out of thin air. It must have existed in an unmanifest state in the domain of the "cloud," or collective unconscious. The interesting part is that Edison's lightbulb became not only an external object with which people began to be familiar, but electric light itself became a more frequent psychic content. A psychic version of electricity was now at play. This was a monumental change in the history of the human psyche. No longer was this light-phenomenon relegated to occasional appearances courtesy of Mother Nature. Now it existed in common, and it has forever altered the nature of the human psyche.
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Thursday, November 17, 2005
Dreams and Movies
It strikes me as very interesting that movies were invented right around the time that Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams. For the uninitiated, the Lumiere brothers, Louis and Auguste, of France, are generally credited with making and showing the first "movies" (on their camera-projector-in-one, the "cinematograph") in Paris in 1895. Five years later, the first modern, methodical analysis of dreams appeared, courtesy of Freud's hands and mind.
Movies are much like dreams. In fact, if we were to pick a psychic phenomenon to match up with the material phenomenon of movies, it would unquestionably be dreams. Dreams are the only psychic event that hold our attention as thoroughly and as exclusively as movies. When we dream, we experience the dream as the only thing happening. Everything is of the dream. So too with movies. In the darkened theater, or the living room, nothing else exists except for what is on the screen.
There are many other parallels like this, where minds and things seem to curiously intersect in time. For example, in the 1960s and 70s, when computers (not PCs yet, of course) were coming of age, psychologists, and others who took an interest in the human mind, began to conceive the mind as functioning very much like a computer. There's input, and depending on how we are "programmed," there's a given output. There will be those that say that one caused the other: either computers made us think of our minds like that, or our minds made computers act like that, but this line of thought fails to appreciate the new psychic "territory" that computers inhabit. It is as if our collective psyches evolved into a place that was ripe for the advent of computers.
Certainly, too, we have all had the experience of something in our inner lives matching something in our outer lives: We are reading a book, and a scene or a character or an event in the book matches a scenario or a person or a chance happening in our lives. When we experience these things we get a great rush. A sense of connectivity comes over us, as if inner and outer are merging into an indistinguishable whole. Carl Jung called these experiences synchronous, and gave a term, synchronicity, to the phenomenon as a whole.
The world, too, gives birth to remarkable synchronicities - they are not just individual in scale. The movie-dream phenomenon strikes me as one of these, as does the computer-mind model. But how? Using Jung's idea of the collective unconscious, we can imagine that there is an unseen collective psychic world that informs our individual psychic activity. (Much as all of our physical bodies operate according to the same, evolution-influenced patterns, so too are our minds collectively similar.) After all, we are not simply just independent automotons. So long as we believe we are able to "connect" with other people, there must be some ground on which connection occurs - some hard-wired, connection-ready material at our disposal. It is most certainly invisible, but it would be difficult to deny it were there.
This invisible world must, in my estimation, stand in relation to the visible world - especially if we notice synchronous events with any frequency. Furthermore, it seems right to hypothesize a mirroring effect. One does not necessarily change the other, but, rather, they are parallel processes. They grow side-by-side. We may even go so far as to say they are two aspects of the same thing. This, of course, brings us back to the age-old dichotomy of matter and psyche: How can psyche affect matter? How on earth, as I alluded to above, do we connect with things that are outside of us? I am not only talking about people, but also things, plants, animals, environments.
Again, neurologists will cite brain circuitry that receives signals from our sensory "input" and "outputs" them for our understanding - but really, do have any idea how this works? Do we have any idea, for that matter, how we can call upon an image, or a memory, at a moment's notice? Are these images really "stored" in a specific location in the brain, and then "retreived," a la the computer? To this point, brain/memory research has not been able to produce evidence of a system that works this mechanically. It seems reasonable, then, to postulate a phenomenon (and here I am speaking of the psyche) which stands over and above (but certainly not entirely separate from) material/physical processes. (Of course it will be forever difficult to say where the brain ends and the psyche begins. This simply seems beyond our intellectual power as humans. It may be better, really, to get unscientific about it and imagine them as both separate and connected by a kind of inconceivable fluidity.)
So what is my point? That the inner world is growing with the outer world. That there are two, even though they look like one: We didn't just begin thinking of our minds like machines at the dawn of the industrial era (e.g. "The wheels are turning, now!" or "I'm a little rusty...") by accident. Michael Jordan's talent for baseketball wasn't just a coincidence. Did you ever think that he was lucky to be born at a time when basketball existed? Did you ever think Bill Gates was lucky to have been born at a time when the world was ready for computers? It wasn't just luck: Their minds matched the environment. The two were uniquely suited for each other.
