We may take consciousness for granted today, but historically speaking, it’s a relatively new phenomenon. The old biblical Word links its history to modern psychology, philology and philosophy, along with evolutionary studies which describe the conflicting functions of natural development on the one hand and highly advanced conscious defense-mechanisms against it on the other.
Before nature’s most recent experimentation in self-recognition, primates were primarily outfitted for eating, excreting and competing, mainly for the broader purposes of coitus. This may explain Congress, but what of the deeper spiritual concerns of so-called normal human beings? Evolutionary psychology provides clues to this mystery:
In Homo Antithesus, around three million years ago, an evolving capacity to associate past experiences formed a psychic complex known as consciousness, or in academia, as the ‘God Complex’. Its dwarf state enabled our ancestors to think backward along a chain of preceding events to an assumed ’cause’. The added capacity for memory carried with it a function for weighing possibilities, too, and the forward flow was primitively conceptualized as’ time’ — or ‘money’, as it’s known today.
Thoughts originally appeared as hallucinations in the dawn mind. A relatively weak ego was unable to differentiate its mental activities from its surroundings at first, and objects were easily contaminated with sense perceptions of their images. These mysteries of its own ideation were perceived as spirit or magic. No one knew where they came from. Early hominids venerated what they needed most, and plants and animals were the first objects of worship.
Even as crude prototypes, thought-obsessions and compulsive object-worship proved more effective for survival than blind beastly instinct. How else would the new species maintain the delicate balance of nature but through the ability to recognize the reality that self-awareness promised (with the possible exception of the unforeseeable consequences of its every action)? Though now classified as symptoms of mental derangement, these functional dissociations were actually the indispensable building-blocks of culture and remain so today.
As in a mirror, unconscious images were reflected back in real-time. So vivid were they through the medium of sense perception, the world appeared only as Concrete Reality. Of course, it was real in one sense yet not in another, for the new complex was unaware of the subtleties of psychic representations: image merged with need, desire and object as in a dream.
About a half a million years ago, the intra-psychic effects of sense-images began to produce cognitive identifications of a different complexity beyond Concrete Reality: on the psychological level of hallucination called ‘spirit-possession’. An unstable ego’s resistance to change bid it cling to the self-flattering aspects of the new function, and these gradually assumed fantastic proportion in correlation to its fear of development. This was unavoidable:
Nature combined intuition and an inflated sense of self to support and protect the new complex; for, without the dual functions of protection and opposition required for its purposes, the nascent individual identity so vital to its evolution would never gain the strength to confront the reality it saw in every natural thing but denied in itself.
In compensation for the future-dread inherent in the gift of foresight, ego came to sense its spirit-possession as divinely ordained. In its identity with the ‘upward’ symbols of a ‘higher’ reality above the crotch and belly of instinct, it quickly ballooned far beyond earthly limitations and flew directly into the stratosphere. Modern technology has since made this image of psychic inflation a concrete reality.
As a cultural instrument, The Word gained complexity through social exchange; though its subjective nature worked also as a tool for aggression, rationalization and delusions of magical flight from the instinct-compulsions it refuted. Its backward thought translated its fears into upside-down collective ideas which only further veiled the subversive effects of the inflated perspective.
Indistinguishable from the causal reasoning demanded by its deluded wish for knowledge and certainty, the stunted forward design of the unconscious mind re-surfaced as crude self-interest: compensation for the backward group identity that had long held to the certainty of tradition for its survival. The puffed-up complex mirrored in its religious ideals soon metastasized into unconscious self-adulation.
The nascent ego’s fear of its half-conceived tasks of development pronounced them as having already been accomplished, and it was obstinate to any change beyond the abetment of sensual pleasure. The instinct for personal reflection was negated by a collective spiritual indolence consumed primarily with reducing physical effort; mental focus remained tied to the senses. Energies specific to individual development over-accumulated in proportion to their fears of them and came to be seen as bad things to be avoided.
The repressed urge for development gradually formed into mass projections called Ideologies. Legions fought over such subjective perceptions for centuries, unaware that the psychic realities of subject and object were bound up in the contagion of collective hallucination divided by as many heads as were swept away by them. This very grudgingly allowed the random awareness of a few until their more curious hit on observation and experiment to test assumption. This partially lifted the curtain of perception — but only in the external world.
Fueled by its fascination with objectivity and the wish for certainty and control, the new science inspected everything but the self-awe which had so long hindered its spiritual adaptation to Nature. Those who funded it quickly saw the worth in exploiting it and set about the mass manufacture of commercial fascination with objects. This dissolved the old holographic sky-deities and was seen as further proof of the fantastic self-images they’d historically convinced themselves of: the only aspects of nature left unexamined. The new form of self-aggrandizement was perceived as a great advancement, though it described as much regress as progress.
The regressions only reinforced the original biological orientation, and the new science could no more reconcile unconscious purpose to conscious objective than its ancestors. This backward response to ancient, upside-down religious views only served to maintain the old form of stunted inner cognition, and it remained inside-out.
Hypnotized by the new subjective objectivity, the instinctual symbols directing it remained as undifferentiated as the fantastic sky-deities — only re-emerged in a new form of object-worship as symbols of its own self-creation.
Read a poetic story of how these ideas may manifest in modern dreams.