86Thousand400: The Road Less Travelled

The highest forms of love are inevitably totally free choices and not acts of conformity

‘The Evolution of Consciousness’

But we still have not explained how it is that the unconscious possesses all this knowledge which we have not yet consciously learned. Here again the question is so basic that we have no scientific answer. Again we can only hypothesise. And again I know of no hypothesis as satisfactory as the postulation of a God who is intimately associated with us - so intimately that her is part of us. If you want to know the closest place to look for grace, it is within yourself. If you desire wisdom greater than your own, you can find it inside you. What this suggests is that the interface between God and man is at least in part the interface between our unconscious and our conscious. To put it plainly, our unconscious is God. God within us. We were part of God all the time. God has been with us all along, is now, and always will be.

How can this be? If the reader is horrified by the notion that our unconscious is God, he or she should recall that it is hardly a heretical concept, being in essence the same as the Christian concept of the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit which resides in all of us. I find it most helpful to understand this relationship between God and ourselves by thinking of our unconscious as a rhizome, or incredibly large and rich hidden root system, which nourishes the tiny plant of the consciousness sprouting visibly from it. I am indebted to Jung, who describing himself as ‘a splinter of the deity’, went on to say:

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. It’s true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. (This is how humans are like plants - our lifetime is our ‘sprouting’ when we die like a hyacinth or any plant our soul remains and we rebloom in another life). Then it withers away - an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilisation we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains. - C.G.Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Jung never went quite so far as to actually state that God existed in the unconscious, although his writings clearly pointed in that direction. What he did do was to divide the unconscious into the more superficial, individual ‘personal unconsious’ and the deeper ‘collective unconscious’ that is common to mankind. In my vision the collective unconscious is God; the conscious man as individual, and the personal unconscious is the interface between them. Being this interface, it is inevitable that the personal unconscious should be a place of some turmoil, the scene of some struggle between God’s will and the will of the individual. I have previously described the unconscious as a benign and loving realm. This I believe to be true. But dreams, though they contain messages of loving wisdom, also contain many signs of conflict; while they may be pleasantly self-renewing, they may be tumultuous, frightening nightmares. Because of this tumultuousness, mental illness has been localised in the unconscious by most thinkers, as if the unconscious were the seat of psychopathology and symptoms were like subterranean demons that surface to bedevil the individual. As I have already said, my own view is the opposite. I believe that the conscious is the seat of psychopathology and that mental disorders are disorders of the consciousness. It is because our conscious self resists our unconscious wisdom that we become ill. It is precisely because our consciousness is disordered that conflict occurs between it and the unconscious which seeks to heal it. Key Point: *In other words, mental illness occurs when the conscious will of the individual deviates substantially from the will of God, which is the individual’s own conscious will.*

(Why is anxiety, stress and depression so prevalent in today’s society? Because we are repeatedly going against our will, our instincts. We are being fed a load of B.S on what success is, on nutrition on Doctors and pharmaceuticals and then given drugs and vaccines to make us less and less self aware. Start exercising, drink more water and start tapping in to the simplicity and beauty of everyday life. That which is of true value cannot be bought)

I have said that the ultimate goal of spiritual growth is for the individual to become as one with God. It is to know with God. Since the unconscious is God all along, we may further define the goal of spiritual growth to be the attainment of godhood by the conscious self. It is for the individual to become totally wholly God. Does this mean that the goal is for the conscious to merge with the unconscious, so that all is unconsciousness? Hardly. We now come to the point of it all. The point is to become God while preserving consciousness. If the bud of consciousness that grows from the rhizome of unconscious God can become itself God, then God will have assumed a new life form. This is the meaning of our individual existence. We are born that we might become, as a conscious individual, a new life form of God.

The conscious is the executive part of our total being. It is the conscious that makes decisions and translates them into action.

