The Transparent Self to Come?

Scott Preston’s newest piece, The Seer, is worth reading. He makes an argument for what is needed next for humanity, what one might think of as getting off the Wheel of Karma. But I can’t help considering about the messy human details, in this moment of societal change and crisis. The great thinkers like Jean Gebser talk of integral consciousness in one way while most people experience the situation in entirely different terms. That is why I’m glad Preston brought in what is far less respectable (and far more popular) like Carlos Castaneda and the Seth Material.

As anyone should know, we aren’t discussing mere philosophy here for it touches upon human experience and social reality. I sense much of what is potentially involved, even as it is hard to put one’s finger on it. The challenge we are confronted with is far more disconcerting than we typically are able and willing to acknowledge, assuming we can even begin to comprehend what we are facing and what is emerging. How we get to the integral is the difficult part. Preston explains well the issue of making the ego/emissary transparent — as the Seth Material put it, “true transparency is not the ability to see through, but to move through”. That is a good way of putting it.

I appreciate his explanation of Satan (the egoic-demiurge) as the ape of God, what Iain McGilchrist calls usurpation. This reminds me of the mimicry of the Trickster archetype and its relation to the co-optation of the reactionary mind (see Corey Robin). A different kind of example of this is that of the folkloric Men in Black, as described by John Keel. It makes me wonder about what such things represent in human reality. This was on my mind because of another discussion I was having in a different post, Normal, from rauldukeblog’s The Violent Ink. The topic had to do with present mass hysteria and, as I’m wont to do, I threw out my own idiosyncratic context. Climate change came up and so I was trying to explain what makes this moment of crisis different than the past.

There is the scientific quality to it. Modern science created climate change through technological innovation and industrialization. And now science warns us about it. But it usually isn’t like a war, famine, or plague that hits a population in an undeniable way — not for most of us, not yet. That is the complexifying change in the scientific worldview we now inhabit and it is why the anxiety is so amorphous, in away profoundly different than before. To come to terms with climate change, something within human nature itself would have to shift. If we are to survive it while maintaining civilization, we will likely have to be as dramatically transformed as were bicameral humans during the collapse of the Bronze Age Civilizations. We won’t come through this unscathed and unchanged.

In speaking of the scientific or pseudo-scientific, there is the phenomenon of UFOs and contact experience. I pointed out that there has been a shift in official military policy toward reporting of UFO sightings, which gets one wondering about motives and also gets one thinking about why now. UFOs and aliens express that free-floating sense of vague anxiety about the unknown, specifically in a modern framework. It’s almost irrelevant what UFOs really are or aren’t. And no doubt, as in the past, various governments will attempt to use UFO reports to manipulate populations, to obfuscate what they wish to keep hidden, or whatever else. The relevant point here is what UFOs symbolize in the human psyche and why they gain so much attention during periods of wide scale uncertainty and stress. The UFO cults that have appeared over the past few generations are maybe akin to the cults like Jesus worship that arose in the Axial Age. Besides Jung, it might be helpful to bring in Jacques Vallee’s even more fascinating view. A new mythos is forming.

I’m not sure what it all adds up to. And my crystal ball is no less cloudy than anyone else’s. It just feels different in that we aren’t only facing crisis and catastrophe. It feels like a far more pivotal point, a fork in the path. During what is called the General Crisis, there was much change going on and it did help bring to an end what remained of feudalism. But the General Crisis didn’t fundamentally change society and culture, much less cut deeper into the human psyche. I’d argue that it simply brought us further down the same path we’d been on for two millennia since the Axial Age. I keep wondering if now the Axial Age is coming to its final conclusion, that there isn’t much further we can go down this path.

By the way, I think my introduction to Jacques Vallee came through my further reading after having discovered John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies, the book that came out long before the movie. That is where the basic notion comes from that I was working with here. During times of crisis and foreboding, often preceding actual mass death, there is a build up of strangeness that spills out from our normal sense of reality. We can, of course, talk about this in more rational or rather respectable terms without any of the muck of UFO research.

Keith Payne, in The Broken Ladder, notes that people come to hold bizarre beliefs and generally act irrationally when under conditions of high inequality, that is to say when inflicted with unrelenting stress. But it goes beyond that. There is more going on than mere beliefs. People’s sense of reality becomes distorted and they begin experiencing what they otherwise would not. This was the basis of Julian Jaynes’ hypothesis of the bicameral mind where voice-hearing was supposedly elicited through stress. And this is supported by modern evidence, such as the cases recorded by John Geiger in the Third Man Factor.

