Reality and Desire

The word “desire” has a peculiar origin and etymology. It means, quite literally, “from the stars” or “down from the stars” — de sidere. It comes from a time, evidently — a time that was, a time that is, a time that will be — when there was no separation of the “in here” from the “out there”. The still weak human ego consciousness experienced its own desires and passions as being outside or external to itself. To be in the grip of strong passions and desires was to be possessed by a god.

This is still registered in related meanings of words like “influence” (in-flowing) or “enthusiasm” (en-theos, or “a god within”). This is quite characteristic of both the magical and mythical structures of consciousness, and it is returning again with the disintegration of the ego consciousness, or breakdown of the mental-rational consciousness and “the return of the repressed”. So, it’s something that needs to be understood, especially for understanding Jean Gebser’s concerns expressed in The Ever-Present Origin.

If you read someone like Homer, for instance, you soon realise that what we today think of as the inner or subjective world of dream, passion, desire, imagination is not “inner” at all, but is a completely autonomous and “objective” reality. This is what we have been referring to as “the field” and is somewhat akin to what Levy-Bruhl described as “participation mystique“. This way of looking at things seems very very strange to moderns or to the mental-rational/perspectival consciousness.

There is, of course, no conscious awareness of the mythical field of passion, desire, dream as that in which the ego lives, moves, and has its being, since it simply doesn’t know any other reality. The analogy would be the fish in the sea. It is one with its environment and so simply doesn’t notice it (unless you drag it out of its environment). The mythical and magical consciousness structures are like that, immersed in a sea of dream, desire, passion, emotion, feeling, imagination that appears to it as a completely autonomous reality. They have not yet gained “perspective” on their reality, which is to say psychological distance or “the objective attitude”, so you do not find distinctions or differentations of matters like “culture” and “Nature” or “Soul” and “World”, let alone “Ego” and “It”.

In fact, as Rosenstock-Huessy pointed out in his book The Origin of Speech, you could not say in classical antiquity “It rains” or “It is raining” at all, only statements like “Zeus rains”. And this seems also to be true of many contemporary indigenous languages.

As Castaneda’s don Juan once said to him, “reality is a feeling we have for it”. That expresses quite well the meaning of the magical and mythical consciousness structures, but without that kind of self-consciousness about it that don Juan’s statement expresses. The mythical consciousness was not self-aware in that sense and that’s what is expressed in the ambiguous myth of Narcissus and Echo. Narcissus is unable to distinguish between himself and his image in the reflecting pool. And yet, the paradox of this myth is, that it couldn’t even be conceived as such unless the mythical consciousness was beginning also to distinguish itself from the domain of the mythical, and, as Gebser notes, beginning to wake up to its own subjectivity or “discovery of the soul”.

Now, it’s quite apparent, as well, that the mythical consciousness could deploy and dispose over the intellect or the rational faculty, although it was not considered “normal”. We are still in awe of some of the engineering and architectural accomplishments of early civilisations. But the point is, it was subordinate to the mythical consciousness and not vice versa, ie, “in service to the gods” (ie, devotion). Cain, in the Book of Genesis, represents that, being both a criminal and yet also “the founder of cities”, who bears the mark on his forehead but also has the blessing and protection of God.

Gebser talks about the “effective” and “deficient” modes of a consciousness structure. A “deficient mode” would be characterised by superstition. This distinction between effective and deficient modes of the mythical is precisely what is described by William Blake too:

