S T R A N G E P A R T I C I P A T I O N
Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion."
CARL JUNG - Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype
CARL JUNG - Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype
Good and evil are not fashionable concepts; bringing to mind as they do charactures of devils and angels. But, nevertheless, they do exist; as abstractions.
Among hibernating animals existance is a one big rush to do do what you have to do to whilst putting on enough weight to survive the winter. They operate to a definate and literal deadline. It seems to me that our universe has a similar objective; and an equally pressing scedule.
"In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it."
This extraordinary statement was made by Martin Rees (Martin Rees is Master of Trinity College, Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, Astronomer Royal, visiting Professor at Imperial College London and Leicester University, amongst many other distinctions. I mention this in case you mistakenly thought that these are the words of a lunatic)
In this context I would define good as simply being any individual, event or process that aids in the development of consciousness; evil being everything else.
Mystics the world over and throughout history have consistantly revealed this truth; so important was this message that innumerable amongst their number sacraficed their lives rather than deny its authencitity. This same theme is being revealed to the modern world through the medium of science and psychology. The examinition of the very small (quantum physics) and the examination of the very big (astrophysics) have concluded that conciousnessis is both the purpose and the causal principle of existance; both the observer and the observed.
The purpose and the result of creation is the development of a consciousness capable of achieving and sustaining this crucial act of self referal. My contention is that worship (as explicitly demanded by priesthoods on behalf of deities down the ages) was aimed at the acceleration of this process. It is as good an explanation as any for why an all powerful spiritual entity would have a seemingly pathological addiction to attention. Following this argument the more extreme acts of worship, animal and human sacrafice, could have been conceived as 'priming the pump' of consciousness.
Joining the dots that have recently appeared between science and psychology brings us inevitably to Jung's collective unconscious. (Which occultists have recognised for millennia and given various names; in the western tradition it's known as the astral.) As described by Jung it is simply a massive, growing and evolving repository of human experience in the form of pure consciousness. It is my contention that the universe didn't come into existence because I observed it, or because you observed it; it came into existance because the collective unconsciousness reached the optimal state of development for this process to take place.
A superficial examination of history will reveal consistant and sinister attempts to halt, even reverse the development of human consciousness (remember poor old Galileo; hauled before the Inquisition for daring to defend the Copernican model of the solar system and Gordiano Bruno burned at the stake for suggesting that ours may not be the only inhabited world in the universe); I am not going to speculate as to motivation. Gratifyingly your skim through history will also reveal that, although the development of consciousness (especially in the west) was significantly retarded, it's doing okay now. I believe that there's a good case to make that the scientific developments of the 20th century have pushed consciousness beyond a critical tipping point.
This process of unfolding consciousness is eloquently captured in the following extract from 'The Queen's Conjuror - The Science and Magic of John Dee' by Benjamin Woolley.
"Dee had seen with his own eyes the world spill off the edge of the map; and the universe burst out of its shell. And as the comos had spread into infinity, so he had seen everyone's position in it correspondingly reduced. For the first time in over a thousand years, anyone with the learning to see beheld a universe that no longer revolved around the world, and a world that no longer revolved around humans.
"Dee's magical journey with Kelly can be seen as a response to this traumatic demotion. Magic was the way that people could reconnect with an alienated cosmos. It was the hidden mechanism by which God operated the world, the invisible force that joined the spiritual realm to the material one. It was the continuum between life and death, the 'strange participation', to use Dee's phrase, in which body and spirit, the natural and the artificial, the real and the imagined were engaged."
Morbid speculation leads me to consider whether having made our contribution to creation we will continue to be necessary; or whether without us constantly 'colapsing the wave function' existance would...well, do whatever existance does when it doesn't exist. Maybe the answer rests in the following extract from 'Civilisation In Transition'.
Among hibernating animals existance is a one big rush to do do what you have to do to whilst putting on enough weight to survive the winter. They operate to a definate and literal deadline. It seems to me that our universe has a similar objective; and an equally pressing scedule.
"In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it."
This extraordinary statement was made by Martin Rees (Martin Rees is Master of Trinity College, Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, Astronomer Royal, visiting Professor at Imperial College London and Leicester University, amongst many other distinctions. I mention this in case you mistakenly thought that these are the words of a lunatic)
In this context I would define good as simply being any individual, event or process that aids in the development of consciousness; evil being everything else.
Mystics the world over and throughout history have consistantly revealed this truth; so important was this message that innumerable amongst their number sacraficed their lives rather than deny its authencitity. This same theme is being revealed to the modern world through the medium of science and psychology. The examinition of the very small (quantum physics) and the examination of the very big (astrophysics) have concluded that conciousnessis is both the purpose and the causal principle of existance; both the observer and the observed.
The purpose and the result of creation is the development of a consciousness capable of achieving and sustaining this crucial act of self referal. My contention is that worship (as explicitly demanded by priesthoods on behalf of deities down the ages) was aimed at the acceleration of this process. It is as good an explanation as any for why an all powerful spiritual entity would have a seemingly pathological addiction to attention. Following this argument the more extreme acts of worship, animal and human sacrafice, could have been conceived as 'priming the pump' of consciousness.
Joining the dots that have recently appeared between science and psychology brings us inevitably to Jung's collective unconscious. (Which occultists have recognised for millennia and given various names; in the western tradition it's known as the astral.) As described by Jung it is simply a massive, growing and evolving repository of human experience in the form of pure consciousness. It is my contention that the universe didn't come into existence because I observed it, or because you observed it; it came into existance because the collective unconsciousness reached the optimal state of development for this process to take place.
A superficial examination of history will reveal consistant and sinister attempts to halt, even reverse the development of human consciousness (remember poor old Galileo; hauled before the Inquisition for daring to defend the Copernican model of the solar system and Gordiano Bruno burned at the stake for suggesting that ours may not be the only inhabited world in the universe); I am not going to speculate as to motivation. Gratifyingly your skim through history will also reveal that, although the development of consciousness (especially in the west) was significantly retarded, it's doing okay now. I believe that there's a good case to make that the scientific developments of the 20th century have pushed consciousness beyond a critical tipping point.
This process of unfolding consciousness is eloquently captured in the following extract from 'The Queen's Conjuror - The Science and Magic of John Dee' by Benjamin Woolley.
"Dee had seen with his own eyes the world spill off the edge of the map; and the universe burst out of its shell. And as the comos had spread into infinity, so he had seen everyone's position in it correspondingly reduced. For the first time in over a thousand years, anyone with the learning to see beheld a universe that no longer revolved around the world, and a world that no longer revolved around humans.
"Dee's magical journey with Kelly can be seen as a response to this traumatic demotion. Magic was the way that people could reconnect with an alienated cosmos. It was the hidden mechanism by which God operated the world, the invisible force that joined the spiritual realm to the material one. It was the continuum between life and death, the 'strange participation', to use Dee's phrase, in which body and spirit, the natural and the artificial, the real and the imagined were engaged."
Morbid speculation leads me to consider whether having made our contribution to creation we will continue to be necessary; or whether without us constantly 'colapsing the wave function' existance would...well, do whatever existance does when it doesn't exist. Maybe the answer rests in the following extract from 'Civilisation In Transition'.
"Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered. And the wider and more numerous the fissures on the surface, the more the unity is strengthened in the depths."
CARL JUNG - Civilisation in Transition
CARL JUNG - Civilisation in Transition