Miguel Conner, Gnosticism and the Evil Question |446|

Food for thought, the human mind has 15,000 to 20,000
Thoughts a day so when you die, what do your thoughts do? split up in to 15, 000 afterlifes?
Most likely it splits into a single life, having 15000 to 20000 thoughts per ... well the concept of time is seemingly different, so number of thoughts per day probably cannot be quantified. But I see no reason for disintegration. The body isn't the thing which keeps us whole. The body, on the other hand, will tend to disintegrate, by processes of natural decay, if nothing else (e.g. cremation would lead to the more rapid disintegration and dispersal). Evidence from reincarnation shows that a whole consciousness persists over much longer timescales, by human standards at least.
 
Wow interesting story, I notice lots of people have a messianic messiah complex especially new agers and occultists, never heard a voice but my own. I don't know if horus ra is an alien or not or if God is real, maybe it's just because of the cultural imprinting?

I have said this before but want to re-emphasize...

I don't "do" religion and my world view does not hold to the assumption a "third party 'God Thingie'" is fundamental. I will point out that I have found the "thing" among Traditionalists (a stream within the perennialists - the perennial philosophy) that claim their "metaphysics" is the "correct" metaphysics and they speak of something they call, "one's personal God."

My experience has suggested to me that "my personal God" is similar to what some call "the higher self" or one's "guardian angel" (understand I am not meaning these terms literally) - and I would be foolish not to consider "that which I might view as my personal God" is the Demiurge.

What is incredible (and incredibly addicting and thus, perhaps, meant to be distracting), is how I seem to have a personal relationship with the "manifest reality itself" as it arises... and I have developed to the point that I can have conversations with "it" which, if a camera and microphone were always focused on my environment (as if from my physically located point of view) and a recording could be made of the thoughts I have in my mind as they arise in conjunction with what arises in the manifest reality, I would be able to provide definitive proof that "it" is completely alive and sentient... "it" being all that is not "me" in this specific zone of overall reality we sometimes call "consensus reality."

Alas, I don't have the former (video/audio) and the latter is impossible (thought recorder) and thus I am left with knowing this is actually happening, understanding the incredibility of it and that I am. thus far, alone in this type of experience though I would make odds super high there are others like me... I just don't know them.
 
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Most likely it splits into a single life, having 15000 to 20000 thoughts per ... well the concept of time is seemingly different, so number of thoughts per day probably cannot be quantified. But I see no reason for disintegration. The body isn't the thing which keeps us whole. The body, on the other hand, will tend to disintegrate, by processes of natural decay, if nothing else (e.g. cremation would lead to the more rapid disintegration and dispersal). Evidence from reincarnation shows that a whole consciousness persists over much longer timescales, by human standards at least.
Yes but so does the brain which harvest the thoughts
 
Food for thought, the human mind has 15,000 to 20,000
Thoughts a day so when you die, what do your thoughts do? split up in to 15, 000 afterlifes?
Assuming you meant the question as a question, I would first point out that thoughts are things - not a source of any doing.

And that (ok, in my opinion) life is A source - individual and not divisible though with also the characteristic non-local.

Thoughts being things made (not life itself) are local (in the time and within the place you choose to put them).


These being the premise therefore, the real quantity of thoughts per day need not be addressed.
 
Assuming you meant the question as a question, I would first point out that thoughts are things - not a source of any doing.

And that (ok, in my opinion) life is A source - individual and not divisible though with also the characteristic non-local.

Thoughts being things made (not life itself) are local (in the time and within the place you choose to put them).


These being the premise therefore, the real quantity of thoughts per day need not be addressed.
The premise here is that people have experienced "heaven" and "hell" both those concepts require thinking, thoughts and imagination. When people claim they go to these places what apparatus are they using? When you die your body decays, the mind decays which holds thoughts, images, sounds, imagination, memory, creativity etc. The eyes that reflect the light wither away, your sense of smell and taste as well. So how exactly does the soul "experience" an afterlife? This goes directly against the people dying and lends more credence to the DMT theory. Also what kinds of afterlife did pre Christians experience before the invention of "heaven or hell" if they had no concept of it?
 
The premise here is that people have experienced "heaven" and "hell" both those concepts require thinking, thoughts and imagination. When people claim they go to these places what apparatus are they using? When you die your body decays, the mind decays which holds thoughts, images, sounds, imagination, memory, creativity etc. The eyes that reflect the light wither away, your sense of smell and taste as well. So how exactly does the soul "experience" an afterlife? This goes directly against the people dying and lends more credence to the DMT theory. Also what kinds of afterlife did pre Christians experience before the invention of "heaven or hell" if they had no concept of it?
Again there is an unsubstantiated assertion here:
"When you die [.. omitted ...] the mind decays which holds thoughts, images, sounds, imagination, memory, creativity etc."
It really isn't possible to respond to such a post except by asking for evidence to support the postulate. I would add that there is a substandial body of evidence which falsifies the assertion.
 
Again there is an unsubstantiated assertion here:

It really isn't possible to respond to such a post except by asking for evidence to support the postulate. I would add that there is a substandial body of evidence which falsifies the assertion.
Whats false about it? What will you "debunk" it with?
 
The premise here is that people have experienced "heaven" and "hell" both those concepts require thinking, thoughts and imagination. When people claim they go to these places what apparatus are they using? When you die your body decays, the mind decays which holds thoughts, images, sounds, imagination, memory, creativity etc. The eyes that reflect the light wither away, your sense of smell and taste as well. So how exactly does the soul "experience" an afterlife? This goes directly against the people dying and lends more credence to the DMT theory. Also what kinds of afterlife did pre Christians experience before the invention of "heaven or hell" if they had no concept of it?
Very good questions and only suggestion could be available.
Your reality is first precedence.

