True Consciousness

He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign gods. ~ Acts 17:18

Natural Man

In Ascent to the Divine, we described Augustine’s ladder of ascent. The three lower stages describe natural man. Although the I or ego of the natural man will move among the three lower stages, each man is centred predominantly in one of the three. This centre colours his grasp of reality.

Medieval man was spiritually oriented, so he regarded thought as an opening to a reality beyond himself, either beneath him or above him. For example, concupiscence and malice were attributed to effects of the Fall, not as part of a man’s very essence. That is why such impulses and fantasies were seen as originating from subhuman forces, underground, beneath the earth. So medieval man attributed the origins of such ideas to another being, the devil. Rather than being hypnotized, this was rather a truer grasp of reality. For him life was a battle, a spiritual combat, between the higher and lower forces that he experienced in consciousness.

On the other hand, as modern men have fallen deeper into materialism, the sense of thought as the revelation of something transcendent declines. While remaining oblivious to higher forces, he regards the lower impulses as his true nature. Even for the religious, spiritual combat has become pro forma, without any real commitment or understanding.

The Union of Opposites

Like a bridegroom Christ went forth from his chamber …. He came to the marriage-bed of the Cross, and there in mounting it, he consummated his marriage. And when he perceived the sighs of the creature, he lovingly gave himself up to the torment in place of his bride, and joined himself to her forever. ~ St. Augustine, Sermo Suppositus 120

Carl Jung quoted that passage in Mysterium Coniunctionis to illustrate the union of opposites. Edward Edinger in The Creation of Consciousness offers an explanation:

The coniunctio of opposites is not generally a pleasant process. More often it is felt as a crucifixion. The cross represents the union of horizontal and vertical, two contrary direction movements. To be nailed to such a conflict can be a scarcely endurable agony. ~ Edward Edinger, The Creation of Consciousness

That explains why such inner conflict is assiduously avoided. People therefore will gravitate to one side or the other. However, Edinger explains the effects of the union of opposites.

The union of opposites in the vessel of the ego is the essential feature of the creation of consciousness. Consciousness is the third thing that emerges out of the conflict of twoness. ~ Edward Edinger

In spiritual practice, inner conflicts are deliberately courted precisely in order to enable the ego to attain to greater consciousness.

Dueling Selves

In a series of lectures delivered in 1939 in Rotterdam, Valentin Tomberg speculated on the inner meaning of the Crucifixion of Christ. He draws two opposing, but reconcilable, conclusions:

Christ descended into Hell
“I am my Father are one”

That is, there are both a descent and an ascent. These two movements resulted in a separation between the lower I, or ego, and the higher I, or conscience. In descending into Hell, the interior of the earth, he redeems the ego from the devil as described above. The higher I was then opened up to experience the spiritual world. This is felt initially as conscience, that is, as Christ a judge. However, the requisite purification of the mind and the will is not an easy task. As long as the lower and higher I’s are disunited, the sense of conscience will be resisted. Its psychological effect is described by Edinger.

The experience of being a known object, being seen by the Eye of God, can be a fearsome experience because unconscious contents cannot stand to be observed. ~ Edward Edinger, The Creation of Consciousness

Just as medieval man experienced lower impulses as alien forces, modern man often experiences this higher self as alien. Hence, he may describe it as a “Semitic” imposition or world-denying, in contrast to the lower I which is focused on the world. In that case, it would be impossible to unite the two I’s.

Transformation in Christ

Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements in his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. ~ Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

In his book, Transformation in Christ, Dietrich von Hildebrand describes a spiritual path based on phenomenology; hence, it is mostly free of metaphysical arguments or sentimental devotions. For example, there is a chapter on Self-Knowledge and one on True Consciousness. In the latter, he claims:

The inward progress in the Christian’s life is linked to a process of awakening to an ever increasing degree of consciousness. Conversion itself is comparable to an emergence from a state of somnolence. In rising from self-contained worldliness towards the reality of God, in experiencing the metaphysical situation in which God has placed him and the new light in which all things and his own self are now appearing, the person attains to a new level of consciousness.

