Wakefulness and Creative Imagination

 Is there really a clear line between the so-called dream worlds and the waking world? Isn't

wakefulness another form of dream? Isn't waking another form of sleep in the sense that much of

our waking life is a life of low consciousness (historical, psychological, epistemological, ethical)?

Perhaps we are facing a continuum of experience that only the roughest forms of sensitivity polarize

into two well-separated worlds. The aesthetic experience seems to confirm this hypothesis, and it

should not surprise us since human beings are symbolic creatures.

Only basic emotions are literal insofar as they point to some survival action. The rest is symbol.

If we consider reality as a complex symbol, the traditional border of sleep-wake psychology

vanishes. And what scene do we have before us then? What is experience? Our experience is a

shared myth built from successful survival actions. But beneath these actions is the mystery of life

itself, towering over something equally mysterious that we vaguely call matter. And in the bosom of

life, the mind has arisen, emerging with it new movements of determination of reality. This

continuum of Life-Intelligence, of which we make vague mental representations and of which we

have intense vital representations (but also imprecise), shows a force that seems to be a combination

of the vital and mental worlds, a force that operates in the line of the numinous experience. It has

traditionally been called "creative imagination", or "active imagination". I understand this force as

an impulse of expansion of Life-Intelligence outside the limits of symbols related to everyday

experience, it is a second-order symbolic force, like general abstraction, but endowed with a unique

emotional vitality and directed by a principle of self-mimesis. This creative imagination is no more

illusory function than any other mental map can be. In fact, the intensity of its impulse throughout

our entire existence as a species presents it as a sure guide of our being in the world. Through it

have manifested forms of reality that practical reason would never have revealed. Its action is not

limited to the world of dreams, where it is fully active in most of us, but works in our vigil when we

are able to put aside the urgency of survival. Then, not only our mind but all our self enters a

second-order symbolic experience (a reflection about symbols themselves).

The intensity of the creative imagination will determine the intensity of the aesthetical action.

Such intensity depends on the degree of presence, the actual focusing of consciousness in us.

The Noumen on the Threshold

Open door, threshold, the limen is what is in between, neither one thing nor the other, the place of change and of encounter with the Noumen, with the radical other. On the threshold opens up the chasm, the depth, and the individual sinks into a cosmos without limits or measures. There, space and time relationships are suspended, we are in the territory of dark and uncertain borders, we are on the edge, any form is imaginal and virtual flow.

The liminal artist experiences himself at the limit of himself discovers areas that he did not know as his own, and checks how his/her individuality extends in Nature and the Cosmos. He or she opens the incurable wound within his/her community, to expose its members to the convulsion of its main values, a general convulsion of foundations that allows the subsequent growth and evolution. Limits are expanded, new experiences are included and the other, the different, the Noumen found on the threshold is assimilated. Liminality is not the only state of society, nor it is the most frequent, but it is in the condition of liminality that the appropriate scene is set for the emergence of the deepest values, whether in the form of dramas and sacred objects, or by the appearance of the most violent skepticisms about the values of the past.

In a liminal situation, the instincts, emotions, and intellect of a community trigger and crisscross their different pulses, producing a general convulsion, more or less strong, of all its values. The poet amplifies and focuses on himself the liminal situation of his community. Then, later, as a demiurge, he will reconfigure social reality in his work, establishing the new relationships of his members with each other and of these with Nature. Strictly liminal phenomena are more typical of tribal and agrarian societies, while highly structured societies (Mythico-Ritual Axes of the King-God and after) transform the liminal into liminoid through art and ritual. This type of society impose filters on the liminal, stripping it of much of its chaotic content, taming the liminal by locating it in a perfectly controlled space-time, in which the disruptive capacity of the liminal is minimized.

The liminal is what remains open, unfinished, and carries a burden of anomie. Control over this anomie is achieved through a strict rendering of myths in rituals, but above all through the transformation of rite into a show. The step from rite to drama is but a small one: it is enough to interrupt a ceremony to give it theatrical content. The step from the liminal to the liminoid occurs when we include in the ritual performance the new and the unexpected, but disarmed of all its anomic content by granting it a very precise space-time for its occurrence. This step historically began with the control of musical dramas that already took place in Athens, all of them coming from choral songs and dances of the dithyrambic type with strong liminal content, but in general, it is a process carried out by every society at some point on its way to non-tribal social organization.

Through the liminal work, new forms emerge from the virtual flow or the already existing ones dissolve in it. This unique two-way process always occurs on the edge of the present, or on an exact present, as Lorca said. What is the meaning of the word “present”, praes-ens”? It means to be before, that is, the notion of present entails, first of all, an obvious bodily dimension: presence is the location of two bodies in a known space and time, facing each other, one witness to the other. This notion of general presence is precisely used by Lorca with all its resonances in the “Cry for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías”.