My opinion, consciousness itself is not germane to the nature of life. The nature of life, in my opinion, is knowing.
Consciousness is "locked" in time. Knowing is not locked in time.

So, if possible, I guess trying to notice the differences of these two things might allow your answer to be worthy of your consideration of truths.
 
yeah... man oh man. I see it like this - as two questions.

Do "I" (as an individuated conscious agent) have the opportunity to survive the death of my physical body? If so, do I want to?

So, in answering for myself, if it is possible, I want to (at least that's how I feel about it today).

And so, I bet on the "possibility "I" (as an individuated conscious agent) can survive the death of my body. And guess what? If I made the wrong bet, what do I stand to lose? Nothing.

And if I bet "I" end existence upon the death of "my body" and I am wrong, I have to consider the opportunity I might be missing with regards to my soul which, for me, seems potentially "good" for others... producing a "less selfish" foundation for my daily operation, both in this life, and after (be there such).
 
yeah... man oh man. I see it like this - as two questions.

Do "I" (as an individuated conscious agent) have the opportunity to survive the death of my physical body? If so, do I want to?

So, in answering for myself, if it is possible, I want to (at least that's how I feel about it today).

And so, I bet on the "possibility "I" (as an individuated conscious agent) can survive the death of my body. And guess what? If I made the wrong bet, what do I stand to lose? Nothing.

And if I bet "I" end existence upon the death of "my body" and I am wrong, I have to consider the opportunity I might be missing with regards to my soul which, for me, seems potentially "good" for others... producing a "less selfish" foundation for my daily operation, both in this life, and after (be there such).
Super.
I really like this Sam guy. And I like most of his perspectives.
Sharp! This point of where there is nothing to lose if "nothing" goes to "nothing" at death. That is the the lowest of possibilities, so why bother any betting on it.
 