Movies are much like dreams. In fact, if we were to pick a psychic phenomenon to match up with the material phenomenon of movies, it would unquestionably be dreams. Dreams are the only psychic event that hold our attention as thoroughly and as exclusively as movies. When we dream, we experience the dream as the only thing happening. Everything is of the dream. So too with movies. In the darkened theater, or the living room, nothing else exists except for what is on the screen.
There are many other parallels like this, where minds and things seem to curiously intersect in time. For example, in the 1960s and 70s, when computers (not PCs yet, of course) were coming of age, psychologists, and others who took an interest in the human mind, began to conceive the mind as functioning very much like a computer. There's input, and depending on how we are "programmed," there's a given output. There will be those that say that one caused the other: either computers made us think of our minds like that, or our minds made computers act like that, but this line of thought fails to appreciate the new psychic "territory" that computers inhabit. It is as if our collective psyches evolved into a place that was ripe for the advent of computers.
Certainly, too, we have all had the experience of something in our inner lives matching something in our outer lives: We are reading a book, and a scene or a character or an event in the book matches a scenario or a person or a chance happening in our lives. When we experience these things we get a great rush. A sense of connectivity comes over us, as if inner and outer are merging into an indistinguishable whole. Carl Jung called these experiences synchronous, and gave a term, synchronicity, to the phenomenon as a whole.
The world, too, gives birth to remarkable synchronicities - they are not just individual in scale. The movie-dream phenomenon strikes me as one of these, as does the computer-mind model. But how? Using Jung's idea of the collective unconscious, we can imagine that there is an unseen collective psychic world that informs our individual psychic activity. (Much as all of our physical bodies operate according to the same, evolution-influenced patterns, so too are our minds collectively similar.) After all, we are not simply just independent automotons. So long as we believe we are able to "connect" with other people, there must be some ground on which connection occurs - some hard-wired, connection-ready material at our disposal. It is most certainly invisible, but it would be difficult to deny it were there.
This invisible world must, in my estimation, stand in relation to the visible world - especially if we notice synchronous events with any frequency. Furthermore, it seems right to hypothesize a mirroring effect. One does not necessarily change the other, but, rather, they are parallel processes. They grow side-by-side. We may even go so far as to say they are two aspects of the same thing. This, of course, brings us back to the age-old dichotomy of matter and psyche: How can psyche affect matter? How on earth, as I alluded to above, do we connect with things that are outside of us? I am not only talking about people, but also things, plants, animals, environments.
Again, neurologists will cite brain circuitry that receives signals from our sensory "input" and "outputs" them for our understanding - but really, do have any idea how this works? Do we have any idea, for that matter, how we can call upon an image, or a memory, at a moment's notice? Are these images really "stored" in a specific location in the brain, and then "retreived," a la the computer? To this point, brain/memory research has not been able to produce evidence of a system that works this mechanically. It seems reasonable, then, to postulate a phenomenon (and here I am speaking of the psyche) which stands over and above (but certainly not entirely separate from) material/physical processes. (Of course it will be forever difficult to say where the brain ends and the psyche begins. This simply seems beyond our intellectual power as humans. It may be better, really, to get unscientific about it and imagine them as both separate and connected by a kind of inconceivable fluidity.)
So what is my point? That the inner world is growing with the outer world. That there are two, even though they look like one: We didn't just begin thinking of our minds like machines at the dawn of the industrial era (e.g. "The wheels are turning, now!" or "I'm a little rusty...") by accident. Michael Jordan's talent for baseketball wasn't just a coincidence. Did you ever think that he was lucky to be born at a time when basketball existed? Did you ever think Bill Gates was lucky to have been born at a time when the world was ready for computers? It wasn't just luck: Their minds matched the environment. The two were uniquely suited for each other.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Music and space
To our two eyes, the sound of music does not look like anything. To our five senses, it strikes us as a merely auditory phenomenon. But when we examine how music interacts with the psyche, we discover a different picture.
We have all heard the expression "the music filled the room." We have also, at other times, probably had the experience of music filling our "hearts." But since all of our experiences, without exception, are conditioned by the psyche, music must also fill the psyche. Here it may be advantageous to begin a discussion about the shape of the psyche.
Now, one is of course inclined to raise the objection that since we cannot see the psyche we therefore are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to describing its shape. This objection might hold some water if we did not have some access to unconscious processes. But in fact we do. For example, the emotions that overtake us seem, unmistakably, to come in waves. (They may of course strike us, subjectively, as tsunamis or ripples - but there is something unmistakably wave-like about them, something that differentiates them from thoughts.)