(Like me deciding to re-write this passage out)

Were we to become all unconscious, we would be indeed like the newborn infant, one with God but incapable of any action that might make the presence of God felt in the world. As I have mentioned, there is a regressive quality to the mystical thought of some Hindu or Buddhist theology, in which the status of the infant without ego boundaries is compared to Nirvana and the goal of Nirvana seems similar to the goal of returning to the womb. The goal of theology presented here, and that of most mystics is exactly the opposite. It is not to become an egoless, unconscious babe. Rather it is to develop a mature, conscious ego which can then become the ego of God. If as adults walking around on two legs, capable of making independent choices that influence the world, we can identify our mature free will with that of God, then God will have assumed through our conscious ego a new and potent life form. We will have become God’s agent, his arm, so to speak, and therefore part of him. And insofar as we might then through our conscious decisions be able to influence the world according to his will our lives themselves will then have become one form of Grace of God, working on his behalf among mankind, creating love where love did not exist before, pulling our fellow creature up to our own level of awareness, pushing the plane of human evolution forward.

Other Extracts

1. Spiritual Power resides entirely within the individual and has nothing to do with the capacity to co-erce others. People of great spiritual power may be wealthy and may upon occasion occupy political positions of leadership, but they are as likely to be poor and lacking in political authority. Then, what is the capacity of spiritual power if not the capacity to co-erce? It is the capacity to make decisions with maximum awareness. It is consciousness.

Most people, most of the time make decisions with little awareness of what they are doing. They take action with little understanding of their own motives and without beginning to know the ramifications of their choices

2. The path of spiritual growth is a path of life long learning. If the path is followed long and earnestly enough, the pieces of knowledge begin to fall into place. Gradually things begin to make sense. There are blind alleys, disappointments, concepts arrived at only to be discarded. But gradually it is possible for us to come to a deeper and deeper understanding of what our existence is all about. And gradually we come to the place when we actually know what we are doing. We can come to power.

The experience of spiritual power is basically a joyful one. There is a joy that comes with mastery

3. And godlike power is the power to make decisions with total awareness. But unlike the popular notion of it, omniscience does not make decisions easier, rather, it becomes even more difficult. The closer one comes to Godhood, the more one feels sympathy for God. To participate in God’s omniscience is also to share his agony.

There is another problem with power, aloneness*. Here there is a similarity, in at least one dimension, between spiritual and political power. Someone who’s at the peak of spiritual evolution is like someone at the peak of political power. There is no-one above to whom to pass the buck, no-one to blame, no-one to tell you how to do it. There may not even be anyone on the same level to share the agony or the responsibility.

*Distinction between aloneness and loneliness. Loneliness is the unavailability of people to communicate with on any level. Powerful people are surrounded by others only too eager to communicate with them; hence they are seldom lonely and may even yearn for loneliness. Aloneness, however, is the unavailability of someone to communicate with at your level of awareness.

4. Grace

Yet she was not aware of her illness or of the damage she was doing to herself by her self constriction. It was her symptoms, these anxiety attacks which she did not want and had not asked for, which she felt had ‘cursed’ her ‘out of the blue’, that made her finally aware of her illness and forced her to set out on a path of self correction and growth. I believe this pattern holds true for most mental illness. The symptoms and the illness are not the same thing. The illness exists long before the symptoms. Rather than being the illness, the symptoms are the beginning of the cure. The fact that they are unwanted makes them all the more a phenomenon of grace - a gift of God, a message from the unconscious, if you will, to indicate self examination and repair.

As is common with grace, most reject this gift and do not heed the message. They do this in a variety of ways, all of which represent an attempt to avoid the responsibility for their illness. They try to ignore the symptoms by pretending they are not really symptoms, that everyone gets these little attacks from time to time’. They try to work around them by quitting jobs, stop driving, moving to a new town, avoiding certain activities. They attempt to rid themselves of symptoms by pain killers by little pills they’ve gotten from the Doctor or by anaesthetising themselves with alcohol and other drugs. Even if they do accept the fact they have symptoms, they will usually, in many subtle ways, blame the world outside them - uncaring relatives, false friends, greedy corporations, a sick society, and even fate - for their condition. Only those few who accept responsibility for their symptoms, who realise that their symptoms are a manifestation of their own soul, heed the message of their unconscious and accept it’s grace. They accept their own inadequacy (+worktowardstheirweaknesses) and the pain of the work necessary to heal themselves. But to them, and all the others wishing to face the pain of psychotherapy, comes great reward.

Good Words: Rhizome, Denigrates, Ephemeral, Equanimity

Ego Boundaries