“The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects
with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and
adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers,
mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their
enlarged & numerous senses could percieve.
And particularly they studied the genius of each
city & country. placing it under its mental deity.
Till a system was formed, which some took ad-
vantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to
realize or abstract the mental deities from their
objects; thus began Priesthood.
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronouncd that the Gods
had orderd such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside
in the human breast.” — The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Now, we see in today’s events the return of these older modes of myth and magic, albeit chaotically, which is what lies behind terms like “post-rational”, or “post-truth” or “collapse of reality” and so on, and particularly in the breakdown of distinctions between the fictive and the factual, or between the subjective and the objective, and in matters like Neal Gabler’s book on the “conquest of reality by entertainment” or William Davies’ forthcoming book Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World. And we see it, too, in Jeremy Naydler’s The Future of the Ancient World or in Gary Lachman’s Dark Star Rising. All this, of course, was anticipated by Jean Gebser decades ago and recorded in his book The Ever-Present Origin, and by Carl Jung as well. Even earlier by William Blake and Friedrich Nietzsche. And all tried, in their own way, to provide us with a coherent framework or narrative for the positive handling and construction re-integration of this “return of the repressed”.

The return of myth and magic (or “the re-enchantment of the world”) might seem enchanting, but it also comes with its own terrible and terrifying darkness as well — what Gebser describes as “deficient mode” of functioning. Desire, feeling, passion, dream and nightmare unleashed from any and all constraints or structured expression generates havoc, mayhem, chaos, and the spectre of total derangement or, in Jung’s terms, the spectre of “the Shadow”, which has also become a theme of contemporary literature as well — Paul Levy’s “Wetiko” or Carolyn Baker’s “Dark Gold” for example, but also Davies’ forthcoming Nervous States. We also see the symbols and signs of the Shadow increasingly displayed in public discourse — increasing psychic inflation through Shadow possession which recalls the originally meaning of the word “enthusiasm” as “possessed by a god” which signals that one is not master in one’s own household, for these gods rampage in the psyche like poltergeists or what Gebser calls “chaotic emotion”.

Or, as the Buddha once put it: “the house is burning”. Siddhartha lived in equally turbulent times and his answer to the turbulence and malaise of his age was to quench desire — not, indeed, by suppressing or repressing it, but by examining it to its roots and the causes of its arising through cultivating an attitude of non-attachment, or what we today refer to as “mindfulness”. Of course, that means the transcending of the mythical consciousness itself which, itself, becomes an object of investigation and contemplation. It’s one of the reasons that Buddhism belongs to what Karl Jaspers has called “the Axial Age”, which was also an age of transformation, actually an age of transition from the mythical to the mental, which was also characteristic of fifth century BC Greece, in which you see clearly the “discovery of the soul”, meaning that the mythical consciousness was becoming aware of itself, but not yet fully detached from it. But this new faculty of “reason” is still felt as divinely aroused and inspired — by the new goddess Athena.

Mythical consciousness had pretty much reached a dead-end by the time the Axial Age irrupted on the scene — had become maximally “deficient” — the same symptoms of deficiency now afflict the mental-rational or perspectival consciousness which has reached near paralysis as regards the plethora of crises it presently faces, and which are arousing much anxiety about the future, not to leave unmentioned the conundrums and paradoxes of quantum reality. The motto “shut up and calculate!” is an expression of that paralysis, which very much brings to mind the old medeival maps where no-go zones were inscribed with the words “here be monsters” — strange creatures, paradoxical hybrids of human and animal (mermaids, for example) ready to lure sailors to their deaths by drowning. Many of those monsters and strange creatures of the medieval imagination have reappeared in things like “aliens from outer space” or in the Harry Potter series, too.

One notable difference, though, exists between the mythical imagination and the medieval Christian one. The old mythical imagination lived with their monsters, demons, sprites, gods, nymphs, etc as everyday realities. In the Christian era, these have been consigned to the outer limits of the known world, save for pockets of the old paganism that persisted for a while in Europe. The de-mythologisation of Nature by Christian consciousness prepared the way for the disinterested contemplation of “the Book of Nature” without trembling in fear and terror before the everyday demons, sprites, gods, monsters that had to be avoided or placated in some way or controlled by magical means. In Gebser’s terms, this is what distinguishes the “unperspectival” and the “pre-perspectival”. You see quite clearly, here, that “pre-perspectival” reality is quite different from “unperspectival” reality, and it also attests, most importantly, to a growing sense of responsibility for one’s own inner or subjective states, desires, moods, but also therewith a tendency to suppress and repress “immoral” moods, sentiments, desires which are now consigned to the outer darkness beyond the maps of the known — “here be monsters”. The old medieval maps are also exact maps of the pre-perspectival consciousness or “soul” and an increasing division between “conscious” and “unconscious”. There was a known world illuminated by consciousness and yet an unknown world or reality on its boundaries inhabited by creatures strange or even monstrous and dangerous – -the energies of the Shadow.