“Dr. Evans-Wentz has entrusted me with the task of commenting on a text which contains an important exposition of Eastern “psychology.” The very fact that I have to use quotation marks shows the dubious applicability of this term. It is perhaps not superfluous to mention that the East has produced nothing equivalent to what we call psychology, but rather philosophy or metaphysics. Critical philosophy, the mother of modern psychology, is as foreign to the East as to medieval Europe. Thus the word “mind,” as used in the East, has the connotation of something metaphysical. Our Western conception of mind has lost this connotation since the Middle Ages, and the word has now come to signify a “psychic function.” Despite the fact that we neither know nor pretend to know what “psyche” is, we can deal with the phenomenon of “mind.” We do not assume that the mind is a metaphysical entity or that there is any connection between an individual mind and a hypothetical Universal Mind. Our psychology is, therefore, a science of mere phenomena without any metaphysical implications. The development of Western philosophy during the last two centuries has succeeded in isolating the mind in its own sphere and in severing it from its primordial oneness with the universe. Man himself has ceased to be the microcosm and eidolon of the cosmos, and his “anima” is no longer the consubstantial scintilla, or spark of the Anima Mundi, the World Soul. Psychology accordingly treats all metaphysical claims and assertions as mental phenomena, and regards them as statements about the mind and its structure that derive ultimately from certain unconscious dispositions. It does not consider them to be absolutely valid or even capable of establishing a metaphysical truth. We have no intellectual means of ascertaining whether this attitude is right or wrong. We only know that there is no evidence for, and no possibility of proving, the validity of a metaphysical postulate such as “Universal Mind.” If the mind asserts the existence of a Universal Mind, we hold that it is merely making an assertion. We do not assume that by such an assertion the existence of a Universal Mind has been established. There is no argument against this reasoning, but no evidence, either, that our conclusion is ultimately right. In other words, it is just as possible that our mind is nothing but a perceptible manifestation of a Universal Mind. Yet we do not know, and we cannot even see, how it would be possible to recognize whether this is so or not. Psychology therefore holds that the mind cannot establish or assert anything beyond itself. If, then, we accept the restrictions imposed upon the capacity of our mind, we demonstrate our common sense. I admit it is something of a sacrifice, inasmuch as we bid farewell to that miraculous world in which mind-created things and beings move and live. This is the world of the primitive, where even inanimate objects are endowed with a living, healing, magic power, through which they participate in us and we in them. Sooner or later we had to understand that their potency was really ours, and that their significance was our projection. The theory of knowledge is only the last step out of humanity’s childhood, out of a world where mind-created figures populated a metaphysical heaven and hell. Despite this inevitable epistemological criticism, however, we have held fast to the religious belief that the organ of faith enables man to know God. The West thus developed a new disease: the conflict between science and religion. The critical philosophy of science became as it were negatively metaphysical —in other words, materialistic—on the basis of an error in judgment; matter was assumed to be a tangible and recognizable reality. Yet this is a thoroughly metaphysical concept hypostatized by uncritical minds. Matter is an hypothesis. When you say “matter,” you are really creating a symbol for something unknown, which may just as well be “spirit” or anything else; it may even be God. Religious faith, on the other hand, refuses to give up its pre-critical Weltanschauung. In contradiction to the saying of Christ, the faithful try to remain children instead of becoming as children. They cling to the world of childhood. A famous modern theologian confesses in his autobiography that Jesus has been his good friend “from childhood on.” Jesus is the perfect example of a man who preached something different from the religion of his forefathers. But the imitatio Christi does not appear to include the mental and spiritual sacrifice which he had to undergo at the beginning of his career and without which he would never have become a saviour. The conflict between science and religion is in reality a misunderstanding of both. Scientific materialism has merely introduced a new hypostasis, and that is an intellectual sin. It has given another name to the supreme principle of reality and has assumed that this created a new thing and destroyed an old thing. Whether you call the principle of existence “God”, “matter”, “energy” or anything else you like, you have created nothing; you have simply changed a symbol. The materialist is a metaphysician malgré lui. Faith, on the other hand, tries to retain a primitive mental condition on merely sentimental grounds. It is unwilling to give up the primitive, childlike relationship to mind-created and hypostatized figures; it wants to go on enjoying the security and confidence of a world still presided over by powerful, responsible, and kindly parents. Faith may include a sacrificium intellectus (provided there is an intellect to sacrifice), but certainly not a sacrifice of feeling. In this way the faithful remain children instead of becoming as children, and they do not gain their life because they have not lost it. Furthermore, faith collides with science and thus gets its deserts, for it refuses to share in the spiritual adventure of our age. Any honest thinker has to admit the insecurity of all metaphysical positions, and in particular of all creeds. He has also to admit the unwarrantable nature of all metaphysical assertions and face the fact that there is no evidence whatever for the ability of the human mind to pull itself up by its own bootstrings, that is, to establish anything transcendental. Materialism is a metaphysical reaction against the sudden realization that cognition is a mental faculty and, if carried beyond the human plane, a projection. The reaction was “metaphysical” in so far as the man of average philosophical education failed to see through the implied hypostasis, not realizing that “matter” was just another name for the supreme principle. As against this, the attitude of faith shows how reluctant people were to accept philosophical criticism. It also demonstrates how great is the fear of letting go one’s hold on the securities of childhood and of dropping into a strange, unknown world ruled by forces unconcerned with man. Nothing really changes in either case; man and his surroundings remain the same. He has only to realize that he is shut up inside his mind and cannot step beyond it, even in insanity; and that the appearance of his world or of his gods very much depends upon his own mental condition. In the first place, the structure of the mind is responsible for anything we may assert about metaphysical matters, as I have already pointed out. We have also begun to understand that the intellect is not an ens per se, or an independent mental faculty, but a psychic function dependent upon the conditions of the psyche as a whole. A philosophical statement is the product of a certain personality living at a certain time in a certain place, and not the outcome of a purely logical and impersonal procedure. To that extent it is chiefly subjective; whether it has an objective validity or not depends on whether there are few or many persons who argue in the same way. The isolation of man within his mind as a result of epistemological criticism has naturally led to psychological criticism. This kind of criticism is not popular with the philosophers, since they like to consider the philosophic intellect as the perfect and unconditioned instrument of philosophy. Yet this intellect of theirs is a function dependent upon an individual psyche and determined on all sides by subjective conditions, quite apart from environmental influences. Indeed, we have already become so accustomed to this point of view that “mind” has lost its universal character altogether. It has become a more or less individualized affair, with no trace of its former cosmic aspect as the anima rationalis. Mind is understood nowadays as a subjective, even an arbitrary, thing. Now that the formerly hypostatized “universal ideas” have turned out to be mental principles, it is dawning upon us to what an extent our whole experience of so-called reality is psychic; as a matter of fact, everything thought, felt, or perceived is a psychic image, and the world itself exists only so far as we are able to produce an image of it. We are so deeply impressed with the truth of our imprisonment in, and limitation by, the psyche that we are ready to admit the existence in it even of things we do not know: we call them “the unconscious.” The seemingly universal and metaphysical scope of the mind has thus been narrowed down to the small circle of individual consciousness, profoundly aware of its almost limitless subjectivity and of its infantile-archaic tendency to heedless projection and illusion. Many scientifically-minded persons have even sacrificed their religious and philosophical leanings for fear of uncontrolled subjectivism. By way of compensation for the loss of a world that pulsed with our blood and breathed with our breath, we have developed an enthusiasm for—mountains of facts, far beyond any single individual’s power to survey. We have the pious hope that this incidental accumulation of facts will form a meaningful whole, but nobody is quite sure, because no human brain can possibly comprehend the gigantic sum total of this mass-produced knowledge. The facts bury us, but whoever dares to speculate must pay for it with a bad conscience—and rightly so, for he will instantly be tripped up by the facts. Western psychology knows the mind as the mental functioning of a psyche. It is the “mentality” of an individual. An impersonal Universal Mind is still to be met with in the sphere of philosophy, where it seems to be a relic of the original human “soul.” This picture of our Western outlook may seem a little drastic, but I do not think it is far from the truth. At all events, something of the kind presents itself as soon as we are confronted with the Eastern mentality. In the East, mind is a cosmic factor, the very essence of existence; while in the West we have just begun to understand that it is the essential condition of cognition, and hence of the cognitive existence of the world. There is no conflict between religion and science in the East, because no science is there based upon the passion for facts, and no religion upon mere faith; there is religious cognition and cognitive religion. With us, man is incommensurably small and the grace of God is everything; but in the East, man is God and he redeems himself. The gods of Tibetan Buddhism belong to the sphere of illusory separateness and mind-created projections, and yet they exist; but so far as we are concerned an illusion remains an illusion, and thus is nothing at all. It is a paradox, yet nevertheless true, that with us a thought has no proper reality; we treat it as if it were a nothingness. Even though the thought be true in itself, we hold that it exists only by virtue of certain facts which it is said to formulate. We can produce a most devastating fact like the atom bomb with the help of this ever-changing phantasmagoria of virtually nonexistent thoughts, but it seems wholly absurd to us that one could ever establish the reality of thought itself. Psychic