The fact that the mind tends to produce confirmation of any descriptive scheme that we impose on it, including the Freudian Id, Ego, and Superego or the Kabbalistic Sephiroth of the Tree of Life or the Eight Circuit Wilson-Leary model, surely tells us something. No part of it can comprehend the whole incredibly complex and malleable assemblage.
All in all, it seems that humans can function across a whole spectrum from the apparent Mono-Self type to the Multi-Self type. In practise neither extreme of the spectrum seems optimal, because at both ends of it the selves erect barriers between each other.
The Mono-Self type acts predictably and with restricted creativity, and has a cellar full of demons and discarded angels. The full-blown Multi-Self type can act creatively and unpredictably, but erratically and dysfunctionally if communication between the selves breaks down.
We need to aim somewhere between the Zombie like automaton of the mono-self type and the disintegrated condition of the complete Randomaton to explore the multitudinous riches within and to emerge in a functional and sane condition.
Monotheist mysticism and magic inevitably plunges its practitioners into the demon realms.
Monotheist mystics exalt one imagined god-self within by repressing all their own natural ungodliness. They never succeed in this until perhaps old age erodes their sexuality and aggression and appetites, but in the meantime they sometimes manage to sublimate their impulses into 'good' works. But expect outbreaks of appalling behaviour or long nights of unproductive guilt and anguish at the very least.
The Devil gave his name as Legion, the legion of repressed selves lurking in the monotheist's dungeons.
* * *
Part 3.
Dicing with the Randomaton
Chaoists approach multi-self management with stochastic techniques. If one self doesn't work, try another; if necessary, at random. Here we see lateral thinking at work on the grand scale.
Most people seem strangely protective about their name and immediately correct you if you so much as mispronounce it. On the other hand, in many mystical organisations people often have a special name which they only use within it. A change of name or title seems charged with considerable significance for most people. I once spent a year and a half in a job where they called me Jim rather than Pete, due to someone mis-hearing something on the first day. I decided not to disabuse them. It worked out rather well, Jim did a better job of educating the unwilling and the behaviourally challenged than Pete would have, and Pete refused to take Jim's identity and job home after hours.
This seems to work best where you can enter a new situation. Asking everyone you already know to call you something different has little effect in the short term and gains you no extra degree of freedom.
Apparently everything perceived in our universe has a name, and whenever anyone comes across something lacking a name they seem to feel an overwhelming compulsion to give it one. Yet in bizarre contrast to this, few people have any names at all for any of their many selves. Half of their universes consist of murky areas full of phenomena that don't even have proper names. Mere psychological tags often have to suffice, even for the relatively self aware.
Despite that we can peer into the hearts of stars and atoms; our psychology remains primitive. Arguably we have little more real psychological knowledge than the ancient Greeks did. The destruction of all books on psychology would have no serious consequences at all.
Naming the selves of the personal mythos might seem like the first step on the road to insanity and the disintegration of the ego or self image, and we might well ask 'who' names them. In the absence of any sort of 'real' inner core or 'essential self', the selves have to name each other or at least to exchange names and welcome each other to a party that has no host with special privileges, because they all own the building.
I tend to favour democracy, it looks like the least worst system of governance yet devised. Critically, it depends on all power blocs allowing other blocs to try anything that does not radically obviate their own agenda. It does not work in highly divided 'societies'; it depends to a large extent on negotiation between various interest groups.
A truly sane individual or society tries to achieve a compromise between all its impulses.
We (the author) have endeavoured to conduct our life as a party, with something to amuse and exercise the skills and obsessions of all those present at various points during the celebration. In the absence of an adequate psychological terminology we have tended to identify each other with the names of the now safely dead classical gods from various pantheons.
Take violence for example. Everybody has a self that loves violence, whether they try to repress it or not. Don't pretend that several million years of evolution has not equipped us with a certain facility to relish hunting, fighting, and killing, and the crushing of rivals and enemies, and given us a sense of glory and achievement in doing so. However a Mars self unadvised by our other selves, leads the whole organism rapidly to disaster.
Plus of course people don't generally like anyone manifesting a Mars self except under the controlled circumstances of sport or entertainment. Watching violent sport and entertainment seems rather like watching pornography and then not having any form of sexual activity. It titillates an impulse but does not satisfy it, and it allows the maintenance of the hypocrisy that we abhor violence. In fact we have a self that loves violence and several others that don't like it, and they usually have a bad opinion of the self that does. Thus the violence presented in entertainment for the viewer to identify with usually has to appear as justifiable revenge, anything else seems immoral to several of the other selves.
We* (the author*) let Wotan, as we call him, out of his cage for regular ritual exercise. He likes weightlifting, sword practice, the thunderous roar of drums and cannon, the crash of axe upon shield, fire, explosions, muscle powered projectiles such as javelins, knives, arrows, etc and getting into an ecstatic rage for the hell of it. Well why not?
