We are subjective beings striving for objectivity—with varying degrees of success

I think it's important as writers to delve into certain kinds of ideas as a framework to contain or direct our thoughts, such as philosophy and psychology. This entry is in that spirit. I can't find an appropriate section on the board for it, and I don't expect it to really generate any responses, so I guess it belongs on my blog.

I’ve heard it said we’re invisible beings, incapable of really seeing ourselves or others. We can see only the outer shell, the physical body that serves as life support system for the inner being that thinks and feels and experiences.

We can infer things about other invisible beings (other people) through words, body language and expression, and all manner of other subtle clues in somewhat the manner of astronomers inferring the existence of planets orbiting distant stars by observing the regular dimming of the star’s light. The bodies we live in are objects, with objective existence in the physical world. But we exist as patterns of consciousness inside of, or somehow connected to or permeating our organic housings.

The point I want to try to make is that our inner reality is a complex and shifting assortment of thoughts, ideas, feelings, memories and experiences that bears some sense of continuity that we think of as our personality or our temperament or tendencies. In a very real sense, this is our actual reality, and any objectivity we manage to finagle from it is hard-won.

The conscious mind is a relatively new addition, coming into existence around the time we stood on our hind legs and started using tools and developing language rather than a systematized series of grunts and utterances like the communication of animals to signal danger or a desire to mate. The unconscious arrives at instantaneous decisions and thinks ‘in parallel’, to borrow a computer term. It can process multiple streams of calculations all at the same time, while the conscious mind must plod along working ‘in serial’, one decision after another.

From my research into the subject I’ve reached a tentative conclusion (not even what could be called a working hypothesis really) that the conscious mind developed as a sort of check and balance on the unconscious and our instinctive reactions to everything. For example, if you’re strolling along a path and a sabretooth tiger jumps out, your instant reaction is to run like hell, leap into the nearest tree, or if cornered try to fight the damn thing. But if you have that slow clumsy contraption known as a conscious mind you can then double-check the efficiency of your instant reaction. Maybe hanging under the lowest branch of the tree like low-hanging fruit isn’t the best place to be when the tiger could easily jump that high—maybe you should strive to climb a bit higher.

The brain is constructed in layers, something like an onion. At the top of the spinal cord is a lump of spinal tissue known as the Lizard Brain, which we share in common with our reptile ancestors. That knows only the simplest of motivations—aggression and fear, the need to feed and to hibernate etc. Around this and built on top of it is the Limbic System or Mammal Brain, home of warm fuzzy feelings like love and friendship. And around this, developing at the dawn of Man, is the Neocortex or new cortex. The Human Brain, which is what houses most of the conscious mind and allows abstract thought at a level never before possible in any form of life we know of. It’s where language comes from, and art, and math and science. Our ability to conceptualize rather than to just react from pure instinct.

We’ve probably all seen the Iceberg diagram, where the conscious mind is the top 10% that’s visible above water while the majority, the other 90%, is operating invisibly below the level of conscious awareness.

I have a different metaphor for it that I think is more expressive. I see the mind as a vast dark forest where we (the conscious mind which many of us believe to be the entirety of the mind) live in a cheery and well-maintained village in a clearing. Beyond the edges of that clearing are the fringes, the grey zone where consciousness begins to dissolve into unconsciousness. This would be the area of the Personal Unconscious that Freud discovered and believed to be the entirety of the unconscious. It’s the part where we repress those things we want to disown about ourselves, that we tend to project onto others or see as alien even though they’re really parts of our own psyche.

Beyond this first layer the forest grows darker and more primordial. Here be monsters, and all manner of strange creatures and places, but there’s also treasure and wonderful magic. As Jordan Peterson might say the dragons and the gold exist in the scariest places, and you can’t have the gold without the dragons.

This is the realm of mythology and fairy tale. People knew about it in pre-scientific times. There were those who had voyaged there and returned to tell about it, but they didn’t really have any language for it except metaphor and simile, which was a very common way to get ideas across anyway in those times (as now in fact). They didn’t talk about visiting a strange and frightening part of the mind, but rather of visiting some strange and frightening realm or country populated by fantastic beings, monsters and gods.

This was the discovery of Carl Gustav Jung, former associate with Freud who had dared to correct many of Freud’s wrong notions, earning himself a vicious split and a dubious place in the ongoing development of popular psychology, which unfortunately stuck with Freud and largely ignored Jung, mostly because it was Freud and his circle of associates (those who lacked the acuity or the audacity to question his edicts) who founded what became modern psychiatry.

