No one is ever hailed as a hero for selfishly and relentlessly pursuing his own self-interest. It is extraordinary that celebrities and the super rich are treated as human gods when, judged by their greed and narcissism, they do not have one single altruistic quality. These are people who have tirelessly worked to glorify themselves, to win the adulation of the masses, to show that they are " superior " to ordinary men and women. These are in fact the worst type of anti-heroes …… those who are in it absolutely for themselves.
The quest for the holy grail is the search for the hero who resides within each and every one of us. We must reach into the heart of darkness, our unconscious mind to find out who we really are …… No task is more difficult.
" The treasure which the hero fetches from the dark cavern is life ….. it is himself. " Jung
" The sense of mystery, of a real danger to be faced, of an overwhelming Spiritual gain to be won, were of the essential nature of the tale. It was the very mystery of Life which lay beneath the picturesque wrappings, small wonder that the Quest of the Grail became the synonym for the highest achievement that could be set before men, and that when the romantic evolution of the Arthurian tradition reached its term, this supreme adventure was swept within the magic circle. The knowledge of the Grail was the utmost man could achieve, Arthur's knights were the very flower of manhood, it was fitting that to them the supreme test be offered. That the man who first told the story, and boldly, as befitted a born teller of tales, wedded to Arthurian legend, was himself connected by descent with the ancient Faith, himself actually held the Secret of the Grail, and told, in purposely romantic form, that of which he knew, i am firmly convinced, nor do i think that the time is far distant when the missing links will be in our hand, and we shall be able to weld once more the golden chain which connects Ancient Ritual with Medieval Romance."
Jessie L. Weston
" If man hasn't discovered something to die for ….. he isn't fit to live." Martin Luther King
IV Human
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Language
Our language capabilities are often deemed to be innate. How can that be accounted for genetically ?
How can unthinking genes ( according to the traditional view ) have any concept of language ? So how can they give rise to innate language skills ?
But if the language of mathematics is the core of mind and if all matter is " minded " then it comes as no surprise to find increasing language capabilities in increasingly complex organisms, reaching their fullest expression in humans.
Jung compared archetypes to instincts. He said that the archetype was the instinct's perception of itself, or the " self-portrait " of the instinct i.e. if the instinct was the " physical " side of the coin then the archetype was the complementary mental flip side i.e. how we subjectively, mentally experience our physical and instinctual response. The term " psychoid-gene " or " psycho-gene " would be preferable to " archetype " since this terminology provides a much clearer idea that it's the mental aspect of genes that is being discussed.
An indeterminate amount of our mental life is unconscious rather than conscious. The fact that mental activity is taking place does not imply that we are aware of it. Usually, we're not. Our consciousness reflects a tiny amount of the mental aspect of our existence. Jung said that archetypes existed within the 'collective unconscious'. This latter phrase is misleading because it seems to suggest that the whole of the human race shares a single, common unconscious whereas it actually means that just as all human beings share a common biological ancestry, so they share a common mental ancestry too. This common mental aspect is always unconscious until it is brought into consciousness, and when that happens the particular
details are unique to each of us, reflecting our unique natures, experiences and environments, although the " big picture " will be the same for all normal human beings.
If and when they enter our consciousness, they do so in the way familiar from our dreams i.e. as images of symbols, objects and people. Since dreams, according to Freud and Jung, are the " royal road to the unconscious ", they will be a primary arena for the appearance of the archetypes when they seek to make themselves known to our consciousness.
( Jung said that the archetypes are teleological, they are actively seeking to express themselves.)
It is important to emphasize that the archetypes are controlling our mental life whether or not they become conscious. If they do become conscious then it is in image-form, Jung maintained. An example that is normally given is that every culture has a conception of a Wise Old Man.
Figures like Merlin and Gandalf are classic examples of the type. ( Note that an image of an archetype is called an archetypal image,
the image is not the archetype itself, rather how our consciousness interprets it. The archetype, in Kantian language, is the thing-in-itself while the archetypal image is its phenomenal representation. ) Jung himself claimed to have his own personal wise old man …. his spirit guide called Philemon.
" Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which i had not consciously thought. For i observed clearly that it was he who spoke …. not i.
He said i treated thoughts as if i generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, ' If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them. ' It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche …… At times he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality. I went up and down the garden with him, and to me he was what the Indians call a guru. "
( Many people have similar experiences but don't talk about them for fear of being thought mad. Jung himself was judged by some to be suffering from mental illness )
Given what Jung said about having conversations with Philemon, it is odd that he omitted the idea that archetypes could also manifest themselves as sounds, language and voices rather than just images. After all, our thoughts consist of images, sounds and language, so shouldn't unconscious archetypes be capable of intruding into our consciousness in exactly the same way ?
