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.
1 comment:
Just some thoughts... with no particular structure.
Movies are like dreams. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind seems to capture it well. The last part of that paragraph reminded me of this time i went to go see a movie by myself and ended up being the only person in the movie theater... i was totally enraptured by the movie, but every once in a while i would remember where i was... alone in a movie theatre... watching a story that was not my own. very weird feeling. kind of felt voyeuristic, really.
Have you read Gabriel Marcel's "On the Ontological Mystery?" It’s philosophy, but your description of the psyche reminds me so much of his description of being. Marcel’s definition of being is “what withstands—or what wound withstand—an exhaustive analysis bearing on the data of experience and aiming to reduce them step by step to elements increasingly devoid of intrinsic or significant value”… both descriptions of psyche and being seem to draw upon the fact that there’s “more than”. I’ve been hanging around with a great deal of atheists lately, and it seems to me that this is a defining characteristic that divides myself from them… the assertion that there is “more than” and “both”…. Marcel helps to describe despair in this way… He warns against the view of life in which a person is the sum of their functions and reliant on their theories to quell their fears. Someday, those theories will be proven wrong, they will lose their sense of control and order of the world, and fall into despair. This is different from the person who recognizes being, “what withstands,” and opens themselves up to mystery.
In reference to your paragraph on sychronicity (which I know nothing about formally), the first thing that popped into my head was C.S. Lewis’ quote, “We read to know that we are not alone.” I think Marcel touches on this idea too…. Marcel explains that deep relationships cannot be written off as insignificant, for by these relationships we are changed. They cannot be adequately explained as a series of innocent coincidences either, because this explanation of coincidences have “nothing to do with that intimate and unique affinity with which we are dealing . . . Hence I am in the presence of a mystery.” We cannot put ourselves outside, before or beyond the mystery—we are engaged in it. We are dually changed, both inwardly and outwardly by our relationship, which echoes the idea of grace in Catholicism. The physical world is working on us, and inwardly we are in a position to make a decision to act. We are neither totally independent of or dependent on the outward world. According to Marcel, in order to recognize this ontological mystery, one must be able to recollect oneself, for only then can one “transcend the dualism of being and action.” Here, in a state of recollection, one can compose one’s life—that is “it is within recollection that I take up my position . . . in regard to my life . . . I carry within me that which I am and which perhaps my life is not.” In essence, it seems that this is the process by which we compose our lives.
I’m not sure how all of this ties in… I guess I tend to know more about philosophy than psych, so my mind automatically goes there…. I certainly suggest picking up Marcel if you have the time. His essay “On the Ontological Mystery” is brief but a good overview of his work.
“that inward realization of presence through love which infinitely transcends all possible verification because it exists in an immediacy beyond all conceivable mediation”
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