For Og: Religious Authority and Magical Beliefs

marmalade · 12-08-2007, 04:51 PM

This is a post from another forum(the forum will be closed at the end of the month and so the link will be dead).

The Campbell quote is what caught my attention. I've been thinking a lot about literalist beliefs in Christianity. This gives one possible explanation. Plus, it shows the relationship between literalism and authority.

http://lightgate.net/boards/viewtopi...=7660&start=30

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jana

I think this state of pathological grandiose inflation is the fate of many a Guru and rather than true transcendence it represents infantile fusion and indissociation, that is magically and mythically charged (e.g. the purple and red in spiral dynamics). Indissociation is the term used by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) to refer to the failure of young children to differentiate themselves from their environments or objects from one another. This subjective-fusion with manifestation is similar to an infant’s magical uroboric perspective; a state of oceanic indissociation or egocentric fusion, which is undifferentiated or "one with" local environs. This infantile indissociation also lies at the root of mythic religion as the following quote from Joseph Campbell illustrates.

“We have noted that in the world of the infant the solicitude of the parent conduces to a belief that the universe is oriented to the child’s own interest and ready to respond to every thought and desire. This flattering circumstance not only reinforces the primary indissociation between inside and out, but also adds to it a further habit of command, linked to an experience of immediate effect. The resultant impression of an omnipotence of thought—the power of thought, desire, a mere nod or shriek, to bring the world to heel—Freud identified as the psychological base of magic, and the researches of Piaget and his school support this view. The child’s world is alert and alive, governed by rules of response and command, not by physical laws: a portentous continuum of consciousness endowed with purpose and intent, either resistant or responsive to the child itself. And, as we know, this infantile notion (or something much like it) of a world governed rather by moral than by physical laws, kept under control by a super-ordinated parental personality instead of impersonal physical forces, and oriented to the weal and woe of man, is an illusion that dominates men’s thought in most parts of the world—to the very present. We are dealing here with a spontaneous assumption, antecedent to all teaching, which has given rise to, and now supports, certain religious and magical beliefs, and when reinforced in turn by these remains as an absolutely ineradicable conviction, which no amount of rational thought or empirical science can quite erase.” Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology

Og · 12-08-2007, 05:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by marmalade

religious and magical beliefs, and when reinforced in turn by these remains as an absolutely ineradicable conviction, which no amount of rational thought or empirical science can quite erase.” Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology

Thanks marmalade. I think this makes a lot of sense. But I don't think that the ego or "indissociate" consciousness need be discarded. I think that's a folly of the fusion of the east and west and how all these western people think it's all cool and hippie and such to go find a guru and spend time at an ashram.

Campbell also comments about an image in an old hindu text where there are two birds in the tree of life. One is eating the fruit of the tree, and the other passively watches. And they are fast friends.

This is a balance to achieve. We all dissociate in the end. You should play the game while its here and you're here, but just remember your friend who watches.. That's what informs the transcendent truths you can see everywhere around you.

Of course, this kind of realization is in the awakened mind and there is no need to congregate to fortify one's beliefs. So, what remains, are the unawakened "Wasteland" souls who fill today's churches and fellowship halls. Consider organized religion a warm blanket under which the ego may hide until they're willing to expose themselves to the transcendent truth of their being.

Hopefully as science gets more and more necessary for survival and our biology becomes more and more integrated with the technological, these poor ideas of distinctions and boundaries will disappear.

Thanks again for sharing.

marmalade · 12-08-2007, 06:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Og

But I don't think that the ego or "indissociate" consciousness need be discarded.

If I understand you correctly, then this quote from Gerry Goddard's on-line text might apply. I just found Goddard's writings the other day and I'm really liking what I've found so far. His explanations of archetypes is very satisfying.