reality” is a controversial concept, like “psyche” or “mind.” By the latter terms some understand consciousness and its contents, others allow the existence of “dark” or “subconscious” representations. Some include instincts in the psychic realm, others exclude them. The vast majority consider the psyche to be a result of biochemical processes in the brain cells. A few conjecture that it is the psyche that makes the cortical cells function. Some identify “life” with psyche. But only an insignificant minority regards the psychic phenomenon as a category of existence per se and draws the necessary conclusions. It is indeed paradoxical that the category of existence, the indispensable sine qua non of all existence, namely the psyche, should be treated as if it were only semi-existent. Psychic existence is the only category of existence of which we have immediate knowledge, since nothing can be known unless it first appears as a psychic image. Only psychic existence is immediately verifiable. To the extent that the world does not assume the form of a psychic image, it is virtually non-existent. This is a fact which, with few exceptions—as for instance in Schopenhauer’s philosophy—the West has not yet fully realized. But Schopenhauer was influenced by Buddhism and by the Upanishads. Even a superficial acquaintance with Eastern thought is sufficient to show that a fundamental difference divides East and West. The East bases itself upon psychic reality, that is, upon the psyche as the main and unique condition of existence. It seems as if this Eastern recognition were a psychological or temperamental fact rather than a result of philosophical reasoning. It is a typically introverted point of view, contrasted with the equally typical extraverted point of view of the West. Introversion and extraversion are known to be temperamental or even constitutional attitudes which are never intentionally adopted in normal circumstances. In exceptional cases they may be produced at will, but only under very special conditions. Introversion is, if one may so express it, the “style” of the East, an habitual and collective attitude, just as extraversion is the “style” of the West. Introversion is felt here as something abnormal, morbid, or otherwise objectionable. Freud identifies it with an autoerotic, “narcissistic” attitude of mind. He shares his negative position with the National Socialist philosophy of modern Germany, which accuses introversion of being an offence against community feeling. In the East, however, our cherished extraversion is depreciated as illusory desirousness, as existence in the samsara, the very essence of the nidãna-chain which culminates in the sum of the world’s sufferings. Anyone with practical knowledge of the mutual depreciation of values between introvert and extravert will understand the emotional conflict between the Eastern and the Western standpoint. For those who know something of the history of European philosophy the bitter wrangling about “universals” which began with Plato will provide an instructive example. I do not wish to go into all the ramifications of this conflict between introversion and extraversion, but I must mention the religious aspects of the problem. The Christian West considers man to be wholly dependent upon the grace of God, or at least upon the Church as the exclusive and divinely sanctioned earthly instrument of man’s redemption. The East, however, insists that man is the sole cause of his higher development, for it believes in “self-liberation.” The religious point of view always expresses and formulates the essential psychological attitude and its specific prejudices, even in the case of people who have forgotten, or who have never heard of, their own religion. In spite of everything, the West is thoroughly Christian as far as its psychology is concerned. Tertullian’s aninia naturaliler Christiana holds true throughout the West—not, as he thought, in the religious sense, but in a psychological one. Grace comes from elsewhere; at all events from outside. Every other point of view is sheer heresy. Hence it is quite understandable why the human psyche is suffering from undervaluation. Anyone who dares to establish a connection between the psyche and the idea of God is immediately accused of “psychologism” or suspected of morbid “mysticism.” The East, on the other hand, compassionately tolerates those “lower” spiritual stages where man, in his blind ignorance of karma, still bothers about sin and tortures his imagination with a belief in absolute gods, who, if he only looked deeper, are nothing but the veil of illusion woven by his own unenlightened mind. The psyche is therefore all-important; it is the all-pervading Breath, the Buddha-essence; it is the Buddha-Mind, the One, the Dharrjiakdya. All existence emanates from it, and all separate forms dissolve back into it. This is the basic psychological prejudice that permeates Eastern man in every fibre of his being, seeping into all his thoughts, feelings, and deeds, no matter what creed he professes. In the same way Western man is Christian, no matter to what denomination his Christianity belongs. For him man is small inside, he is next to nothing; moreover, as Kierkegaard says, “before God man is always wrong.” By fear, repentance, promises, submission, self-abasement, good deeds, and praise he propitiates the great power, which is not himself but totaliter aliter, the Wholly Other, altogether perfect and “outside,” the only reality. If you shift the formula a bit and substitute for God some other power, for instance the world or money, you get a complete picture of a Western man—assiduous, fearful, devout, self-abasing, enterprising, greedy, and violent in his pursuit of the goods of this world: possessions, health, knowledge, technical mastery, public welfare, political power, conquest, and so on. What are the great popular movements of our time? Attempts to grab the money or property of others and to protect our own. The mind is chiefly employed in devising suitable *’isms” to hide the real motives or to get more loot. I refrain from describing what would happen to Eastern man should he forget his ideal of Buddhahood, for I do not want to give such an unfair advantage to my Western prejudices. But I cannot help raising the question of whether it is possible, or indeed advisable, for either to imitate the other’s standpoint. The difference between them is so vast that one can see no reasonable possibility of this, much less its advisability. You cannot mix fire and water. The Eastern attitude stultifies the Western, and vice versa. You cannot be a good Christian and redeem yourself, nor can you be a Buddha and worship God. It is much better to accept the conflict, for it admits only of an irrational solution, if any. By an inevitable decree of fate the West is becoming acquainted with the peculiar facts of Eastern spirituality. It is useless either to belittle these facts, or to build false and treacherous bridges over yawning gaps. Instead of learning the spiritual techniques of the East by heart and imitating them in a thoroughly Christian way—imitatio Christ—with a correspondingly forced attitude, it would be far more to the point to find out whether there exists in the unconscious an introverted tendency similar to that which has become the guiding spiritual principle of the East. We should then be in a position to build on our own ground with our own methods. If we snatch these things directly from the East, we have merely indulged our Western acquisitiveness, confirming yet again that “everything good is outside,” whence it has to be fetched and pumped into our barren souls. It seems to me that we have really learned something from the East when we understand that the psyche contains riches enough without having to be primed from outside, and when we feel capable of evolving out of ourselves with or without divine grace. But we cannot embark upon this ambitious enterprise until we have learned how to deal with our spiritual pride and blasphemous self-assertiveness. The Eastern attitude violates the specifically Christian values, and it is no good blinking this fact. If our new attitude is to be genuine, i.e., grounded in our own history, it must be acquired with full consciousness of the Christian values and of the conflict between them and the introverted attitude of the East. We must get at the Eastern values from within and not from without, seeking them in ourselves, in the unconscious. We shall then discover how great is our fear of the unconscious and how formidable are our resistances. Because of these resistances we doubt the very thing that seems so obvious to the East, namely, the self-liberating power of the introverted mind. This aspect of the mind is practically unknown to the West, though it forms the most important component of the unconscious. Many people flatly deny the existence of the unconscious, or else they say that it consists merely of instincts, or of repressed or forgotten contents that were once part of the conscious mind. It is safe to assume that what the East calls “mind” has more to do with our “unconscious” than with mind as we understand it, which is more or less identical with consciousness. To us, consciousness is inconceivable without an ego; it is equated with the relation of contents to an ego. If there is no ego there is nobody to be conscious of anything. The ego is therefore indispensable to the conscious process. The Eastern mind, however, has no difficulty in conceiving of a consciousness without an ego. Consciousness is deemed capable of transcending its ego condition; indeed, in its “higher” forms, the ego disappears altogether. Such an ego-less mental condition can only be unconscious to us, for the simple reason that there would be nobody to witness it. I do not doubt the existence of mental states transcending consciousness. But they lose their consciousness to exactly the same degree that they transcend consciousness. I cannot imagine a conscious mental state that does not relate to a subject, that is, to an ego. The ego may be depotentiated—divested, for instance, of its awareness of the body—but so long as there is awareness of something, there must be somebody who is aware. The unconscious, however, is a mental condition of which no ego is aware. It is only by indirect means that we eventually become conscious of the existence of an unconscious. We can observe the manifestation of unconscious fragments of the personality, detached from the patient’s consciousness, in insanity. But there is no evidence that the unconscious contents are related to an unconscious centre analogous to the ego; in fact there are good reasons why such a centre is not even probable. The fact that the East can dispose so easily of the ego seems to point to a mind that is not to be identified with our “mind.” Certainly the ego does not play the same role in Eastern thought as it does with us. It seems as if the Eastern mind were less egocentric, as if its contents were more loosely connected with the subject, and as if greater stress were laid on mental states which include a depotentiated ego. It also seems as if hatha yoga were chiefly useful as a means for extinguishing the ego by fettering its unruly impulses. There is no doubt that the higher forms of yoga, in so far as they strive to reach samadhi, seek a mental condition in which the ego is practically dissolved. Consciousness in our sense of the word is rated a definitely inferior condition, the state of avidya (ignorance), whereas what we call the “dark background of consciousness” is understood to be a “higher” consciousness. Thus our concept of the “collective unconscious” would be the European equivalent of buddhi, the enlightened mind.” — Carl Gustav Jung, “The difference between Eastern and Western thinking.”, C.W. 11, Psychology and Religion: West and East, paragraphs 759-775 Artwork |
 