Around the time of the split IIRC Jung had a dream that he and Freud we in a house where each floor was decorated in the manner of a different historical era, each floor being older than the one above it. They had made it to a secret basement level underneath the level of Classical Antiquity, representing an era from before written language and the beginning of recorded history. At this point Jung found a hatch leading down to an even deeper level, not a basement but a cavern, vaster by far than the level just above. Freud had not accompanied him to this level in the dream. On waking he realized the secret basement level Freud had taken him to represented the unconscious that Freud had mapped out, and that the deeper cavern represented another deeper level that Freud was unaware of. This is the level he called the Objective or Collective Unconscious, home of the archetypes and complexes that had been glimpsed by those earlier wanderers and called monsters and gods.

He launched into a massive study of comparative religions, mythologies, fairy tales, folk tales etc. This formed much of the basis, alongside his clinical practice, for his theories. He collected dream reports from hundreds if not thousands of people and worked in a sanitarium for some time, and he found endless examples of parallels between dreams, the delusions of the insane, and mythologies/religions/mystical belief systems.

One more metaphor before I wrap this up. The unconscious mind is always active, it doesn’t need to sleep periodically like the conscious mind does, but it ordinarily speaks in a much quieter voice. The metaphor is that the conscious mind is like the sun, while the unconscious is like the night sky populated by stars. Ok, the way I wrote it it's actually a simile. The stars are always there, we just can’t see them in the day because the bright glare of the sun overwhelms them. Like the conscious mind, the sun sleeps at night and the stars come out to play, like the dream figures we cavort with every night.

Many people believe dreams are meaningless nonsense, and for the most part they’re right. For one thing the conscious apparatus is offline while we’re dreaming, the part that makes sense and meaning out of things. For another dreams seem to exist partially to help consolidate memories into long term storage and to decide which memories are unimportant enough to discard, so they tend to be built largely from day residue, just meaningless snapshots of things we’ve thought about or seen in distorted form. But in troubled times dreams take on a great deal of symbolic meaning and in fact can be the key to solving problems if interpreted right, which is something primitives were very good at. Another way to get more meaning out of dreams is to develop lucidity, something very close to Jung’s method of Active Imagination, which was a sort of focused daydreaming. And personally I believe he would frequently fall asleep and probably go directly into lucid dreaming, in a method known today as a WILD or wake-induced lucid dream. Both of these methods (focused daydreaming and lucidity) are methods of uniting the conscious and unconscious minds, which ordinarily are strangers.

There have been people throughout history who seemed to have a good rapport between the two. They exhibited an uncanny level of intuition and awareness concerning human behavior. Jung was one of these, as were many Eastern mystics such as Buddha etc. Socrates was another one. He used to carry on internal dialogues with some being that he called his Daimon, which would answer only in the negative, to let him know if he was off track while pursuing some idea. It’s believed he actually had developed a deep rapport with the unconscious which will begin to speak, sometimes in something like a proto-voice or through means like dreams and waking visions or sudden bursts of inspiration and intuition.

Jung’s method known as Individuation consists of developing this kind of rapport with the aim of recapturing psychological wholeness, partially through active imagination and dream interpretation, and I’ll bet if he was aware of it he would have included lucid dreaming as well.

I don’t mean for this to be just about Jung, but then he taught us most of what’s currently known about the unconscious and its relation to conscious awareness.

And to close on the same note I opened with, we all like to think of ourselves as rational beings clearly able to distinguish objective truth from subjective fallacy, but we’re largely wrong. We all suffer from various kinds of superstitions and strange beliefs, but we compartmentalize. We also suffer from widespread misunderstandings of complicated scientific ideas that we oversimplify. We do all kinds of subjectivizing of reality while believing we’re being almost completely objective. Ultimately our data about the outer world comes in through 5 senses that are far from perfect. They have blind spots and are subject to all kinds of distortion from emotion, strange belief systems, or just failure to really understand some things.

I’m not a solipsist, though parts of this might make it seem like I am. I’m just trying to be as realistic as possible. I believe, along with Gene Wolfe, that (paraphrasing again) ‘It’s the other thing that’s arrogant and wrong-headed—the firm belief that we understand everything going on around us.’ This in relation to the ideas many of his books are based on, with all their unreliable narrators and falsified memories and incomprehensible realities.

Sorry, this comes across as pretty disconnected. I wrote it up this morning and probably should have taken a few days to develop it into something more comprehensive and with a better flow through the ideas. But it is what it is.