Thoughts, on the other hand, seem to come in a thinner form, and there is something about them that is "straighter" than emotion. One may very well get the sensation that a thought - a breakthrough, perhaps - is numinous, or "more than just a thought" but this apparent "thickness" is due only to the presence of an accompanying emotion. (Would anyone deny that, by and large, emotions are more powerful than - and therefore distinct from - thoughts? We may mince words about the definition of "powerful," but the fact is that the subjective experience of an emotion usually affects the individual to a greater degree than the subjective experience of a thought.)
So here we have discussed at least two aspects of psychic content, which helps us imagine the psyche as composed of distinct elements (see "Rumblings... Music" for more detail). But its structure (which, however, is closely aligned with its content) for the time being, remains a mystery. What of matter, then? In an earlier post I hypothesized that since the psyche is the sole conditioner of all experience, we are actually experiencing psyche when we encounter the material world. We do not directly experience the computer, for example, but rather, the psychic version of the computer. This of course seems immeasurably strange - even otherworldly - to the average reader, but the student of the psyche knows that an unmediated experience of the natural world is impossible. All experience - and here we must also include the experiences of animals - is necessarily filtered by a subjective factor, namely the psyche. For example, it is well known that two people may perceive the same object to be two slightly different colors. If we listen only to the neurologists and ophthalmologists we will remain convinced that this is due to differences in the brains and the eyes of the observers. But these specialists will, time and again, ignore the role of the psyche, which towers above physical processes in determining the character of our perceptions.
So, with the psyche as the all-encompassing mediating factor that I argue it to be, it stands to reason that our above-mentioned computer is not only material, but also psychic as well. This raises an interesting question: is the psychic computer an image of a computer, or does it have dimensionality like objects in the material world? Is there room, in other words, to speak of a three-dimensional psychic computer? Is that a too-absurd notion to consider?
If the psyche is as far-reaching as we say it is, can we afford to imagine it as some flat, static disc or some other such two-dimensional configuration? It is something, and it would seem to make more sense to characterize it with the same dynamism with which it animates us. Among other things, this means describing it in three dimensions.
Here again (see "The Difference" for additional discussion) I shall urge the reader to step out of the convention of the age and try to imagine a psyche which is not confined to our heads. If we can manage this feat of imagination (another product of the psyche, I might add), then we can begin to appreciate the psyche for what it is: a vast (as vast as the universe, perhaps!) network of connections, sparks, waves and forces. This characterization may seem overwhelming, outlandish, or both, but the psyche is not the physical world; thus we cannot imagine it in physical terms. It operates according to its own non-Newtonian, non-Einsteinian laws, which lay open for our discovery.
Here I have drifted a bit far from my opening musings on music, but I'll end here and keep the title unaltered, as music and psyche are awfully close relatives.
We have all heard the expression "the music filled the room." We have also, at other times, probably had the experience of music filling our "hearts." But since all of our experiences, without exception, are conditioned by the psyche, music must also fill the psyche. Here it may be advantageous to begin a discussion about the shape of the psyche.
Now, one is of course inclined to raise the objection that since we cannot see the psyche we therefore are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to describing its shape. This objection might hold some water if we did not have some access to unconscious processes. But in fact we do. For example, the emotions that overtake us seem, unmistakably, to come in waves. (They may of course strike us, subjectively, as tsunamis or ripples - but there is something unmistakably wave-like about them, something that differentiates them from thoughts.)
Thoughts, on the other hand, seem to come in a thinner form, and there is something about them that is "straighter" than emotion. One may very well get the sensation that a thought - a breakthrough, perhaps - is numinous, or "more than just a thought" but this apparent "thickness" is due only to the presence of an accompanying emotion. (Would anyone deny that, by and large, emotions are more powerful than - and therefore distinct from - thoughts? We may mince words about the definition of "powerful," but the fact is that the subjective experience of an emotion usually affects the individual to a greater degree than the subjective experience of a thought.)
So here we have discussed at least two aspects of psychic content, which helps us imagine the psyche as composed of distinct elements (see "Rumblings... Music" for more detail). But its structure (which, however, is closely aligned with its content) for the time being, remains a mystery. What of matter, then? In an earlier post I hypothesized that since the psyche is the sole conditioner of all experience, we are actually experiencing psyche when we encounter the material world. We do not directly experience the computer, for example, but rather, the psychic version of the computer. This of course seems immeasurably strange - even otherworldly - to the average reader, but the student of the psyche knows that an unmediated experience of the natural world is impossible. All experience - and here we must also include the experiences of animals - is necessarily filtered by a subjective factor, namely the psyche. For example, it is well known that two people may perceive the same object to be two slightly different colors. If we listen only to the neurologists and ophthalmologists we will remain convinced that this is due to differences in the brains and the eyes of the observers. But these specialists will, time and again, ignore the role of the psyche, which towers above physical processes in determining the character of our perceptions.