What do they say? A silence rests stinks.

We are with a present body that disappears,

with a clear shape that had nightingales and now

we see it filled with bottomless holes.

The expression used, present body, which normally serves to name a corpse to be taken to bury, introduces us to the problem of presence: it is a body that vanishes, something volatile and fleeting. Life is fleeting, and so is death. Ignacio's body vanishes, like a vague fog of stenches that goes away in silence. The mutable form of a corpse, pierced by death in its incessant activity, it was yesterday a hostel of nightingales, the abode of the vital principle. Today, however, it has become somewhat dry and incomprehensible for everyone, since it shows us that what animated the body is different from the body itself. The corpse is the object of contemplation and the poet shows it to us as a mystery: stone and corpse in mutual support, something no longer human, a body fused with the nature that gave it its birth and its death. The corpse shows the incessant activity of nature at the limit, the continuity of the vital cycles in the decomposition of the organism. The present body not only shows the continuity of what is natural in the human but is focusing all that activity of life in death itself, is intensifying it before us, because that body has just died has already moved away from the image we had of him.

The problem of the corporeality of presence, therefore, leads to the problem of its temporal dimension: presence is corporeality focused on the present, and more generally, the focusing or intensification of individual consciousness in the here and now, which transfigures it into a broader identity, already detached from any material projection like Principium Individuationis. The present contains the enigma of eternity, is the rose of the eternal rosebush, is something elusive measured with the imponderables instants. Individual consciousness is based on the opening to the nothingness of the moment, whose roots are sighs, that is, air. The moment is what dies and is born continuously, but it is also the door, the threshold to what has not yet been realized, where something different can happen. The opening of the moment is the basis of the opening of presence, and that is why speaking of presence is analogous to speaking of absence: everything that is coming into presence is leaving it at the same time.

We could then define the notion of presence as the instantaneous focusing of individual consciousness that expands it beyond its limits. This is the equivalent to an intensification of the process that leads from the limited to the Unlimited, the process from form to the virtual flow.

Absences and individual presences are but veils that mitigate or cover the terrifying encounter with the focus of consciousness on the corporeality of nature, the processes of generation and destruction in front of which our individuality seems to disappear, the encounter with the Sublime. Such encounter with the Sublime is the lifting of the veil of existence, the encounter with the Absolute, it is more than anyone can bear, and it can only be experienced as terror. Like in the Dionysian experience. The terrible presence is the presence that has reached maximum focus. The terrible presence intensifies before the poet the dynamics of formation and dissolution; the contrast between the limitation of the individuality of the poet and the limitless extension of nature. The experience produces pain as well as an irresistible attraction. The action that derives from the encounter with the terrible presence is the complaint, an authentic bridge stretched over the abyss that unites the poet with the virtual flow over the generations and destructions of individual forms, as we read in Arjun’s encounter with Brahman in The Bhagavad Gita.

Kopimism

The Internet produces new forms of "Assembly" (which is exactly what is meant by "Church" in classical Greek (Ecclesia). The new forms of gathering and structuring of forms of group-consciousness of the internet are closer to the myths of the Universal Law than the myths of the Human Law because scientific psychology fails to function as an instrument for the generation of identity narratives that are harmonized with contemporary science and technology. Contemporary psychology fails to create meaning for our lives, and the old paradigms come back dressed in new costumes. The old myths of the great "Ecclesiae" revive without renewing their psychological contents. On the other hand, the Web has already begun to develop the foundations for future cults, such as Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. Kopimism, which is now a cult, will be incorporated in a syncretic way by other narrative forms that over the years will end up in new religions devoid of content beyond the screens, but producing wars just like the others did.

Thinking and Technology

    According to Aristotle [Nicomachean Ethics. Book VI], the rational soul has two thinking drives: one is a calculating action (to logistikon), the other a scientific impulse (to epistemotikon). The calculating aspect is the way humans deal with contingent matters (things that could be otherwise) while the epistemic aspect deals with necessary questions (things that could not be otherwise). Calculating leads to practical thinking while scientific thinking leads to theoretical knowledge. Following this basic distinction, we can say that what today we call technology falls in the first category, calculating, whose realm is the practical matters of life. 

So technology is practical thinking, a knowledge embedded in everyday life. On the other hand, science or theoretical knowledge studies necessary objects and relations, the foundations of all knowledge, that are not directly related to everyday life thinking, but is its support, as is the case with philosophical and pure mathematical thinking. The distinction is important in order to understand the separation of these two realms. Technology is founded on theoretical thinking (epistemological thinking) but not the inverse, so we cannot expect that technological thinking solves epistemological questions: Technology can neither make clearer the truth of objects and relations nor unveil the meaning of our life and the Cosmos. The realm of technological thinking has very clear limits within the scope of our thinking force.

