Spiritual Journal, 10/8/01

[novapsyche]

We can no more control Nature than we can control our own unconsciousness.

Nature and the sub-/unconscious are the same. Civilized man fights both if he fight one at all.

And so it is, that humans believe they must control, master themselves, be the master in the self/world slave/master dichotomy.

If a man were to master himself, he will, at the very same instant, enslave himself. To what does he enslave himself? His intellect, or in other words the ego.

What good is eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil if, as Jung says, "We can never finally know"? The Catch-22 is clear. There cannot be any ultimate knowledge, because all knowledges are grounded in the subjective.

Yet, we still owe much to the idea of objectivity, insofar as it can be conceived as "not-subjectivity". Adding perspectives to any previously held perspectives increases knowledge; and a broad body of knowledge about any one subject in particular adds to its own capacity for having an "objective view" about said subject.

Comments

[novapsyche.livejournal.com]

both remarks here follow your unstated assumption that the mental supercedes the physical, which is the most popular euroamerican variation of the cartesian model of physical/mental realms.

If I've given this impression, I apologize. I do not subscribe to Cartesian, dualistic thought. The mental does not supercede the physical. The mental is equivalent to the physical.

but you claim that conscious or atleast civilized part of man is not natural.

This is exactly what I don't mean. The conscious mind is as natural as anything and everything else.

after all, in dreams, which are thought to be of the subconscious, we dream of driving cars, and stabbing people and marriage... im sure you'd agree with me that these things are not 'natural' that they are rather, cultural or byproducts of 'civilization'.

The dream state is extraordinarily natural. The process of dreaming is grounded, utterly grounded in the physical. It is only our experience of the dreaming that seems so odd.

Civilization, too, is natural. This is a very non-Western stance. Many Westerners think that nature is the polar opposite of civilization, and I cannot subscribe to this view. Civilization is, as we can see with the slightest of hindsight, an outgrowth of nature. It did not develop outside nature, or even alongside nature.

Just as civilization is an outgrowth of nature, so conscious thought is an outgrowth of physical processes.

Consciousness seems fluid only because of the way we perceive. The human eye views 24 frames per second because of the persistence of vision; perhaps we "view" reality as a fluid process because we have a persistence of perception. In actuality, our synapses are firing off at minute fractions of seconds, so quickly we cannot sense any time elapsing.

I think about thought a lot these days. I keep thinking we should experience thought as hurky-jerky, as discontinuous. But I know next to nothing about much of what I theorize. I'm theorizing.

I'm not as much of a materialist as it sounds. I just happen to feel that physics does seem to explain our world, and ourselves, pretty well. What physics does not explain, metaphysics fills the gap. I suppose, very technically speaking, thought could itself be considered metaphysical, as it as a phenomenon emerges from the physical; it is extraphysical.

but in dreams we may eat things which are not edible... we may fly.

The dream state is a matrix of its own. We have dreams in which we eat things, but it is not that we are really eating something inedible. The whole act is an imagining, and so only exists on the conceptual level.

Hmm. It's late (or early, depending on how you want to look at things...). I'll try to come back to this with a clearer head and less confusing, less repetitious language.

[sulphuroxide.livejournal.com]

yes well, that would be cool. it's just that your original entry makes a distinction between natural, subscious and civilized... which i dont get.

=)