There are obvious parallels between Jung's archetypes and Julian Jaynes's
hypothesis of the hallucinated voices of " the gods " arising in the right hemisphere of the brain and being obeyed by the left hemisphere of the brain ( the bicameral mind theory ). If we combine both theories, we get the following view of the evolution of human consciousness ....
1) DNA has a mental as well as a biological aspect. The biological part
provides the instructions for building our bodies while the mental aspect provides the instructions for constructing our minds. This aspect of our DNA would create any innate, a-priori categories of perception or understanding such as those discussed by philosophers like Kant.
2) Evolutionary changes in a species occur when gene mutations create new genes that then succeed or fail according to natural selection. If a gene is successful, it will start to gain a widespread presence in the gene pool, if not, it will steadily disappear. The odds against a gene mutation leading to a good outcome are enormous ( there are far more ways for a gene to go wrong ), yet it appears that gene mutations are much more successful than would occur by chance. If genes aren't randomly mutating but are actually being crudely guided in some way, that would explain a higher than expected success rate of gene mutation. This would be possible if genes had " minds " …. not sophisticated minds, but minds all the same that are able to intuit the nature of their environment and vaguely steer a mutation in a direction more likely to prosper. Many mistakes are still made, but not nearly many as would occur otherwise. In other words …….. Darwin's hugely successful and influential theory of evolution by natural selection is only partially explained by conventional gene theory. A fuller account would talk instead about "psycho-genes" - genes with minds, genes with teleological aspects. These other aspects are not yet susceptible to scientific study.
Until they are, the current implementation and understanding of Darwin's
theory will remain approximate, and leave scope for attacks by Creationists and Intelligent Design proponents.
( What we are saying here has nothing to do with Intelligent Design except in the sense that genes have a rudimentary intelligence that, very primitively, allows them to design themselves in a certain way, thus reducing the number of mistakes
and the chaos that would ensue from endless random gene mutations. ) What we are describing here could be described as Enhanced Darwinism or Psycho Darwinism, based on psycho-genes. It is obviously hard to differentiate Psycho Darwinism from conventional Darwinism since there is no currently known scientific means for distinguishing " guided " gene mutation from random gene mutation. Sophisticated statistical analysis might be able to show that the odds against humanity randomly evolving from a primordial chemical soup rather through a guided process are astronomical, but that would not constitute firm proof of Enhanced Darwinism, though it would be strongly indicative. ( There are many wildly different philosophical interpretations of quantum mechanics. These interpretations, although presenting radically different and contradictory views of the nature of reality, are all fully compatible with the currently available experimental results. In other words, the experimental evidence cannot be used to support or dismiss any of the candidates even though they have practically nothing in common.
Quantum mechanics is the most successful scientific theory ever and yet not one of its super-intelligent practitioners can actually say what it means. No observation
can prove one interpretation over another. The same is true of Darwinism versus Psycho Darwinism. Both are entirely compatible with all known experimental results and no observation could prove one over the other, yet they present radically different models of the fundamental nature of existence.
Which will you choose ? )
3) The mental aspect of genes, it must be emphasized, is unconscious and applies to everything, plant or animal, that contains genes. The difference between ourselves and all other gene-based organisms is that we have a highly developed consciousness. Consciousness arises, ultimately, from the detailed instructions provided by the unconscious mental aspects of our DNA. As our consciousness grows, those unconscious instructions ( which are intended to explicitly guide our consciousness ) break through into our consciousness as images,
sounds, language, voices and intuitions. There are no other ways in which they can manifest themselves consciously.
4) The bicameral mind - the precursor of our familiar modern-day
consciousness, would have had a much more obvious " archetypal " nature than it has now. Thousands of years ago, human beings would have been accustomed to archetypal beings such as Jung's Philemon appearing to them and telling them things, especially in times of crisis when urgent, potentially life-saving advice was required.
In those times, the unconscious would have been throwing out a constant stream of voices, images, sounds, hallucinations and intuitions …. archetypes manifesting themselves as best they could. Arguably, it is because of this ancestry that so many human beings are, in the present day, highly submissive and tolerate being treated badly, they are used to being ordered about and dominated by the voices and " gods " in their minds.
( The members of the Old World Order have effectively taken the part of the
"gods" that used to bark orders at people via the right hemisphere of their brains. ) Jung says that archetypal images tend to have a numinous, sacred quality,
making them seem part of the divine order. ( Atheists might argue that it is precisely this transcendent, otherworldly nature of archetypes breaking into our consciousness that underlies humanity's " fake " religious experience. ) Our modern world is full of strange phenomena that are completely ignored by science since it has no theory for dealing with them. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Psycho Darwinism not only refines standard evolutionary theory, it also offers the prospect of permitting many of the psychic phenomena that have long fascinated humanity to become amenable to scientific study via " psycho-genes ".