“Dr. Evans-Wentz has entrusted me with the task of commenting on a text which contains an important exposition of Eastern “psychology.” The very fact that I have to use quotation marks shows the dubious applicability of this term. It is perhaps not superfluous to mention that the East has produced nothing equivalent to what we call psychology, but rather philosophy or metaphysics. Critical philosophy, the mother of modern psychology, is as foreign to the East as to medieval Europe. Thus the word “mind,” as used in the East, has the connotation of something metaphysical. Our Western conception of mind has lost this connotation since the Middle Ages, and the word has now come to signify a “psychic function.” Despite the fact that we neither know nor pretend to know what “psyche” is, we can deal with the phenomenon of “mind.” We do not assume that the mind is a metaphysical entity or that there is any connection between an individual mind and a hypothetical Universal Mind. Our psychology is, therefore, a science of mere phenomena without any metaphysical implications. The development of Western philosophy during the last two centuries has succeeded in isolating the mind in its own sphere and in severing it from its primordial oneness with the universe. Man himself has ceased to be the microcosm and eidolon of the cosmos, and his “anima” is no longer the consubstantial scintilla, or spark of the Anima Mundi, the World Soul. Psychology accordingly treats all metaphysical claims and assertions as mental phenomena, and regards them as statements about the mind and its structure that derive ultimately from certain unconscious dispositions. It does not consider them to be absolutely valid or even capable of establishing a metaphysical truth. We have no intellectual means of ascertaining whether this attitude is right or wrong. We only know that there is no evidence for, and no possibility of proving, the validity of a metaphysical postulate such as “Universal Mind.” If the mind asserts the existence of a Universal Mind, we hold that it is merely making an assertion. We do not assume that by such an assertion the existence of a Universal Mind has been established. There is no argument against this reasoning, but no evidence, either, that our conclusion is ultimately right. In other words, it is just as possible that our mind is nothing but a perceptible manifestation of a Universal Mind. Yet we do not know, and we cannot even see, how it would be possible to recognize whether this is so or not. Psychology therefore holds that the mind cannot establish or assert anything beyond itself. If, then, we accept the restrictions imposed upon the capacity of our mind, we demonstrate our common sense. I admit it is something of a sacrifice, inasmuch as we bid farewell to that miraculous world in which mind-created things and beings move and live. This is the world of the primitive, where even inanimate objects are endowed with a living, healing, magic power, through which they participate in us and we in them. Sooner or later we had to understand that their potency was really ours, and that their significance was our projection. The theory of knowledge is only the last step out of humanity’s childhood, out of a world where mind-created figures populated a metaphysical heaven and hell. Despite this inevitable epistemological criticism, however, we have held fast to the religious belief that the organ of faith enables man to know God. The West thus developed a new disease: the conflict between science and religion. The critical philosophy of science became as it were negatively metaphysical —in other words, materialistic—on the basis of an error in judgment; matter was assumed to be a tangible and recognizable reality. Yet this is a thoroughly metaphysical concept hypostatized by uncritical minds. Matter is an hypothesis. When you say “matter,” you are really creating a symbol for something unknown, which may just as well be “spirit” or anything else; it may even be God. Religious faith, on the other hand, refuses to give up its pre-critical Weltanschauung. In contradiction to the saying of Christ, the faithful try to remain children instead of becoming as children. They cling to the world of childhood. A famous modern theologian confesses in his autobiography that Jesus has been his good friend “from childhood on.” Jesus is the perfect example of a man who preached something different from the religion of his forefathers. But the imitatio Christi does not appear to include the mental and spiritual sacrifice which he had to undergo at the beginning of his career and without which he would never have become a saviour. The conflict between science and religion is in reality a misunderstanding of both. Scientific materialism has merely introduced a new hypostasis, and that is an intellectual sin. It has given another name to the supreme principle of reality and has assumed that this created a new thing and destroyed an old thing. Whether you call the principle of existence “God”, “matter”, “energy” or anything else you like, you have created nothing; you have simply changed a symbol. The materialist is a metaphysician malgré lui. Faith, on the other hand, tries to retain a primitive mental condition on merely sentimental grounds. It is unwilling to give up the primitive, childlike relationship to mind-created and hypostatized figures; it wants to go on enjoying the security and confidence of a world still presided over by powerful, responsible, and kindly parents. Faith may include a sacrificium intellectus (provided there is an intellect to sacrifice), but certainly not a sacrifice of feeling. In this way the faithful remain children instead of becoming as children, and they do not gain their life because they have not lost it. Furthermore, faith collides with science and thus gets its deserts, for it refuses to share in the spiritual adventure of our age. Any honest thinker has to admit the insecurity of all metaphysical positions, and in particular of all creeds. He has also to admit the unwarrantable nature of all metaphysical assertions and face the fact that there is no evidence whatever for the ability of the human mind to pull itself up by its own bootstrings, that is, to establish anything transcendental. Materialism is a metaphysical reaction against the sudden realization that cognition is a mental faculty and, if carried beyond the human plane, a projection. The reaction was “metaphysical” in so far as the man of average philosophical education failed to see through the implied hypostasis, not realizing that “matter” was just another name for the supreme principle. As against this, the attitude of faith shows how reluctant people were to accept philosophical criticism. It also demonstrates how great is the fear of letting go one’s hold on the securities of childhood and of dropping into a strange, unknown world ruled by forces unconcerned with man. Nothing really changes in either case; man and his surroundings remain the same. He has only to realize that he is shut up inside his mind and cannot step beyond it, even in insanity; and that the appearance of his world or of his gods very much depends upon his own mental condition. In the first place, the structure of the mind is responsible for anything we may assert about metaphysical matters, as I have already pointed out. We have also begun to understand that the intellect is not an ens per se, or an independent mental faculty, but a psychic function dependent upon the conditions of the psyche as a whole. A philosophical statement is the product of a certain personality living at a certain time in a certain place, and not the outcome of a purely logical and impersonal procedure. To that extent it is chiefly subjective; whether it has an objective validity or not depends on whether there are few or many persons who argue in the same way. The isolation of man within his mind as a result of epistemological criticism has naturally led to psychological criticism. This kind of criticism is not