Transpersonal Theory & and Astrological Mandala
http://www.islandastrology.net/Chapter1.htm

Chapter 1: Counterpoints in Transpersonal Theory & the Evolution of Consciousness

The NeoJungian Perspective

Quote:

Some of the objections to the hierarchical universalist ontology can be answered by the neoJungian perspective, especially as articulated by transpersonal philosopher Michael Washburn in his concept of primary repression as the necessary foundation of the mental-ego and the consequent propulsion through its inevitable angst toward a ‘regression-in-service-of-transcendence’. The clinical experiential disclosure and mapping of the perinatal matrices by transpersonal psychotherapist and theorist Stanislav Grof similarly identifies a return to origins involving a transformative opening to the collective unconscious. In a number of works, Grof has provided an archetypal cartography of the ‘collective unconscious’ that not only identifies the primal matrices underlying certain classes of pathology, but also articulates the ontological interpenetration of biologically primal (the life-death dynamic of the birth process) and transpersonal experiential domains. The neo-Jungian view articulates the intuition that something of great value has been lost—something that we once experienced, however dimly, and with which we were once connected. Furthermore, due to the dialectical polarity of consciousness and unconsciousness, this 'something' was inevitably lost in the process of taking the next developmental step—the birth of self reflexive interiority and individual autonomy out of prior collectivity and the largely unconscious group mind. But to move on from here, to move beyond our present critical and severely imbalanced condition, we must reclaim and embrace that which we have lost—the feminine, the earth, the anima mundi.

The path of ‘individuation’ as originally articulated by Jung describes a developmental movement from a condition of identification with the centre of consciousness, an ego which had originally differentiated out from the matrix of collective unconsciousness, toward a realization of the ‘self‘, the centre and circumference of the psyche as a whole including and uniting both conscious and unconscious elements. Such a conscious-unconscious integration is not merely a modification of the ego and its drive to greater self actualization, but a radical transformation which necessarily accesses the transpersonal dimensions. We are speaking here not of a recovery of a buried aspect of the personal self, but of an archetypal dimensionality dialectically related to and as ontologically significant as the essentially agentic and masculine dimensionality that came to form the infrastructure of civilization, and of Western culture in particular.

Chapter 2: Toward an Astrological Model of Consciousness

Beyond Psychological Astrology

Quote:

The language of astrology is rooted in the very logic of ancient mythology. According to Jung (1959), “the primitive mentality does not invent myths, it experiences them. Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings…Not merely do they represent, they are the psychic life of the primitive tribe.”(p.154). In his Origin and History of Consciousness, the Jungian theorist Erich Neumann, identifies the deep psychological structures which generated the originally concrete mythic stories that lay upon the cultural surface of an evolving and developing consciousness. When subject to the insightful analysis of a Neumann, (or a Joseph Campbell, an Ernst Cassirer or a W. I. Thompson) ancient myths reveal their meanings as reflective of deep formative and developmental processes of the psyche; meanings and processes lying beyond the fully conscious knowledge of their creators. "Just as unconscious contents like dreams and fantasies tell us something about the psychic situation of the dreamer, so myths throw light on the human stage from which they originate and typify man's unconscious situation at that stage." (p.263). But what exactly are myths? In the words of Joseph Campbell (1972):

Quote:

Mythology is like the Greek god Proteus....[it] has been interpreted by the modern intellect as a primitive, fumbling effort to explain the world of nature (Frazer); as a production of poetical fantasies from prehistoric times, misunderstood by succeeding ages (Muller); as a repository of allegorical instruction, to shape the individual to his group (Durkheim); as a group dream, symptomatic of archetypal urges within the depths of the human psyche (Jung); as the traditional vehicle of man's profoundest metaphysical insights (Coomaraswamy); and as God's revelation to his children (the Church). Mythology is all of these. The various judgments are determined by the viewpoints of the judges. For when scrutinized in terms not of what it is but of how it functions, of how it has served mankind in the past, of how it may serve today, mythology shows itself to be as amenable as life itself to the obsessions and requirements of the individual, the race, the age. (pp.381,382)

According to Mircea Eliade (1959), myths cannot precisely be said to be products of the unconscious "for the mode of being of the myth is precisely that it reveals itself as myth, that is, it announces that something has been manifested in a paradigmatic manner....modern man's 'private mythologies'—his dreams, reveries, fantasies, and so on—never rise to the ontological status of myths, precisely because they are not experienced by the whole man and therefore do not transform a particular situation that is paradigmatic."(pp 209-211)

From the creation myth of the uroborus to the Great Mother to Isis and Osiris and to the epic of Gilgamesh, these myths mark distinct structures of consciousness and their transitions. For example, in describing the highly formative Gilgamesh story, the mythologist W. I. Thompson writes: "Gilgamesh is the quintessential ancient man, trying to create an ego through slaying the spirit of the forest, rejecting the deadly embrace of the goddess....When the male-bonding pair of Gilgamesh and Enkidu defy the goddess Ishtar and seek to slay the spirit of the forest to make a name for themselves, they are declaring a war on death that is at the heart of the paradox of individuation. Osiris, who is at the threshold of the transition from prehistoric culture to historic civilization, is clearly a more ancient and transitional figure than Gilgamesh, for he is not the distinct and highly individuated personality that Gilgamesh is." (p.159,163).

