The concept of the Unconscious certainly predates Freud. It has been traced back to Paracelsus, but we can find other precursor concepts in the upokeimenon (what lies behind) and in the different formulations of the substance-accident semantic operator used by several philosophers. Advaita Vedanta talks about the formation of waves in the sea, waves that appear and return to the sea without ever ceasing to be the sea. Our most intimate intuitions tell us of a more fundamental reality than those reported by the appearances of consciousness. When I speak here about the unconscious, I do it starting from the
theoretical context developed by Carl Jung and Eric Neumann. It is a
non-reductionist psychological orientation. Neither is matter
reduced to a simple mental or spiritual projection, nor is spirit an
emergent property of matter that can be explained in terms of
mathematical physics theories. As such, it is in tune with various
forms of ontological non-duality, such as Advaita-Vedanta in its
different formulations, Sufism, Taoism, Zen... It would be too poor
to call this psychology "analytical", since it does not
limit itself to making a process of separating the parts of
consciousness to examine their function. Jung's studies, both those
published for therapeutic purposes and the various psychological
investigations that he developed personally, are firmly anchored in
the alchemical Christian esoteric tradition but with a very broad
synthesis of diverse influences. It would also be too narrow to call
it Jungian, for although Jung acted as a centripetal force with his
approach to psychology, there is an extraordinary group of thinkers
that gathered around his main theses about the psychological nature
of humans. This thinkers, sometimes referred to as the Eranos Group,
include Mircea Eliade, Erich Neumann, Heinrich Zimmer, Erwin
Schroedinger, Daisetz Suzuki, Henry Corbin, Joseph Campbell, Carl
Kerenyi and many others.
The scope of Jung’s though became so much enlarged and extended in
different directions that we can no longer talk about Jungian
psychology in relation to this flourishing of integral knowledge
about the human being. We will then speak of the Western Theories of
Individuation (WTI), since this process is central to the
understanding of the dynamics of the world of consciousness. The
Group never presented an unified field of proposals and thesis about
ontology, epistemology and psychology, though they all shared the
belief in a Philosophia Perennis that showed different paths
in the pursuit of Self-knowledge and a full life as human beings.
When I talk about WTI views I imply the theories of some of these
thinkers, which in many cases are the theories of a long tradition of
Philosophia Perennis (Ph.P.), expanded or merely updated to modern
language by some of these deep and thorough thinkers.
For
WTI, the stages, the trajectories of the development of
consciousness, are archetypal and function as an eternal presence
that configures the human psyche. The archetypal starting point
implies a progressive deployment and appearance of psychic elements
that are involuted and appear in the evolutionary vital experience as
the emergence of an entity that in one of its multiple names is
called the Self or Being. If we make a philosophical analysis,
we could say that WTI adopts a reality principle that is intuitively
easy to understand and assimilate: Nothing comes into Being except
from Being. Chance, then, is a mental inability on our part to
represent a priori certain emergences of that Being from Itself. That
Itself is rather complex or opaque to our linguistic processes.
Consciousness,
according to WTI, is a transformation of, or an emergence from
an undefinable entity that is called the unconscious.
Consciousness is understandable as a liminal experience that takes
various archetypal forms, called ego, shadow, animus-anima, persona,
and Self. In its germinal form, the ego or centroversion force
expresses itself as a liminal entity that arises between the human
world, with its community-individual polarity, and the extra-human
world. This first form of consciousness does not take a clearly
distinguishable form from the unconscious. The individual
organism spontaneously projects its own constitutive forms, its
architecture onto the outside world. This projection or morphism
simplifies the superabundant outside world through a filter, a
selection. The psyche of the organism in that projection creates a
reality according to its own structure. It is not an individual
projection, but a projection of the organism of the species, that is,
of a specific evolutionary architecture. In this sense, the
reality of the group (of the species or of a particular subset
of the species) is both illusory (as it filters and recreates)
and a finite perspective of an infinite reality, which makes it real
as a particular determination of such a reality of infinite order of
complexity.
The
dimension of reality and unreality of the projection of the social
and individual organism on the outside world means that our
understanding of psychic reality cannot take at face value the
constructions of meaning and the evaluations made by any social group
or by an isolated individual. It is necessary to pay constant
attention to the liminal appearances of the archetypal forms in that
social life using a logic of the liminal and not a symbolic logic
such as that proposed by philosophy or science, although we need to
incorporate the basic space-time intuitions reflected in such
sciences, such as sequentiality/simultaneity and unity/plurality.
The
primordial liminal stage of the development of consciousness
out of the unconscious is called uroboric
by the Ph.P. tradition. The
Uroboros is a very old symbol that represents the
Universal Womb
as the locus of the Great
Round, the primordial Cycle
of Life.
At the uroboric level the Father and the Mother are still unified in
their embrace. The
Uroboros includes all distinctions and opposites, father-mother,
above-bellow, heaven-earth, etc. The first spontaneous answer about
origins is given at this stage. The Uroboros is the primordial Water
of plenitude where life and
death are not opposed but part of the same Great Cycle.
