The New Psychology and the Evolution of Consciousness - Part 4

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Dear All,

 

Part 3 of The New Psychology and the Evolution of Consciousness ended with:

 

" This world of symbolic imagination is typical of what is known as palaeological

thought. This is thought which is not fully logical and which operates largely

with images and symbols. In this mythological world people had not learnt to

reason accurately or to make clear logical distinctions, and so all sorts of

confusions and superstitions easily came to form part of the worldview. But in

spite of the problems associated with this stage of consciousness it was also a

time of deep insight. "

 

Here now is Part 4.

 

Enjoy,

 

violet

 

 

The New Psychology and the Evolution of Consciousness

 

(Part 4)

 

 

(p.39) At this stage of palaeological thinking, it has been suggested, language

was paratactic and not syntactic. In other words, clauses were merely put

together side by side. There were no complex sentences with subordinate and

embedded clauses. Today a child of a few years old can learn a language

syntactically. The habit has been formed over thousands of years so that it now

comes easily and of course, mostly importantly, the child will be surrounded by

adults who use syntax fluently, but it took thousands of years for language to

grow in this way. People had to learn, through their experience, to express

themselves with the degree of subtlety only possible through fully developed

syntax.

 

In the verbal membership stage the predominant function of the brain was on the

right side. It is generally accepted now that the two hemispheres of the brain

function rather differently. The right hemisphere is associated with intuitive,

imaginative, symbolic, synthetic activity and the left with thought which is

rational, analytical and logical. We at our present stage of development are

living almost entirely from the left hemisphere (p.40) and are therefore

" one-sided " . True human knowledge is that which is balanced between the two

hemispheres. Such knowledge arose only gradually in the course of human

development.

 

The next stage was that once agriculture had been established people began to

store up food for the future and the point came when there was a surplus. Then,

instead of living from day to day or even from week to week, it was possible to

live from year to year. This led to the beginning of exchange and barter, and

money in some form came to be introduced as the medium of exchange. With this

the whole economy changed and it is here that Karl Marx is right, that as the

economy changed, the outlook of the people and the whole social structure

changed. Surplus food brought money - and cities. Now instead of tribes hunting

their prey and living a nomadic life in order to do so, and instead of small

groups cultivating a small area, larger communities sprang up and these

developed rapidly. In the valleys of the great rivers, the Nile, the Euphrates,

the Indus, and the Yellow River in China, there arose the beginnings of the

great city civilisations, vast agricultural enterprises producing quantities of

surplus food and money. At this point there emerged a caste of people who had

leisure; people, that is, who no longer had to be constantly engaged in

providing for their daily needs. With such leisure there arose the beginnings of

writing, ideograms, the alphabet, the calendar and the observation of the stars.

These developments came principally through the temple, since the worship of the

gods was the centre of all human life.

 

At this stage the world of the gods dominated all human concerns. At the

beginning of history there was a sense of simply being one with nature, with the

world and with the mother. Then, as the separation from body consciousness took

place, there was an intensified consciousness of the Great Mother. There was the

experience of having come out (p.41) of the Mother's womb: the whole world of

nature was the womb from which humanity came forth, and nature was experienced

as nursing and nourishing her growing child. The religion of the Great Mother is

the basis of all the great city civilisations. It is interesting that in Tamil

Nadu, in South India, the mother goddess is still the main object of worship in

the villages and this is no doubt a survival of the primeval culture of India.

With the arrival of the Aryans, who were patriarchal, this matriarchal culture

largely gave way to patriarchy and to new forms of worship.

 

When the individual person gets to this point of development there often arises

a series of problems. As a person separates from nature and from the body

through language and culture it is very easy to suppress the past. There is the

tendency to suppress feelings, emotions and contact with the mother. This is

where a great conflict begins. As human consciousness develops more and more

powers are released, but dangers are increasingly present.

 

Wilber makes the very important point here that at every stage there is both

differentiation and transcendence. As body consciousness is differentiated from

oceanic [the womb or uroboric], then verbal consciousness [differentiated] from

the body, mental consciousness [differentiated] from the verbal, and so on, at

each stage people not only differentiate from themselves but also transcend the

previous state. With transcendence there is increased freedom but there is also

the necessity to integrate the former consciousness, and it is precisely with

the process of integration that the problem arises. All too often the

integration fails. We today experience this particularly at our normal level of

mental consciousness. We develop mental consciousness from the earliest age. The

child of three or four years old begins to develop its mental consciousness and

almost simultaneously there begins the repression of emotional consciousness,

sexual consciousness and contact with nature. Serious splits are the result.