5) Consider the two sets of genes that are involved in our instincts for
" fight or flight ". Imagine that the two archetypes corresponding to these different sets of genes manifest themselves, in the case of " fight ", as a military man barking out orders, or, in the case of " flight ", as a runner speeding away as fast as possible and saying, " follow me ". Our ancestors wouldn't have wasted time thinking. They would simply have done what they were ordered to. There is a condition called " latah " where victims, if they are caught by surprise ( i.e. subjected to a sudden,
unexpected stress ) feel compelled to act out any command they hear. They can be aware that they are being ordered to do ridiculous, shameful things and yet they nevertheless carry them out to the letter. They also compulsively imitate motions of others, and if several people are present they might try to imitate all the different actions being performed. This can lead to severe injury as they manically twist and turn, trying to imitate several incompatible actions at once. It is as if they have been spontaneously hypnotized. In every way, this is consistent with the theory of the bicameral mind. Latah sufferers are perhaps the closest modern example to what our bicameral ancestors must have been like.
Another good example is Tourette's syndrome. Most sufferers are left handed ( implying that their right brain is more dominant than their left ) and Julian Jaynes speculated that, under stress, the vestigial bicameral mind breaks through and is responsible for the uncontrolled obscenities uttered by sufferers of the condition. ( originating from the primitive, unregulated language areas of the right brain )
6) If complex behaviors of survival value are somehow mentally encoded in genes, what else might be encoded ? Perhaps we have genetic material that seems to serve no biological function at all, yet the reason it's present in our DNA is that it's providing archetypal data, perhaps of a very sophisticated kind. Imagine that great mathematical, scientific and engineering instructions are embedded in our DNA - " unconscious " instructions, but accessible in the right circumstances. Imagine that mysterious ancient feats of engineering such as Stonehenge and the Pyramids were constructed according to such knowledge. Perhaps all the great secrets of human history are encoded in our DNA. Perhaps the most profound religious knowledge is stored there. Imagine that those of our ancestors who had genes that gave rise to archetypal religious experiences proved far more sexually successful than others. Those genes would then prosper in the gene pool. ( According to the theory of " Y-chromosomal Adam ", all humans alive today are patrilinealy descended from a single man who lived in Africa some 60,000 years ago.) It turns out there is indeed a vast amount of seemingly functionless DNA, estimated by some to be as high as 95% of the total.
Richard Dawkins says in The Selfish Gene
" …it appears that the amount of DNA in organisms is more than is strictly necessary for building them, a large fraction of the DNA is never translated into protein …....… If the "purpose'" of DNA is to supervise the building of bodies, it is surprising to find a large quantity of DNA which does no such thing. Biologists are racking their brains trying to think what useful task this apparently surplus DNA is doing. "
Dawkins goes on to describe this " junk DNA " as a " parasite …. hitching a ride in the survival machines created by the other DNA."
In fact " junk DNA " is a storehouse of incredible, unconscious knowledge that can be accessed by the right people in the right circumstances via the mechanism of Jungian archetypes. Think of the remarkable and seemingly incredible abilities
of autistic savants.
Their awesome abilities in specific areas are the direct consequence of their condition fortuitously giving them full access to certain archetypes largely denied to the rest of us because of our " normality ". Imagine if we could tap into those same archetypes without sacrificing our normality. Imagine the talents and powers we might unleash, ones that could transform human civilization. Imagine that an ancient society already once mastered such powers
……….... the race that " myth " says populated Thule and Atlantis.
7) In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins defines a " meme " as a " unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. "
He gives examples of pop tunes, ideas, catch phrases, fashions etc.
Memes are produced by our consciousness, enter the meme pool and then prosper or die. They aren't of course genetically encoded, no one is suggesting that pop tunes are biologically transmitted to the next generation. Jung proposed something infinitely more radical.
In effect, he said that unconscious mental units of information could indeed be encoded genetically and transmitted biologically, probably in so-called 'junk DNA'. It can't be stressed strongly enough that it is not conscious ideas that
are stored in this way, but unconscious instructions that can only manifest themselves " through a glass darkly " in human consciousness. However ... if these dimly glimpsed instructions have sufficient impact on the conscious mind and prove sufficiently useful to the recipient to the extent that he sexually prospers in life then, slowly but surely, these unconscious instructions start spreading throughout the gene pool and are potentially accessible by anyone who has inherited the right genes.
For the avoidance of misunderstandings, it is crucial to re-emphasize that we are saying that archetypes are unconscious mental patterns, not conscious ideas, stored in genes. They can influence conscious behavior and, if they prosper, they will spread through the gene pool, and, if not, they will perish.
These ideas are not too far removed from the area of study known as sociobiology. Jung's " collective unconscious " is really a reference to all the unconscious mental instructions encoded in core genes that are common to all human beings.
He defined an archetype as " an irrepresentable, unconscious, pre-existent form …… that seems to be part of the inherited structure of the psyche." His is a scientific theory but one, unfortunately, that is not yet
susceptible to scientific study, just as the unconscious mind is not. Even the conscious mind defies scientific understanding.