Erich Neumann is able to tie in the individual developmental stages with overarching historical and collective developments, thus unifying human psychology and history, a history which is more than solely a cultural history of ideas.

Quote:

When we speak of the stages of conscious development, we mean...the archetypal stages, though at the same time we have repeatedly stressed their evolutionary and historical character. These stages, with their fluctuating degrees of ego consciousness, can be shown to be archetypal; that is, they work as an "eternal presence" in the psyche of modern man and form elements of his psychic structure. The constitutive character of these stages unfolds in the historical sequence of individual development, but it is very probable that the individual's psychic structure is itself built up on the historical sequence of human development as a whole. The concept of the stages can be taken as much in the "Platonic" as in the "Aristotelian" sense; as archetypal stages of the psyche's structure they are constituents of psychic development, but they are also the result and deposit of this development all through human history. (p.264)

And just as the myths now reveal the deep structures of which they were then largely an unconscious expression, so to do the traditional stories of the astrological symbols now reveal their deeper archetypal meanings in the light of new paradigmatic insights in the social sciences and the humanities.5 Contrary to Ken Wilber’s demeaning of the cognitive significance of myth, allegedly confined as it is to expressing a concrete mode of thinking developmentally inferior to logical and conceptual thought, “…neither the negation of myth by scientific intellect nor its transmutation into logos by philosophic intellect can exhaust the essence within myth. The mythical has to be restored to the existential whence it originates in an elemental sense and within which the core of the content of its meaning can be accorded anew an existential interpretation…”(Nishitani, 173,174)

marmalade · 12-08-2007, 06:34 PM

I just noticed that you mentioned Tarnas in another thread and Goddard references Tarnas throughout his work. I own Tarnas' Cosmos and Psyche, but haven't read the whole thing yet. Here is a discussion about this book where I brought up Goddard. By the way, I highly recommend this forum if you like intelligent discussions about anything related to Jung.

http://kaleidoscope-forum.org/talk/i...4.msg23331#new

Chapter 2: Toward an Astrological Model of Consciousness

Astrological Universals: Beyond Psychological Astrology

Quote:

It is only through the postulating of complex (non-naturalistic) meanings that a planetary event can be said to correlate with an earthly condition at all. According to Richard Tarnas(1990):

Quote:

If astrological correlations are real, then the underlying Copernican, Cartesian, and Kantian basis of the modern world view is undermined at its very foundation. It does this in three ways: First, in answer to Copernicus, they [astrological correlations] suggest that the universe is patterned in a way that relates in time and space directly to the human species, that centers on this Earth, that centers even on individual human beings...Second, in answer to Descartes, astrological coincidences suggest that the physical universe is patterned according to certain formal principles or archetypes that are not merely mechanistic but are vividly personal and humanly meaningful...and that therefore the world is not a machine but is ensouled, an anima mundi...And finally, in answer to Kant, these astrological coincidences suggest that the universe can indeed be known by the human mind, because the universe's operative principles are principles with which human experience is directly and intimately familiar from within — that is to say, the universe's operative principles are archetypes which are both subjective and objective, simultaneously informing not only human experience but also planetary motions. As Plato affirmed, the categories of the human mind are also categories of a universal mind, the two minds being intimately connected. [my emphasis] (pp. 4-5)

