The presumption that this consciousness is irrelevant to you and me or that it resulted in a life that was “nasty, brutish, and short” (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan)—is rubbish. I call this presumption The Great Trashing.
Join me in this series of (free) lectures that explain the disturbing agenda behind The Great Trashing (Nietzsche, Goethe, and Carlyle had cogent and bitter insights into this) and how to heal the neurotic, bicameral mind (see Julian Jaynes) it created in you and me.
What distinguishes these lectures from innumerable gospels of “enlightenment,” “salvation,” or “redemption,” all of which I consider hucksterism, is the conviction that healing is not achieved by fancying ourselves as Rousseauvian sauvages—Native American wannabes, for example—or by embracing some sort of religious ideology. Religion, indeed, is a big part of the problem. Healing lies within the non-religious insights of Western culture, though it takes work. It requires sifting through the voluminous literature, the debates, the heresies of civilization to locate the castoffs that rejected The Great Trashing and its grotesque, Baconian “will to power.” (The phrase belongs to Nietzsche.) Socrates’s oft-quoted admonition, “know thyself,” fits this task, although he screwed it up, as I will explain when we examine The Cratylus. (While I’m on the subject of screw-ups, Julian Jaynes likewise messed up: he got his concept of the bicameral mind backwards.)
More specifically, we find what we are looking for—the full octave of the 10-meters—in Neoplatonism (Plotinus), Sanskrit philosophy/linguistics, the science of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Re-Clothed), Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens (from whom I took the phrase, “the amassing harmony”), T. S. Eliot, and perhaps best of all, the renegade (except, he was right) physicist David Bohm—plus a few key conversations with Socrates, Hegel, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, and lots with Nietzsche (chiefly Twilight of the Idols). And believe it or not, several with Jesus of Nazareth about whom, alas, we know little that can be considered authentic, although what little we know is vital to my purposes (which are not necessarily Christian: don’t be misled by my unfortunate name).
Above all, we find that the above sources are strikingly congruent with aboriginal epistemology (understanding of knowledge), phenomenology (understanding of phenomena), and experience with reality (ontology). So I learned from living with the Diné (Navajo) for the better part of a summer (Ganado and Shiprock) and with Yup’ik Eskimos for two years on the Alaska tundra. I discovered it, as well, from decades of reading ethnographies of Paleolithic peoples around the world.
In sum, the Western cultural tradition contains all that we need to understand the mind of our Paleolithic forbears and contemporaries (yes, they still exist), whose mind indelibly and absolutely informs our own. (Don’t make the mistake of evolutionary biologists and anthropologists who baldly assert that “culture” has replaced inherited consciousness. This is self-serving propaganda—part of The Great Trashing.) When we grasp this, the crushing burden of all the crap that has been substituted for—or painted over—the amassing harmony of our mind will be lifted. (Will you then become a hunter-gatherer and switch to a “Paleo” diet? LOL! Nope!)
All I can do is (a) walk you through the tape-measure you were born with—your birthright, in other words—plus (b) walk you through the last several centimeters of conflicted and confusing cultural efforts to pulverize or re-direct the mind you inherited in the womb (no, don’t call this “instinct”: a bullshit term). So you emerge with what I hope will be a non-neurotic, non-bicameral (two “minds”) experience of the complete span of consciousness which, as I say, is already yours.
The only reason you need (a), above, is because of the damage and hijacking done by (b). If the subject of (b) were not such a colossal and bewildering mess, the subject of (a) would be gratuitous.
What you do with this non-conflicted consciousness is beyond the scope of these lectures; I am not trying to turn you into anything. Not a wannabe Cherokee Indian, not a mystic, not a weekend Buddhist, not a saint, not a Dionysan libertine (which was Nietzsche’s goofy advice), and not a Nazi or other Ayn Rand-inspired power monger. I’m trying to explain the harmonious “whole” intrinsic to you. (Bohm used the term “holonomy,” which would fit here. Ezra Pound’s “logopoeia” may also work. Language, as my lectures reiterate ad nauseam, is fundamental and tricky.) Whether you perceive this or not, you are not just an amassing harmony; you are the amassing harmony, as Plotinus (see his Enneads) and Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order make clear, as does Rilke in “The Eighth Elegy” (among numerous other poems) and Stevens in “The Man with the Blue Guitar” and throughout his poems.
We simply must stop thinking in “parts.” Because we ask partial questions, we get partial answers, said Bohm. Bohm wrote the following as a physicist discussing the way the universe really and truly works—and this includes the entirety of human consciousness:
Wholeness is what is real, and . . . fragmentation is the response of this whole to man’s action, guided by illusory perception, which is shaped by fragmentary thought. In other words, it is just because reality is whole that man, with his fragmentary approach, will inevitably be answered with a correspondingly fragmentary response. . . . What is needed is for man to give attention to his habit of fragmentary thought, to be aware of it, and thus bring it to an end. Man’s approach to reality may then be whole, and so the response will be whole.
— Bohm, “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”
To fully engage Bohm’s formula for wholeness, which, I underscore, is the wholeness he researched and described as the hard-core physics of the cosmos, we must release the thumb stop on the (figurative) 10-meter measuring tape.
If you can’t manage to grasp that you are Bohm’s “wholeness”—what I am calling the amassing harmony—during your lifetime, I suspect you will experience this when you die, whether you strive for it or not. This is where Jesus is helpful, especially via the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, which was left out of the biblical canon for reasons I will explore later.
One final point: “Education that does not bear on life and on the most vital and immediate problems of the day is not education, but merely suffocation and sabotage” (Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. Eliot, Pound’s emphasis).