Anger seems a much-neglected resource. It can temporarily double your physical strength and concentration during really hard work, it can project a sort of madman-charisma that wins conflicts psychologically, and it can also serve as a gnosis for projecting intent magically.
We* (the author*) don't feel ashamed of Wotan, we can trust him not to act out of turn, we regard him as a valuable committee member, he likes devising and playing complex board wargames with Logicus the abstract thinker, which neither of them would probably enjoy on their own. Wotan regards ordinary individual human stupidity as rather laughable and only gets aggressive at organised stupidity and malice.
Then we* find that we also comprise at least half a dozen other Selfs with various agendas and abilities, and that all of them seem to have magical powers if the others will stand aside for a while and let them do their stuff.
Death provides constant saturnine advice on matters of time, ageing, senescence, mortality and futility. Sex seems more polymorphous-perverse than the rest of us realised, and has developed a delightful repertoire of fairly harmless paraphilias over the years. Love appears as several different characters that love quite different phenomena, and get quite different payoffs for doing so. The same goes for Hatred. This realisation solved an awful lot of confusion and argument. Logicus would no more try to rationalise any of our Hatreds away than he would try to kill any of our Loves.
So which of my who's am I?
We* regard that question as meaningless because it contains a false imputation of 'being' in the use of the word 'am'. We* have no chairman at our round table, the microphone gets passed around according to circumstance or purely randomly if no circumstances impinge. If we* have any kind of real or fundamental self it consists of the quantum panpsychic chaos underlying all of our* consciousnesses. The Ancient Greeks considered that their gods arose from Chaos, they had a point there.
Great people invariably contain great contradictions, internal self-consistency has no virtue, it merely causes mediocrity. Rather we should strive
to make the most of all the selves that we contain, for each can function as a god for a time if the others stop trying to restrain it. We* seem to function better by regarding ourselves as a team, and by occasionally letting one of our number manifest in full god form, but more of that in Chapter 4.
Some Chaomeras of the
Neural Neopantheon;
We have worlds within us
And we have others within us
Humans and gods make each other
In each others images
* * *
Chapter 4
Neopantheism
- DIY Religion
This chapter looks at possible ingredients for non-insane DIY religion. It begins with a demolition of the whole idea of objective truth in theology and seeks an Apophenia in the Neo-Pantheist concept of a personal mythology and narrative.
Part 1.
Against Logos, 'The Literal Word'
Some people have a mystical capability. They can find awe and wonder in the natural world or in the astonishing phenomena of consciousness itself, or simply in the fact that they, or indeed anything at all, or anyone else, actually exists. Others only seem to have a religious capability. They just want some answers to the big questions to believe in, and they will accept any absurdity rather than uncertainty.
Of all our instincts the religious one seems particularly vulnerable to our profound suggestibility. All too easily it gets subverted for the purposes of social and political control, or simply to make a living for wicked old men.
Most of the religion that litters our planet seems indistinguishable from mental illness.
It blinds people to the enormity and variety of the universe and themselves, it tends to narrow rather than to expand horizons, it takes myth and metaphor for literal truth, it values faith over evidence, and it seeks to impose certainty where open mindedness has more to offer.
If any individual in isolation developed a series of beliefs and behaviours equivalent in their irrationality to most of the main religions, everyone else would regard them as deranged. Let's try it:
How about a prophet or a messiah born from the anus of a man for a change? That sounds like a suitably impressive and contra-intuitive miracle. The great Sky God sent his emissary to us by this means to remind us that He creates universes out of black holes. Devotees must of course carry a symbol of the sacred 'O' ring at all times. A whole elaborate morality thus depends on the correct and incorrect uses of the anus. On feast days we celebrate its functioning, on fast days its functioning becomes punishable with burning stakes. On judgement day only the worthy will squirm through the great black sphincter in the sky, but the rest will spend eternity in a great boiling sea of, - well I guess you can fill in the theological details.
Of course this sounds deranged, yet it has about as much coherence as any organised religion, and when millions of people come to believe in it we will have to respect their beliefs or they will become very angry and probably very violent if they gain secular power. Anusites will crush the unbelievers, apostates and blasphemers!
Indeed they will take a dim view of anyone who rejects The Word of the Black Hole.
We can never know for sure in what sense the ancients believed in their gods. Did they believe in Logos type gods that really existed in some objective way as actual independent entities, or did they believe in them in the Mythos style, as metaphorical principles to explain the world and the human heart?
The belief mode of the ancient Egyptians remains obscure because their hieroglyphs do not submit to unambiguous interpretation, and they seem to have lacked the vocabulary for abstract thought, as we know it. Perhaps this in itself provides a clue as to how they thought. Mythos and Logos seem indistinguishable in what we can make of their inscriptions. Maybe they lived and breathed and thought entirely in one mode and expressed themselves exclusively in mythological terms. We often forget that the religion(s) of ancient Egypt spanned millenniums and a huge serpentine territory. Individual ancient Egyptians would only have venerated a small selection of the gods now known to us.