Most people today live with a mind separated from matter, from the body, (p.42)

from sensations and feelings. Modern man is experiencing all these splits and

repressions to a tremendous extent, and it is the resultant disorders deep in

the psyche [soul] which are the cause of the imbalance of modern society.

 

Another risk is that as the person separates and gains mental consciousness

there is the danger of going back to the mother. This is experienced again and

again. Instead of separating from mother and then uniting properly with her in

an adult way, people allow themselves to be dragged back to the mother. The

child wants to cling to the mother and refuses to become free and separate; and

the mother clings to the child, refusing to allow it to grow up and become free.

This produced a terrible crisis when the mother was conceived as devouring the

child. Mother Nature was always seeking to devour her children, to drag them

back into the emotional world, into the world of sex and nature. One of the

great struggles that the Hebrew prophets had to engage in was precisely that.

All the surrounding peoples were experiencing this attraction of the power of

goddesses, which were representations of the Great Mother. So there arose many

myths in which the mother is the devourer of the people and the hero is one who

is trying to escape and to rescue them from the mother.

 

It is at this point that the rites of sacrifice underwent a new development.

Sacrifice probably began in the typhonic [emotional] stage and was certainly

established in the verbal stage. The meaning of sacrifice is this. Human beings

were from the beginning aware of themselves as parts of a cosmic whole. At every

level there was spiritual awareness. Even at the very first stage there was a

global awareness of the Spirit in all nature. In the typhonic stage there was

awareness of the Spirit within the body, in all bodies and in the whole

emotional world. Then, as development took place into the imaginative and

symbolic world, there was awareness of the Spirit (p.43) as expressing itself

through those images and symbols which are the origin of the forms of the gods.

The gods, in other words, are manifestations of the Spirit in symbolic forms.

Then there followed the need to express dependence on that Spirit. Sacrifice, in

its proper form, was an expression of dependence on the great Spirit. It may be

dependence on the Great Mother, accompanied by the sense that thanks must be

expressed to her when she granted a good harvest, or that there was the

necessity to pray that she would make it successful. And so at first things are

offered. The first fruits of the harvest, for instance, might have been brought

and offered to the Mother, to the great goddess. That was genuine sacrifice. But

then the danger was that people began to think that it was the thing offered

that mattered, rather than their own prayer and thanksgiving.

 

Then began the terrible phenomenon of human sacrifice. Things went wrong, there

was no harvest and starvation abounded. This was interpreted in terms of the

Mother being offended, and something had to be done to propitiate her. Goats

might have been offered, for instance, but this did not satisfy her. There was

still no harvest; the situation is critical. So, the logic ran, a person must

offer his own sons and daughters for they are the most precious of all. With

this reasoning human sacrifice had arrived. An orgy of human sacrifice took

place at this time in many cultures. That again was part of the situation

against which the Hebrew prophets were protesting. The perceptive could see that

when this reasoning was being followed all sacrifices were substitute

sacrifices; instead of making the real sacrifice of one's own worship, praise

and thanksgiving, substitute gifts were being offered. The story of Abraham is

interesting here, for it marks the precise point when humanity discovered that

God did not want that kind of sacrifice. Abraham was taught at that point not to

sacrifice his son but to offer the ram instead, as a sign. That was the exact

point at which human sacrifice (p.44) was surpassed in Israel, while up to that

time it was part of the cult.

 

At this stage came war. Previously, war was unknown. In the earlier uroboric

[womb] state war was inconceivable, and at the tyhonic [emotional] stage there

was general harmony between the tribes punctuated only by occasional incidences

of tribal conflict. It is very interesting that among the animals, as well as

among primitive human beings, although there is often conflict and they may

fight they never totally destroy one another. Animals will fight for territory,

for instance, but they do not annihilate one another in the process. It is only

human beings, and advanced ones at that, who deliberately annihilate one

another. The tragedy is that as higher powers develop the possibilities of

misusing them more effectively increase. At this stage of development there took

place the most terrible wars.

 

Assyrian kings, for instance, boasted of how many cities they had sacked and of

how many men, women and children they had killed, or conquered and made slaves.

A terrible power began to grow up when man had separated from nature and had

begun to discover his own power; it is this that marked the development of the

ego mentality.

 

A New Vision of Reality (Western Science, Eastern Mysticism and

Christian Faith)

Bede Griffiths

Templegate Publishers - Springfield, Illinois

ISBN 0-87243-180-0

Pgs.39-44)