popular with the philosophers, since they like to consider the philosophic intellect as the perfect and unconditioned instrument of philosophy. Yet this intellect of theirs is a function dependent upon an individual psyche and determined on all sides by subjective conditions, quite apart from environmental influences. Indeed, we have already become so accustomed to this point of view that “mind” has lost its universal character altogether. It has become a more or less individualized affair, with no trace of its former cosmic aspect as the anima rationalis. Mind is understood nowadays as a subjective, even an arbitrary, thing. Now that the formerly hypostatized “universal ideas” have turned out to be mental principles, it is dawning upon us to what an extent our whole experience of so-called reality is psychic; as a matter of fact, everything thought, felt, or perceived is a psychic image, and the world itself exists only so far as we are able to produce an image of it. We are so deeply impressed with the truth of our imprisonment in, and limitation by, the psyche that we are ready to admit the existence in it even of things we do not know: we call them “the unconscious.” The seemingly universal and metaphysical scope of the mind has thus been narrowed down to the small circle of individual consciousness, profoundly aware of its almost limitless subjectivity and of its infantile-archaic tendency to heedless projection and illusion. Many scientifically-minded persons have even sacrificed their religious and philosophical leanings for fear of uncontrolled subjectivism. By way of compensation for the loss of a world that pulsed with our blood and breathed with our breath, we have developed an enthusiasm for—mountains of facts, far beyond any single individual’s power to survey. We have the pious hope that this incidental accumulation of facts will form a meaningful whole, but nobody is quite sure, because no human brain can possibly comprehend the gigantic sum total of this mass-produced knowledge. The facts bury us, but whoever dares to speculate must pay for it with a bad conscience—and rightly so, for he will instantly be tripped up by the facts. Western psychology knows the mind as the mental functioning of a psyche. It is the “mentality” of an individual. An impersonal Universal Mind is still to be met with in the sphere of philosophy, where it seems to be a relic of the original human “soul.” This picture of our Western outlook may seem a little drastic, but I do not think it is far from the truth. At all events, something of the kind presents itself as soon as we are confronted with the Eastern mentality. In the East, mind is a cosmic factor, the very essence of existence; while in the West we have just begun to understand that it is the essential condition of cognition, and hence of the cognitive existence of the world. There is no conflict between religion and science in the East, because no science is there based upon the passion for facts, and no religion upon mere faith; there is religious cognition and cognitive religion. With us, man is incommensurably small and the grace of God is everything; but in the East, man is God and he redeems himself. The gods of Tibetan Buddhism belong to the sphere of illusory separateness and mind-created projections, and yet they exist; but so far as we are concerned an illusion remains an illusion, and thus is nothing at all. It is a paradox, yet nevertheless true, that with us a thought has no proper reality; we treat it as if it were a nothingness. Even though the thought be true in itself, we hold that it exists only by virtue of certain facts which it is said to formulate. We can produce a most devastating fact like the atom bomb with the help of this ever-changing phantasmagoria of virtually nonexistent thoughts, but it seems wholly absurd to us that one could ever establish the reality of thought itself. Psychic reality” is a controversial concept, like “psyche” or “mind.” By the latter terms some understand consciousness and its contents, others allow the existence of “dark” or “subconscious” representations. Some include instincts in the psychic realm, others exclude them. The vast majority consider the psyche to be a result of biochemical processes in the brain cells. A few conjecture that it is the psyche that makes the cortical cells function. Some identify “life” with psyche. But only an insignificant minority regards the psychic phenomenon as a category of existence per se and draws the necessary conclusions. It is indeed paradoxical that the category of existence, the indispensable sine qua non of all existence, namely the psyche, should be treated as if it were only semi-existent. Psychic existence is the only category of existence of which we have immediate knowledge, since nothing can be known unless it first appears as a psychic image. Only psychic existence is immediately verifiable. To the extent that the world does not assume the form of a psychic image, it is virtually non-existent. This is a fact which, with few exceptions—as for instance in Schopenhauer’s philosophy—the West has not yet fully realized. But Schopenhauer was influenced by Buddhism and by the Upanishads. Even a superficial acquaintance with Eastern thought is sufficient to show that a fundamental difference divides East and West. The East bases itself upon psychic reality, that is, upon the psyche as the main and unique condition of existence. It seems as if this Eastern recognition were a psychological or temperamental fact rather than a result of philosophical reasoning. It is a typically introverted point of view, contrasted with the equally typical extraverted point of view of the West. Introversion and extraversion are known to be temperamental or even constitutional attitudes which are never intentionally adopted in normal circumstances. In exceptional cases they may be produced at will, but only under very special conditions. Introversion is, if one may so express it, the “style” of the East, an habitual and collective attitude, just as extraversion is the “style” of the West. Introversion is felt here as something abnormal, morbid, or otherwise objectionable. Freud identifies it with an autoerotic, “narcissistic” attitude of mind. He shares his negative position with the National Socialist philosophy of modern Germany, which accuses introversion of being an offence against community feeling. In the East, however, our cherished extraversion is depreciated as illusory desirousness, as existence in the samsara, the very essence of the nidãna-chain which culminates in the sum of the world’s sufferings. Anyone with practical knowledge of the mutual depreciation of values between introvert and extravert will understand the emotional conflict between the Eastern and the Western standpoint. For those who know something of the history of European philosophy the bitter wrangling about “universals” which began with Plato will provide an instructive example. I do not wish to go into all the ramifications of this conflict between introversion and extraversion, but I must mention the religious aspects of the problem. The Christian West considers man to be wholly dependent upon the grace of God, or at least upon the Church as the exclusive and divinely sanctioned earthly instrument of man’s redemption. The East, however, insists that man is the sole cause of his higher development, for it believes in “self-liberation.” The religious point of view always expresses and formulates the essential psychological attitude and its specific prejudices, even in the case of people who have forgotten, or who have never heard of, their own religion. In spite of everything, the West is thoroughly Christian as far as its psychology is concerned. Tertullian’s aninia naturaliler Christiana holds true throughout the West—not, as he thought, in the religious sense, but in a psychological one. Grace comes from elsewhere; at all events from outside. Every other point of view is sheer heresy. Hence it is quite understandable why the