Christianity, nonetheless, generated a “safe space” where it was possible to live without the fears and terrors of the pagan world — the realm presided over by God. But one of the implications, too, of “the death of God” is the collapse of that safe space, and among other things, the “return of the repressed” also means that re-invasion of that safe space by all those things formerly consigned or exiled to “the outer darkness”. And one of the implications of the “collapse of reality” and the breakdown of the boundaries between subject and object, between fantasy and reality, is the potential reconquest of the safe space by “the creatures from the lost lagoon”, as it were or “alien invasions”, and so on.

Paranoia, anxiety, hysteria, conspiracy — we’ve actually seen this before, with the breakdown of the Holy Roman Empire and the “collapse of reality” in that age. The monsters and demons re-invaded the safe space, and the result was Inquisition, witch-hunt, crusade and other forms of mass derangement such as the St. Vitus Dance. The turn to a new consciousness became a pressing necessity of survival in the face of this “collapse of reality”, even when it came with war, revolution, bloodshed. The Renaissance — the development of perspective consciousness — saved Europe from a descent into superstition and universal madness. But it’s breakdown, now, places us in a very similar state, and again, the urgency of a new consciousness in order to avoid catastrophe has certainly not been overlooked today either.

The new perspectivist consciousness didn’t emerge from the wreckage overnight. One can follow its struggle to emancipate itself from the corruptions and superstitions of the older one. This took generations. I have nothing but great admiration for the pioneers of perspective consciousness even when I recognise the errors and confusions that have been their legacy down to this day, and which have become the basis of our own affliction of cultishness and superstition. One of the problems there is that they took the most aberrant, deficient, and degenerate manifestations of the magical and mythical as being the very meaning of the magical and mythical, and in vigorously seeking to suppress them, generated their own realm of monsters and demons called “the occult”. The “occult” (or the “mystical”, too) is that very same zone that the medievals inscribed with the words “here be monsters”. One notes with some interest that the very words “occult” and “consciousness” came into usage at generally the same time — the 16th century.

With the “discovery of the unconscious” (and one should note the pattern here: “discovery of the soul”, “discovery of the mind”, “discovery of the unconscious”), Freud had expressed his fears and reservations once to Jung about “the black tide of mud of the occult” — that this black tide of mud would corrupt, overwhelm or swallow the mental-rational or ego consciousness. And while Jung recognised the dangers here, he couldn’t agree that the unconscious was a no-go zone for scientific exploration. Freud’s fears, nonetheless, were not unreasonable in that respect. Jung just sought for an orderly process of re-integrating the “return of the repressed”, and the pattern he found lay in Hermeticism/alchemy. Jung believed that the Hermetic Philosophy provided the appropriate framework and narrative structure for avoiding or surviving the “black tide of mud of the occult”. So did Blake. So did Gebser.

In consequence, too, we see a contemporary resurgence of interest in Hermeticism or Hermetic doctrines including, in all places, quantum physics. Newer science has, in many respects, become unavoidably “Hermetic”. The neurologist Iain McGilchrist is also a Blake scholar, as was the physicist Jacob Bronowski. Bohmian physics is also Hermetic, and Stephon Alexander, in his book The Jazz of Physics, recounts that the Dean of Physics at Oxford encouraged his students to read Carl Jung. The quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli also collaborated with Jung.

So, if there is indeed a “new Renaissance” in the offing, it seems to be intimately connected with the revival and resuscetation of Hermeticism, too.

 

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