An additional layer could be brought to this with Jacques Valle’s work in showing how anecdotes of alien contact follow the same pattern as the stories of fairy abductions and the anthropological accounts of shamanic initiation. These are religious experiences. At other times, they were more likely interpreted as visitations by spiritual beings or as transportation into higher realms. Similarly, spinning and flying disks in the sky were interpreted as supernatural manifestations in the pre-scientific age. But maybe it’s all the same phenomenon, whether the source is elsewhere or from within the human psyche.

The interesting part is that these experiences, sometimes sightings involving crowds of people (including many incidents with military personnel and pilots), often correspond with intensified societal conflict. UFO sightings and contact experiences appear to increase at specific periods of stress. Unsurprisingly, people turn to the strange in strange times. And there is something about this strangeness, the pervasiveness of it and the power it holds. To say we are living in a reactionary time when nearly everything and everyone has become reactionary, that is to understate it to an extreme degree. The Trickster quality of the reactionary mind, one might argue, is its most defining feature.

One might call it the return of the repressed. Or it could be thought of as the eruption (irruption?) of the bicameral mind. Whatever it is, it challenges and threatens the world we think we know. Talk of Russian meddling and US political failure is tiddlywinks in comparison. But the fact that we take such tiddlywinks so seriously does add to the sense of crisis. Everything is real to the degree we believe it to be real, in that the effects of it become manifest in our experience and behavior, in the collective choices that we make and accumulate over time.

We manifest our beliefs. And even the strangest of beliefs can become normalized and, as such, become self-fulfilling prophecies. Social realities aren’t only constructed. They are imagined into being. Such imagination is human reality for we are incapable of experiencing it as anything other than reality. We laugh at the strange beliefs of others at our own peril. But what is being responded to can remain hidden or outside of the mainstream frame of consciousness. Think of the way that non-human animals act in unusual ways before an earthquake hits. If all we see is what the animals are doing and lack any greater knowledge, we won’t appreciate that it means we should prepare for the earthquake to come.

Humans too act strangely before coming catastrophes. It doesn’t require anyone to consciously know of and rationally understand what is coming. Most of how humans respond is instinctual or intuitive. I’d only suggest to pay less attention to the somewhat arbitrary focus of anxiety and, instead, to take the anxiety itself as a phenomenon to be taken seriously. Something real is going on. And it portends something on its way.

Here is my point. We see things through a glass darkly. Things are a bit on the opaque side. Transparency of self is more of an aspiration at this point, at least for those of us not yet enlightened beings. All the voices remain loud within us and in the world around us. In many thinkers seeking a new humanity, there is the prioritizing of the visual over the auditory. There is a historical background to this. The bicameral mind was ruled by voices. To be seek freedom from this, to get off the grinding and rumbling Wheel of Karma requires a different relationship to our senses. There is a reason the Enlightenment was so powerfully obsessed with tools that altered and extended our perception with a major focus on the visual, from lenses to the printed word. Oral society was finally losing its power over us or that is what some wanted to believe.

The strangeness of it all is that pre-consciousness maintains its pull over modern consciousness simultaneously as we idealize the next stage of humanity, integral trans-consciousness. Instead of escaping the authoritative power of the bicameral voice, we find ourselves in a world of mass media and social media where voices have proliferated. We are now drowning in voices and so we fantasize about the cool silence of the visionary, that other side of our human nature — as Preston described it:

One of the things we find in don Juan’s teachings is “the nagual” and “the tonal” relation and this is significant because it is clearly the same as McGilchrist’s “Master” and “Emissary” relationship of the two modes of attention of the divided brain. In don Juan’s teachings, these correspond to the what is called the “first” and “the second attentions”. If you have read neuroscientist Jill Bolte-Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight or followed her TED talk about that experience, you will see that she, too, is describing the different modes of attention of the “nagual” and the “tonal” (or the “Master” and the “Emissary”) in her own experience, and that when she, too, shifted into the “nagual” mode, also saw what Castaneda saw — energy as it flows in the universe, and she also called that “the Life Force Power of the Universe”

About getting off the Wheel, rauldukeblog wrote that, “Karma is a Sanskrit word meaning action so the concept is that any act(tion) creates connective tissue which locks one into reaction and counter and so on in an endless loop.” That brings us back to the notion of not only seeing through the egoic self but more importantly to move through the egoic self. If archaic authorization came from voices according to Jaynes, and if self-authorization of the internalized voice of egoic consciousness hasn’t fundamentally changed this equation, then what would offer us an entirely different way of being and acting in the world?

The last time we had a major transformation of the human mind, back during the ending of the Bronze Age, it required the near total collapse of every civilization. Structures of the mind aren’t easily disentangled from entrenched patterns of social identity as long as the structures of civilization remain in place. All these millennia later, we are still struggling to deal with the aftermath of the Axial Age. What are the chances that the next stage of humanity is going to be easier or happen more quickly?