So, with the psyche as the all-encompassing mediating factor that I argue it to be, it stands to reason that our above-mentioned computer is not only material, but also psychic as well. This raises an interesting question: is the psychic computer an image of a computer, or does it have dimensionality like objects in the material world? Is there room, in other words, to speak of a three-dimensional psychic computer? Is that a too-absurd notion to consider?
If the psyche is as far-reaching as we say it is, can we afford to imagine it as some flat, static disc or some other such two-dimensional configuration? It is something, and it would seem to make more sense to characterize it with the same dynamism with which it animates us. Among other things, this means describing it in three dimensions.
Here again (see "The Difference" for additional discussion) I shall urge the reader to step out of the convention of the age and try to imagine a psyche which is not confined to our heads. If we can manage this feat of imagination (another product of the psyche, I might add), then we can begin to appreciate the psyche for what it is: a vast (as vast as the universe, perhaps!) network of connections, sparks, waves and forces. This characterization may seem overwhelming, outlandish, or both, but the psyche is not the physical world; thus we cannot imagine it in physical terms. It operates according to its own non-Newtonian, non-Einsteinian laws, which lay open for our discovery.
Here I have drifted a bit far from my opening musings on music, but I'll end here and keep the title unaltered, as music and psyche are awfully close relatives.
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Rumblings... Music
My next big topic is music. Music. That thing we know so much about in our hearts, but very little about in our heads. Why does it have such an emotional impact on us? What is going on when a song provokes a certain emotion? What is happening when a song gives us a particular piece of imagery? Why do lyrics to random songs pop in our heads from time to time? Why does it stir us? And why do we crave it? I do not propose to have hard and fast answers to these questions - only observations about the psyche, which I believe plays a prominent role in determining the extent to which, how, and when we are affected by music. This is, for the most part, uncharted territory - so forgive me is my language is clumsy.
There seem to be unique forces in the psyche, as I have mentioned above. Can we deny that thoughts are different from emotions? Can we deny that emotions and images are distinct? I don't think so. So the psyche both produces and interacts with these various forces. Is it permissible to call them thought-force, emotion-force, image-force? Well, I don't know. We don't know how they move, but they most certainly move. And even if we cannot describe which way they are moving, how fast they are going, along which route they are traveling, etc - they most certainly move in and out of both your and my psyche. Something is propelling them - or seemingly propelling them. They have a dynamism, this is clear.
Music, or melody, seems to be another one of these "forces." A song pops into our head, and that is different from a thought, which is different from an emotion, which is different from an image. Here, though, we come to the question: well, how many different varieties of psychic "substances" are there? It would be silly to put a cap on it when one considers the vastness of psychic experience. Can we lump all bodily experiences - all physical sensations? - into one type of psychic "force?" (Here again the word force should be understood as referring only to the quality of movement "through" the psyche - or, "in" and "out" of consciousness. No further qualitative modifiers can be added with any certainty.) How about matter? Can all our experiences of matter (as distinguished from entities - such as thoughts - that are confined to the psyche) be lumped into one kind of psychic phenomenon? And what about numbers? Do they all belong to a certain type of psychic species? We cannot be certain.
The only thing we can be certain about is that there are distinctions. There are unique types of psychic entities.
There seem to be unique forces in the psyche, as I have mentioned above. Can we deny that thoughts are different from emotions? Can we deny that emotions and images are distinct? I don't think so. So the psyche both produces and interacts with these various forces. Is it permissible to call them thought-force, emotion-force, image-force? Well, I don't know. We don't know how they move, but they most certainly move. And even if we cannot describe which way they are moving, how fast they are going, along which route they are traveling, etc - they most certainly move in and out of both your and my psyche. Something is propelling them - or seemingly propelling them. They have a dynamism, this is clear.
Music, or melody, seems to be another one of these "forces." A song pops into our head, and that is different from a thought, which is different from an emotion, which is different from an image. Here, though, we come to the question: well, how many different varieties of psychic "substances" are there? It would be silly to put a cap on it when one considers the vastness of psychic experience. Can we lump all bodily experiences - all physical sensations? - into one type of psychic "force?" (Here again the word force should be understood as referring only to the quality of movement "through" the psyche - or, "in" and "out" of consciousness. No further qualitative modifiers can be added with any certainty.) How about matter? Can all our experiences of matter (as distinguished from entities - such as thoughts - that are confined to the psyche) be lumped into one kind of psychic phenomenon? And what about numbers? Do they all belong to a certain type of psychic species? We cannot be certain.
The only thing we can be certain about is that there are distinctions. There are unique types of psychic entities.
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