Spiritual Journal, 10/8/01
Nov. 28th, 2001 05:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
novapsycheWe 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.
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.
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(no subject)
Date: 2001-11-28 08:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2001-11-30 02:10 am (UTC)the subconscious cant be natural since it's composed partially if not most, of associations... and those associations need not be sensical, since it's a vocabulary all its own.... and being subjective, ego-bound creatures how can the two (natural subconscios) be the same?
(no subject)
Date: 2001-11-30 02:27 am (UTC)Considering what I've been reading about neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, I feel no hesitation when saying that the subconscious and nature are the same. In truth, the conscious mind and nature are the same--they are derived from the same substance that makes up the whole of the universe. It's just that there's something about it that makes one unable to get to the bottom of it. It will be forever unknowable, because it is the subconscious.
I believe thought and all action preceding conscious thought are natural processes.
and being subjective, ego-bound creatures how can the two (natural subconscios) be the same?
I believe the ego is tied up in the analytical mind--generally speaking, the left hemisphere of the brain. The intuitive side, the right hemisphere, deals more with syntax, metaphorical speaking, spatial cognition. One might say that the analytical flows out of the subconscious, because conscious thought arises from threaded segments from the subconscious....
Hmm. I seem to be getting a bit ahead of myself.
Perhaps it is a fallacy to equate the subconscious with nature; but it is true that they share a commonality, and that commonality is that the conscious mind tries to subdue it. For man, the subconscious mind does represent nature--they are insurmountable for the exact same reason(s).
I feel like I'm talking in circles. Does this make any sense?
(no subject)
Date: 2001-11-30 04:02 am (UTC)feel no hesitation when saying that the subconscious and nature are the same. In truth, the conscious mind and nature are the same--they are derived from the same substance that makes up the whole of the universe. It's just that there's something about it that makes one unable to get to the bottom of it. It will be forever unknowable, because it is the subconscious.
i had a feeling you'd make this leap. two remarks i can make to this... though im not exactly sure what you mean by the bottom of it... i assume by it you mean the subconscious, ie, that we will never consciously understand the subconscious. 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.
1) the subconscious and the universe are physically made of the same stuff, therefore they are the same. well, duh, the conscious is grey matter as well. but you claim that conscious or atleast civilized part of man is not natural. anyway, that's a contradiction. (in the second part of your comment combined with your original post you appear to use conscious and civilized as interchangeable).
Perhaps it is a fallacy to equate the subconscious with nature; but it is true that they share a commonality, and that commonality is that the conscious mind tries to subdue it. For man, the subconscious mind does represent nature--they are insurmountable for the exact same reason(s).
2) the subconscious and nature may both have the same relationship to the mental therefore one represents the other. (your use of insurmountable is kind of odd. not sure what to make of it.) anyhow, you didnt really say how or why the subconscious represents nature. why shouldnt nature represent the subscious? anyhow, A and B may both be analogously "left" of C but that doesn't mean that A and B or the same or that A is a form of B...
what i meant to say, without really saying it in this way, (to adopt the model of supervenyance) the mental may be an emergent property of the physical but it's not a 1 to 1 relationship.
if you imagine the physical as "hardware" and the mental as "software" which writes its own code, you can have any number of mental programs created to help the "hardware" navigate the universe. of course, i understand that one might claim that the kernel of the software might be the same in each; but that neednt be if the software completely rewrites itself constantly as new information is gathered.
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'. if the natural and the subconscious were the same, that would mean they they both have the same vocabulary, and since they do not, i'd suggest that both function differently...
but of course, you havent really said what is natural... i assumed you meant some essential force of nature. i do allow that nature can be some physical tendacy, some human-nature. such as a desire to have children or to eat... but in dreams we may eat things which are not edible... we may fly. these things arent inherient in humannature... neither is driving. people also have all sorts of weird tendancies to do and desire things they may not realize. freud's subconscious, although a somewhat outdated model, is a good example of how complicated and unnatural the human mind can become in the associative functioning it gathers in life. (baggage)
(no subject)
Date: 2001-11-30 05:13 am (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2001-11-30 02:51 pm (UTC)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.
=)