human psyche is suffering from undervaluation. Anyone who dares to establish a connection between the psyche and the idea of God is immediately accused of “psychologism” or suspected of morbid “mysticism.” The East, on the other hand, compassionately tolerates those “lower” spiritual stages where man, in his blind ignorance of karma, still bothers about sin and tortures his imagination with a belief in absolute gods, who, if he only looked deeper, are nothing but the veil of illusion woven by his own unenlightened mind. The psyche is therefore all-important; it is the all-pervading Breath, the Buddha-essence; it is the Buddha-Mind, the One, the Dharrjiakdya. All existence emanates from it, and all separate forms dissolve back into it. This is the basic psychological prejudice that permeates Eastern man in every fibre of his being, seeping into all his thoughts, feelings, and deeds, no matter what creed he professes. In the same way Western man is Christian, no matter to what denomination his Christianity belongs. For him man is small inside, he is next to nothing; moreover, as Kierkegaard says, “before God man is always wrong.” By fear, repentance, promises, submission, self-abasement, good deeds, and praise he propitiates the great power, which is not himself but totaliter aliter, the Wholly Other, altogether perfect and “outside,” the only reality. If you shift the formula a bit and substitute for God some other power, for instance the world or money, you get a complete picture of a Western man—assiduous, fearful, devout, self-abasing, enterprising, greedy, and violent in his pursuit of the goods of this world: possessions, health, knowledge, technical mastery, public welfare, political power, conquest, and so on. What are the great popular movements of our time? Attempts to grab the money or property of others and to protect our own. The mind is chiefly employed in devising suitable *’isms” to hide the real motives or to get more loot. I refrain from describing what would happen to Eastern man should he forget his ideal of Buddhahood, for I do not want to give such an unfair advantage to my Western prejudices. But I cannot help raising the question of whether it is possible, or indeed advisable, for either to imitate the other’s standpoint. The difference between them is so vast that one can see no reasonable possibility of this, much less its advisability. You cannot mix fire and water. The Eastern attitude stultifies the Western, and vice versa. You cannot be a good Christian and redeem yourself, nor can you be a Buddha and worship God. It is much better to accept the conflict, for it admits only of an irrational solution, if any. By an inevitable decree of fate the West is becoming acquainted with the peculiar facts of Eastern spirituality. It is useless either to belittle these facts, or to build false and treacherous bridges over yawning gaps. Instead of learning the spiritual techniques of the East by heart and imitating them in a thoroughly Christian way—imitatio Christ—with a correspondingly forced attitude, it would be far more to the point to find out whether there exists in the unconscious an introverted tendency similar to that which has become the guiding spiritual principle of the East. We should then be in a position to build on our own ground with our own methods. If we snatch these things directly from the East, we have merely indulged our Western acquisitiveness, confirming yet again that “everything good is outside,” whence it has to be fetched and pumped into our barren souls. It seems to me that we have really learned something from the East when we understand that the psyche contains riches enough without having to be primed from outside, and when we feel capable of evolving out of ourselves with or without divine grace. But we cannot embark upon this ambitious enterprise until we have learned how to deal with our spiritual pride and blasphemous self-assertiveness. The Eastern attitude violates the specifically Christian values, and it is no good blinking this fact. If our new attitude is to be genuine, i.e., grounded in our own history, it must be acquired with full consciousness of the Christian values and of the conflict between them and the introverted attitude of the East. We must get at the Eastern values from within and not from without, seeking them in ourselves, in the unconscious. We shall then discover how great is our fear of the unconscious and how formidable are our resistances. Because of these resistances we doubt the very thing that seems so obvious to the East, namely, the self-liberating power of the introverted mind. This aspect of the mind is practically unknown to the West, though it forms the most important component of the unconscious. Many people flatly deny the existence of the unconscious, or else they say that it consists merely of instincts, or of repressed or forgotten contents that were once part of the conscious mind. It is safe to assume that what the East calls “mind” has more to do with our “unconscious” than with mind as we understand it, which is more or less identical with consciousness. To us, consciousness is inconceivable without an ego; it is equated with the relation of contents to an ego. If there is no ego there is nobody to be conscious of anything. The ego is therefore indispensable to the conscious process. The Eastern mind, however, has no difficulty in conceiving of a consciousness without an ego. Consciousness is deemed capable of transcending its ego condition; indeed, in its “higher” forms, the ego disappears altogether. Such an ego-less mental condition can only be unconscious to us, for the simple reason that there would be nobody to witness it. I do not doubt the existence of mental states transcending consciousness. But they lose their consciousness to exactly the same degree that they transcend consciousness. I cannot imagine a conscious mental state that does not relate to a subject, that is, to an ego. The ego may be depotentiated—divested, for instance, of its awareness of the body—but so long as there is awareness of something, there must be somebody who is aware. The unconscious, however, is a mental condition of which no ego is aware. It is only by indirect means that we eventually become conscious of the existence of an unconscious. We can observe the manifestation of unconscious fragments of the personality, detached from the patient’s consciousness, in insanity. But there is no evidence that the unconscious contents are related to an unconscious centre analogous to the ego; in fact there are good reasons why such a centre is not even probable. The fact that the East can dispose so easily of the ego seems to point to a mind that is not to be identified with our “mind.” Certainly the ego does not play the same role in Eastern thought as it does with us. It seems as if the Eastern mind were less egocentric, as if its contents were more loosely connected with the subject, and as if greater stress were laid on mental states which include a depotentiated ego. It also seems as if hatha yoga were chiefly useful as a means for extinguishing the ego by fettering its unruly impulses. There is no doubt that the higher forms of yoga, in so far as they strive to reach samadhi, seek a mental condition in which the ego is practically dissolved. Consciousness in our sense of the word is rated a definitely inferior condition, the state of avidya (ignorance), whereas what we call the “dark background of consciousness” is understood to be a “higher” consciousness. Thus our concept of the “collective unconscious” would be the European equivalent of buddhi, the enlightened mind.” — Carl Gustav Jung, “The difference between Eastern and Western thinking.”, C.W. 11, Psychology and Religion: West and East, paragraphs 759-775 Artwork |
Thanks.
It was TOUGH getting through all that.
My take is that the guy sure as hell had a grip on the points from which to view.
Cosmic joker has probably re-born him into a poor neighborhood probably with a single father - twice.

