At the end of my last post, I referred to what modern science and psychology are selling. For those interested in a more poetic expression, this excerpt begins on page 123 of A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious:
Divided thinking leads at last to conflicting goals:
To the two-way mirrors in the depth of all men’s souls;
Reflecting dual minds in which the opposites prevail
Yet only one can be observed through the conscious veil.
Even in the lofty labs of science this exists
Its subjective basis proven by the physicists:
The uncertain observations Heisenberg asserted
Were the limitations of their minds their thought perverted;
Though even these do not reflect the dark uncertain forms
Imposed by thought’s restriction to objective norms.
The conditions of the soul determine what men seek
The probable statistics are a modern double-speak.
What natural reality makes any sense at all
Without a concept of the purposes inherent in it?
Life would never have arisen on this earthly ball
Without the spirit everywhere apparent in it.
The faithful picture of the world such concepts have defined
Still are psychic products with conditions of their own;
And symbols weave their purpose through the conscious mind
In the secret depth to which itself remains unknown.
The uncertain relativity of modern science —
The deepest of realities the mind has yet discerned —
From the smallest particle to planetary giants
Reflects as well its two-way mirror when the glass is turned.
Such ideas are not conceived as psychic intuition
Though perceived to be the ground reality requires.
Even physics can’t escape the basis of cognition
Revealing inner aspects of the knowledge it acquires.
Through these secrets half-described in man’s imagination
Spirit, too, participates in matter’s dark foundation. Nature’s secrets are elusive as her properties require —
Most of all within the matter of the soul’s desire.
The truths in her images the scientists have won
Lead below the world of things inside a deeper one.
Faust said long ago, “Two souls are dwelling in my breast” —
Now a proven fact the oldest atom will attest.
At the same time as Einstein a Swiss psychologist
Informed objective science of the very thing it missed:
The subjective factor – provable empirically —
Was a psychic analogue for space-time relativity.
This factor hides a deeper law than instruments reveal
For the law of man’s being is a factor he must feel…
Alas two psychic truths are dwelling in his head
Based on opposition like the physicists said. “Each is feign to leave its brother,” just as Faust opined;
And one denied the other for the concepts it divined. The older one — the matrix men’s awareness can’t concede —
Is the very god-likeness their consciousness decreed
As an image of themselves and the wonders they begat
Perverting their own reason as a price for that.
A deeper opposition yet resides within
The partial values in the minds of thinking men:
Like salesmen they construct a future shopping mall
At the same time hoarding weapons to destroy it all…
Men are only objects in these dark imaginings;
Themselves reduced to ciphers in a world of Things.
What man if he had ever drunk from spirit’s well
Could quench his thirst with the technologic brew they sell?
Are the scientific prophets merely profiteers?
What human soul has been enhanced by their inventions?
Strange desires cloud the lens through which this science peers:
The subject of the object now confuses its intentions;
Though men are left to struggle with the same old human fears
As once claimed Eve’s and Adam’s and the snake’s attentions.
No problem is beyond this objective human quest
Except the small subjective one in a man’s own breast;
Yet still all forms of superstition will suffice
To convince him of his distance from his own inner vice.
This same collective border Christianity constructed
Repels a man from seeking what his nature has to say. Though now it’s on the other side of heaven life’s conducted
It has still the same objective to explain the world away And only understand enough to serve the greed created
By the hallowed histories of pious people long since gone;
Driven still by inner forces Nature arbitrated
That science and religion both have turned their backs upon…
For this man to free his mind he must consider things
Quite the opposite the paradigm instilled in him;
For the intellect inflames a man with waxen wings
Soaring far beyond the nature being willed in him.
This will is not his own and not obsessed with other men
But strives below the known to seek a world within;
For the re-creation of an older mystery
And he is only driven there by hard necessity.
He views his thinking through the glass of self-importance;
The wonders he beholds are mystical possessions.
They bewitch and stupefy in mythical accordance
With the ancient laws established by a man’s obsessions.
A man must have a counterweight to these Platonic spheres
Like giant shadows crouched behind his small and modest fears.
He loves these fears too in his own clandestine way:
Such is the bargain struck by men who cannot pray.
He barters spirit-life for dark and fleeting pleasures
To flatter only Image’s obsessive measures. But a man who cannot pray must worship nonetheless
The gods of his disorders whom his fantasies confess.
Such are the idols of a space-age mythology
Until recently the ones the heavens once concealed;
Now the orphans of a modern-day psychology
Yet not much less divine and not much more revealed.
For gods have ever issued from this psychic netherland
In any form interpreted to make men understand
That a greater spirit hides within the human mind
Than by science or the intellect will ever be defined.
But the prophets of today are focused on the brain
Able only to connect with what they touch and see.
No man yet has seen a god in the physical domain Except the demons lurking in the body’s chemistry.
The gods are demons now to this enlightened man
Whose only world consists of what his thought can understand.
The psychic history on which his life is based
By the shining light of Consciousness is now erased.
What was once a sacred sphere by which this man was graced
Has been reduced to symptoms and by chemicals replaced.
What once were ancient deities have now become disease —
Their double-nature no objective science can appease.
How could such a troubled culture now have come about
But that its egotism turned its thinking inside-out?
Denied the things its own spirit thundered long ago
For self-deceptive mysteries its science couldn’t know.
A bi-polar syndrome underlies the Western mind
For these neglected opposites are moving to the fore;
Just as they comprise the nature science has defined
So also do they form the nature scientists ignore.
They force a man inside himself though willed or not;
They urge him to consider things his modern mind forgot.
They sometimes even make him pray though on a thinking level
Not the least discernible from praying to the Devil…