To understand technology we need to answer questions such as: Is all technological thinking mechanical? Has epistemological thinking mechanical traits? What is the foundation of mechanical thinking in relation to human nature and life in general? What is the machine component in physiology, emotions, and general thinking? What human thinking is not repetitive and machine-like? Are we in control of the mechanical processes that we design? Do we really control our mechanical thinking? To what degree are we alienated by our machines? Are machines ethically responsible? Is all practical work alienating? 

It is interesting to notice that the vital force in our bodies works mainly in an unconscious manner. It is not only that the autonomic nervous system does not require our attention, it is rather the fact that all that goes well inside our bodies happens basically unnoticed. However, this does not mean that a physiological system acts like a machine, for evolution implies a set of interactions between life and environment altogether different from the one established between machine and its surroundings. Machines are not environmentally mimetic, but life is. All too often we mistake the model for the thing modelized. Our theoretical models of Nature are helpful oversimplifications that can never be mistaken for Reality. Nature is not an object, humans are not objects. We don’t have and could never have a Science of Reality, for Reality is not an object. We can never know the Real, we simply can be the Real, just being fully human.

The human thinking force operates in different levels of semantical complexity. On the one hand, there is mechanical thinking, which is a kind of mineral-like producer of rigid thoughts, a sort of mineral mind that performs operations based on distinct discrete entities, like the integer numbers, with clear-cut simple mental identities closed to the environment. But we also have vital processes of thought, with much more fluid identities of its elements. These include the processes know as allegories, metaphors, and morphisms in general. This level requires a semantical complexity unknown to the mineral thinking of formal logical calculus, or of our simplest syllogisms. Vital thinking proceeds by association, but also but, and most important by a constant act of suspending identities: the whole is taken for the part and the part for the whole. Vital thinking is closer to what we call magical thinking. The likeness of forms, or even of attributes produce exchanges of identities, physical proximity, and distances are extrapolated to other types of relationships. 

    Consider for a moment Gongora’s famous metaphor: “(…) juntaba el cristal líquido al humano por el arcaduz bello de una mano(...)”, that we could translate as "(...) the liquid crystal joined the human crystal by the beautiful pipe of a hand (…)". The sentence is describing the action of a girl drinking water. The liquid crystal, water, joins the human water, saliva, when the girl drinks water taken with her hands. Such a thought adds different semantic layers and transfigures the scene, the very common scene of someone drinking: the mechanical has been vitalized. When we read Gongora actions are projected into another space, a very human space, even in its extreme transformation, showing to us a legacy of images and worlds of meaning that open up for us a new emotional dimension.

    There is also a third kind of thinking force operating in us that surpasses in complexity the vital and the mineral-like forms of thinking, for it includes them and recapitulates them in a higher setting, and ads something new. We live in complex social structures, built upon complex narratives of identity that include complex and sophisticated emotions. Those structures of thought, let’s call them purely mental, require the previous ones but it operates with them in terms of harmonic forms, constructing mediating processes, inter-human, human-environment, human-cosmos. It is a self-conscious force of thinking that at its highest peak operates with identities and differences in an aesthetic fashion. Purely mental thinking is a force of integration and balance. Finally, there is a fourth kind of thinking force that supposes the emergence of a yet uncommon form of thinking. At its simplest expression, it operates based on what we could call “intuition”. The term is not so good for it is semantically very ambiguous. It is not intuition as a kind of fuzzy and imprecise feeling. It is neither intuition in Kantian terms, as information obtained through the senses. It is rather understanding by continuity of being. I understand life because I am life, and such an understanding is not purely based on the information of my senses, nor is the result of my inferences, neither in the intellectual social structures that provide me with a narration of identity. I understand myself by being myself. As a condition for intuition, there are two forces that are needed for its opening up: freedom and love. These are thought to be moral constructions, but even if we can find involuted forms of these human forces in previous stages of Life-Intelligence, they are organs of a clear and powerful form of thinking, that we may call “supramental”. Thinking itself then transforms into a new sense-organ. What senses are for our dealing with physical forms and matter, supramental thinking is for our dealing with new dimensions in our being. 

    When we deal with technology we have to bring into the picture all these considerations. It is too narrow-minded and dangerously naive to talk about human evolution in terms of technology. The need for an urgent discussion of technology is the symptom of a more than a century-long crisis. The problems faced are not only deeply rooted but also affect most areas of our social constructions. The unbalanced of our narratives of identity in relation to our economic actions is only speeding up a change of Civilization, unfortunately, through a catastrophe.