Kind of sad (allowing that there are 'next lives') what comes of such greatness.
 
“Dr. Evans-Wentz has entrusted me with the task of commenting on a text which contains an important exposition of Eastern “psychology.” The very fact that I have to use quotation marks shows the dubious applicability of this term...

Seriously, unless you break this up into manageable paragraphs with line breaks, it's almost unreadable. Certainly, I couldn't read it. Which is a pity, because it looks interesting.
 
Seriously, unless you break this up into manageable paragraphs with line breaks, it's almost unreadable. Certainly, I couldn't read it. Which is a pity, because it looks interesting.
Yeah. I was going to do a hit piece on him until I seen it was a copy paste of someone else's work.
So I just commented on the work... and left out that academic nut-kick which is still deserved for the form he left it in.
 
There's a part in the text I posted explaining the difference between the left and right path as the westerners call it. Jung aludes to Easter philosophy as liberating yourself and becoming God (left hand path) See how silly it is to call the left hand path "bad" The right hand path according to Jung is the path of a child never embracing their childhood and living in fear of the father (God) and giving up their power and living in fear shame guilt and lack of integration of other philosophies. Now if you guys were paying attention, I posted a video on Kemetic philosophy on set the symbol (not entity) which became Satan. In kemetic science set simply means negation, opposing, adversary it doesn't want to combine with positivism. Now with that said let's look at the history of Catholicism, Christianity and the other religions. What have they been practicing this whole time? Murder, rape, manipulation, pedophilia, brainwashing, guilt and division.

NEGATION

They separate themselves without critical thinking and have waged war for centuries in the name of invisible gods (power, politics and schizophrenia) . But there never were gods, gods were symbolic containers to describe the components of nature.

This ties in beautifully with what Marc Passio has spoken about, Religious people specifically Christians are practicing Satanists not in that they do they bidding of an entity, they unwittingly practice
NEGATION
 
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