The classical Greeks however present a different picture. Plato made a clear distinction between logos and mythos style thinking and it seems likely that the majority of noted thinkers in ancient Greece probably regarded the myths and stories of the gods as metaphorical truths and explanations rather than as actual literal truths.
The peasantry however may have taken such tales literally but in small doses particular to certain areas only. The entire classical Greek pantheon looks like a huge family tree of fornicating and squabbling deities with ever more ludicrous stories attached, and surely no scholar familiar with too broad a swathe of it could have taken it all at literal face value. The flowering of abstract non-mythological thought in the golden age of Greece, which contributed so much to art, mathematics, philosophy, politics and science, could hardly have come about in a culture dominated exclusively by mythos style thinking. When the ancient Egyptians discovered something useful by accident the knowledge invariably became incorporated into their mythology. If the ancient Greeks discovered something by experiment they often allowed it to stand on its own as a non-theological idea.
Roman civilisation represents a bit of a setback in many ways. It took the Greek religion on rather uncritically and it failed to adopt many of the insights in Greek philosophy. Disastrously it failed to adopt Greek mathematics although it still managed to build an awesome bureaucracy and hence an effective army filled by state equipped peasant levies rather than by self equipped aristocrats.
Historians advance many reasons for the collapse of the Roman Empire. Undoubtedly it suffered from imperial overstretch, dynastic power struggles, and military problems with barbarian cavalry, but it also ran into severe religious and philosophical problems. The Romans attempted to amalgamate the religions of conquered peoples with their own, and as Rome became more cosmopolitan it imported foreign cults wholesale. The cult of Mithras became popular in the army; and cults of Isis appeared in the cities. Rome itself ended up swarming with the priesthoods of various deities along with every kind of soothsayer, diviner, prophet and magician.
Out of this confusing and increasingly incredible stew of paradigms one particular religion of Hebraic origin evolved to eventual dominance and then eliminated all opposition with an iron fist. At the Council of Nicea 325AD the empire set its beliefs in concrete forever. Before that, huge differences of opinion existed between various vaguely Christian groups around the empire.
Only one god existed. It created the entire universe. It required worship. It required obedience. All other religions were wrong. Mythos style thinking ends here with the adoption of the Hebraic idea of the literal and absolute objective truth of a written religious corpus.
At the Council of Nicea the assembled worthies decided on exactly which written texts would constitute The Truth. They had plenty to choose from, and they had to discard most of the material available to them.
This stood in violent contrast to paganism which had no absolute texts at all, but had oral or written stories which it could elaborate on or alter or interpret according to taste and usefulness.
One might argue that the Roman Empire never really fell, it merely switched from mainly military to mainly religious methods of control and within a few hundred years it actually controlled more territory by the latter method.
The new Logocentric monotheism with its insistence on the literal truth of The Word of its scriptures not only discouraged mythological thinking, but it also discouraged reasoned enquiry into any other form of truth but its own. Logos in the sense which Plato intended it, the enquiry into reality by reason, lay dormant for centuries, a period which we now call the Dark Ages. During that period another intensely Logocentric monotheism arose in the Arabian Peninsula and it used exactly the same technique, a Sacred and Absolutely True book.
It took Christendom many centuries to begin to extricate itself from the idea of a fundamentally true logocentric religion and s
tart to apply reasoning to the natural world instead of theological matters. The process seems to have begun in the renaissance with the rediscovery of Greek ideas. The invention of the printing press sparked off the reformation which helped a bit, but the Enlightenment took a long time coming. Even today some people in westernised nations seek a retreat into fundamentalism whilst many cultures of the third major monotheism remain mired in it.
Note that Logos style thinking underlies both the idea of literal truth in religion and objective truth in the material world. The results of Logos style thinking depend on whether you apply it to belief or to observation, and so do the results of Mythos style thinking. We can arrange these ideas graphically to see what paradigms result:-
Figure 1.9
The terms 'Magic' and 'Pantheism' have a rather looser and more inclusive usage than normal in this scheme. Magic includes more or less any attempt to use mythos style thinking about the observed phenomena of the world and it thus includes astrology and alchemy. Pantheism refers to the mythological/analogical attitude to belief and could in theory include polytheism or monotheism. Note that Fundamentalism can include polytheistic fundamentalism as well as the more common monotheistic fundamentalism.
Figure 1 represents a graph, and various schools of thought can occupy areas anywhere in the quadrants
My average compatriot in these British Isles has a paradigm footprint or 'psychogram' consisting of a blob centred roughly on the origin where the axes cross.
Such a hypothetical person has a general feeling that an objective reality open to rational analysis actually exists (Science). Nevertheless this person has a vague intuition that fate and intent can play a part in life (Magic). Notwithstanding this, such a person has a head full of archetypes, celebrities and narratives (Pantheism). Lastly, when it comes to the big questions of life, existence, and death, the average person usually maintains that 'There Must Be Something' (Fundamentalism).
Apophenion Page 4