Astrological meanings somehow transcend and inform who we are, or who we are is unfolding through our conscious participation with the symbols, rather than the symbolic meanings being simply our inventions projected upon the physical reality conceived in terms of the astrological geometry. The formative archetypal principles cannot be located strictly within the psyche as Jung attempted to do in his middle 'Kantian' period. But as Tarnas points out, later on Jung came to adopt a view of archetypes "as autonomous patterns of meaning that appear to structure and inhere in both psyche and matter, thereby in effect dissolving the modern subject-object dichotomy. Archetypes in this view were more mysterious than a priori categories—more ambiguous in their ontological status, less easily restricted to a specific dimension, more like the original Platonic and Neoplatonic conception of the archetypes." (1991, 425. See Jung 1973, 1959.) Rather than the strictly psychological concept of archetype, it is this more transcendent view of archetypal principles that superintend both consciousness and world, both psyche and cosmos which is suggested by astrological correlation. Just as mystical experience cannot, legitimately, be summarily rejected on the grounds of mere subjectivism or even pathology but must be investigated on its own terms, so too astrology must properly be investigated in terms of the epistemological structure and logical form of its own truth claims—claims which, grounded in a connectivity of subject and object, articulate meaningful connections among varied apparently noncausally related phenomena.

AB517 · 12-09-2007, 10:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Og

Quote:

Originally Posted by marmalade

religious and magical beliefs, and when reinforced in turn by these remains as an absolutely ineradicable conviction, which no amount of rational thought or empirical science can quite erase.” Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology

Thanks marmalade. I think this makes a lot of sense. But I don't think that the ego or "indissociate" consciousness need be discarded. I think that's a folly of the fusion of the east and west and how all these western people think it's all cool and hippie and such to go find a guru and spend time at an ashram.

Campbell also comments about an image in an old hindu text where there are two birds in the tree of life. One is eating the fruit of the tree, and the other passively watches. And they are fast friends.

This is a balance to achieve. We all dissociate in the end. You should play the game while its here and you're here, but just remember your friend who watches.. That's what informs the transcendent truths you can see everywhere around you.

Of course, this kind of realization is in the awakened mind and there is no need to congregate to fortify one's beliefs. So, what remains, are the unawakened "Wasteland" souls who fill today's churches and fellowship halls. Consider organized religion a warm blanket under which the ego may hide until they're willing to expose themselves to the transcendent truth of their being.

Hopefully as science gets more and more necessary for survival and our biology becomes more and more integrated with the technological, these poor ideas of distinctions and boundaries will disappear.

Thanks again for sharing.

I have a question.

What do you mean by "dissociate in the end?"

Also, don't you see the technological heading towards "copy the biological?" Unless you mean technology as just a tool and what it is made of is irrelevant.

If boundaries are completely gone, nothing can exist.

marmalade · 12-09-2007, 06:13 PM

http://primal-page.com/grofken.htm

Quote:

The critical issue here is that "regressive" experiences, not only perinatal and prenatal, but also ancestral, racial, karmic, phylogenetic, and even those that reach farther back into the history of the cosmos often seem to form an integral part of spiritual opening. Whether we interpret this fact as the transpersonal awareness re-entering these archaic structures, as Ken prefers to describe it, or as manifestation of transpersonal potential inherent within them seems less relevant. Since, according to perennial philosophy and Ken's own system, all of creation and the entire evolution in nature and in the cosmos is, in the last analysis, created by involution of Absolute Consciousness, I do not see any need to treat these elements as inherently different from the spiritual realm. The fact that superior creative intelligence guides the creative process and manifests on all its levels certainly leaves such a possibility open.

In any case, Ken severely misunderstands the nature of perinatal experiences if he sees them as nothing but a replay of the actual experience of the fetus. His main objection is that regression to the pre- and perinatal state cannot convey any revelations about existence, because "the fetus in the womb is not aware of the whole world of inter-subjective morals, art, logic, poetry, history, and economics" (Wilber 1995, 755). I do not see, however, how this makes any difference, since in discussing perinatal experiences, we are not talking about the fetus, but about an adult who is reliving the experiences of the fetus. This regression is experienced by an individual with differentiated personality and intellectual faculties that include and integrate the development through all the postnatal fulcrums. This vast amount of information is not lost during the regressive experience and forms an integral part of it. It certainly is conceivable that the NOSC facilitates an entirely new creative integration of all structures with the transpersonal domain, thus facilitating the unfolding of still new structures. Similar mechanisms have played an important role not only in religious revelations, but also in many scientific discoveries and artistic inspirations (Harman 1984).