There
are two fundamental forms of identity and
identification that require to be understood in
relation to the appearance of Consciousness out of this Primordial
Round . On the one hand, the world is a morphism or map of
the human physiology, and on the other, the individual is an morphism
of the group. The identity of the external world is a projection of
our own conditioning. The material for that projection is taken from
an indefinite amount of energy information outside the organism. The
organism filters out the world according to its inner order, and
mirrors that order into the world. Once projected the morphism of
the human (individual and collective) acquires a linguistic
objectification that produces the physical object as such as an
element of interchange and communication among the group members and
of the group with the integrated objectified image called world or
nature. Objectification is conditioned by what affective neuroscience
basic emotions
Once
objectification is achieved, supported by the inter-subjectivity of
the language in which such objectification is expressed, becomes
independent both of the individual who objectifies and of the
community. Through language, the objective structure of the world
is inherited from one generation to another by enculturation,
to the point that external objects are already considered to be
independent of the group that projects them onto something
indefinite outside, a cluster of apeironic forces. (Neumann Citation)
The
psychological formation that we call a person occurs during
the process of introjection of the structures previously extrojected
(projected) onto that apeironic external world, through the
construction of narratives with these objects (to which the
unconscious components underlie), narratives that allow the necessary
communication for the development and maintenance of social
homeostasis. The individuals, as morphisms of the group, adopt the
form of the external world that the group has developed in its
survival processes, these are the forms that we call social
personae. On the other hand, the group soul is a morphism of the
Anima Mundi as a unifying introjection of the external world
(previously projected from the psyche of the species).
We
could understand the appearance of the ego from the unconscious
through the myth of the emergence of an island from the primordial
waters. Its appearance, however, is not permanent and definitive,
especially at the beginning. The tides of the unconscious rise
and the island is once again covered by the waters. Only a
progressive systematization of consciousness leads to its permanence.
To keep consciousness awake, a force of determination is necessary,
which requires a display of psychic and physiological energy. For the
appearance of consciousness it is necessary to exert an energy that
moves the homeostasis of the organism to a new point of balance. The
objectification morphisms that shape the world around an ego can
revert to the latent or uroboric state at any moment of weakness or
disease of the organism. The first experiences of the ego are those
that lead to its configuration as the center of the world, it is a
force of centroversion. "I am the center of things", "the
world arises and dies with me" are linguistic expressions of
these first stages. In the uroboric phase preceding its appearance,
the "I am" feels to be one with the world and proceeds
through connections of magical causality with it (similarity and
symbolic affinity).
According
to Erich Neumann, the ego that awakens is fundamentally passive and
still tires with the actions of its awakening, so it has a tendency
to revert to previous uroboric states, it tends to dissolve into the
unconscious.
He calls this uroboric incest. What is dissolved are the necessary
tensions posed by the constraints that shape identity. It is a death
in ecstasy. According to Neuman
incestuous regression plays a negative role in the life of the
neurotic and a positive role in the life of the creative human.
Whether it is positive or negative will depend on the intensity of
the conscious formation as well as the stage of development in which
the ego is. In the writings of Leonardo Da Vinci we find an
interesting reflection on uroboric incest:
Now
you see that the hope and the desire of returning home and to one's
former state is like the moth to the light, and that the man who with
constant longing awaits with joy each new spring time, each new
summer, each new month and new year—deeming that the things he
longs for are ever too late in coming—does not perceive that he is
longing for his own destruction. But this desire is the very
quintessence, the spirit of the elements, which finding itself
imprisoned with the soul is ever longing to return from the human
body to its giver. And you must know that this same longing is that
quintessence, inseparable from nature, and that man is the image of
the world.(Leonardo Da Vinci. The Literary Works of Leonardo #1162
("Morals").
The
uroboric incest is not a death instinct but a fundamental
psychological-spiritual law that in purely physical terms is
expressed in the laws of thermodynamics. The fundamental laws of
physics have an archetypal constitution insofar as they are
projections of the structure of the organism, and in this sense they
are ontological laws. The conscious system of even healthy
individuals has an energetic charge (libido, prana, chi) to maintain
homeostasis of a conscious system for only limited periods. According
to Neumann
the margin of conscious alertness is relatively narrow even today:
it seems as if the organ of consciousness is in an early state of
development and is only relatively stable. The emotional instability,
the pleasure/pain ambivalence, the interchangeability of the exterior
with the interior, of the individual with the group, produces an
insecurity and instability of the egoic formation. To this
instability must be added the powerful destabilizing force of basic
emotions.
The uroboros is always experienced as if it were new, as
that which sustains everything and contains everything, that is, as
the Great Mother.
It comes to mind as a representation with the same topology as that
of the cell, closed to the world and open by the membrane. The basic
intuition is there: belonging. It is an intuition that we find
reflected throughout the entire process of consciousness formation:
as a basic topology of physiological processes, as a support for
basic emotions (instincts), as an epistemology of the individual
organism and society, as a spiritual relationship between spiritual
unity and plurality. This most physiological of our intuitions
intuition is 250 million years old. We could hardly -as a species,
and less so as individuals- form an image of the world that is not
based on these uroboric forces of the Great Mother. The wisdom
expressed in these archetypal representations far surpasses any egoic
structure that does not take it into account and uses it as a
foundation for its constructions. It is not that the uroboric
archetype is better adapted to Reality than consciousness, but rather
that what we call Real (basically an enigma) has been configured
mimetically from the projection of those archetypal structures.
According
to Neumann,
the unconscious represents the will of the collective species, but
not as the opposition expressed in the pleasure-reality opposition,
pleasure being the unconscious and reality being consciousness. This
becomes clear when we consider the deep roots of the unconscious at
the most physiological level, when we see its archetypal
configuration in different structures throughout evolution and how
such configurations follow a pattern of mimesis and not merely
pleasure. On the other hand, it is absurd to consider the egoic
formations, developed in this mimesis, as the only representative of
the Real. Multiplicity, division and filtering are basic actions of
the projections of morphisms that life spontaneously makes. It is the
multiplicity that strengthens the ego, basically a force of
centroversion of pluralities, something that we already see working
in a prototypical way at a more basic animal level.