Hildebrand warns against contemporary schools of thought which strive to reveal the hidden motives of thought. This is the technique employed by the so-called “Masters of Suspicion” – Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. In this task, the Medievals were more correct than those masters.

A second form of false consciousness is that of the man whose sole goal is to master a system intellectually. Hildebrand elucidates:

He is not filled with a genuine longing for participation in being. Knowledge is not from him a road to such participation but a mere submission to the immanent logic of an unlimited process divorced from the goal of possessing the truth. Such a man cannot even truly understand the primary function of the intellect, with the participation in being which it embodies by itself. To such a man the process of acquiring knowledge has become a self-sufficient purpose.

The unconscious remain submerged in the lower I, as though in a state of nature. Hildebrand describes this state:

The behaviour of unconscious persons is dictated by their nature. They tacitly identify themselves with whatever response their nature suggests to them. They have not yet discovered the possibility of emancipating themselves, by virtue of their free personal centre, from their nature.

As a man awakens to the higher I, the fourth stage described by Augustine, this is the result:

A truly conscious person has so far advanced over his nature that he no longer agrees implicitly to all its suggestions. Should an impulse of malice or envy surge up in this mind, he, actuated by his free personal centre, will seclude himself from the impulse and disavow it.

Unconscious man lives from moment to moment and is thus incapable of understanding events in a larger context. On the other hand, it is different for conscious man.

Wakefulness means to live [in the sight of God]; to interpret everything in the context of our eternal destiny, in its nexus with all our previous valid experience. Conscious man avoids being submerged beneath things or living among them in the interstices of reality; he incorporates everything int eh objectively valid order of ultimate reality. Only the Christian can be truly conscious in the full sense of the term. For he alone has a true vision of reality proper and a true conception of God and the supernatural realm from which everything derives its ultimate meaning.

In describing wakefulness, Hildebrand comes close to Tomberg in the latter’s understanding of conscience.

True consciousness implies an intimate recognition of our defects. A person who is thus conscious, who has emancipated himself from his nature and no longer agrees automatically to its suggestions, who is awakened to a sense of his free personal centre and of the essential, express, and lasting response which God demands of him, has also cast off his illusions concerning himself. His own being is illumined by the light of God and he allows that light to penetrate into all corners of his soul.

Unconscious man is discontinuous and ununified. Hildebrand describes him this way:

Frequently we come across people who reveal entirely disparate aspects of character, of which now one and then another prevails, so that on different occasions such a man or woman may almost strike us as a different person. According to the varying elements of his environment, which their fluctuating appeal to this or that strain in his mental composition, a person of this kind may seem again and again to change his identity.

The life of the conscious man is integral and he always remains himself. The more he suffused with the light of truth, the close he comes to the Absolute I.

We see now through a glass in a dark manner; but then face to face.

Posted

2019-02-27

Spirituality

Cologero

Tags:

Carl Jung, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Edward Edinger, Valentin Tomberg

Comments

5 responses to “True Consciousness”

geirón

2019-03-07

Very good.
33

2019-03-07

«I mean it’s hard to say which is “better” — doesn’t Mouravieff also say that these differences are adjustments to the period of the cycle? Cyclical devolution is a law in Tradition, is this a yes or a no? Can anyone answer honestly?»

In terms of the condition of the world there is overall devolution leading from the pristine primordial purity, reflected in a virgin nature infused with metaphysical transparency of phenomena, down to the sad state the world currently finds itself in, in which we hardly have a century remaining before the end of this world in terms of horizontal historical discontinuity of the human species and civilization. This is the hard reality we are now facing, a truth most people are too scared to look straight in the face.

However, this process of devolution in no way implies that the freedom of the human will and spirit can not under even the most degraded conditions surpass previous generations, even primordial ones, in terms of certain deeds and realizations. For us, the high point of human history is not to be found in the ancient of Hyperborea or what have you—even though we do not hesitate to admit that the conditions in those days were overall superior—but in one Man who lived, died and conquered about 2000 years ago. And as to what we have before us, said not this greatest Hero of them all to us, “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, AND THEY WILL DO EVEN GREATER THINGS THAN THESE, because I am.”

As we fall even deeper into the depths of the cycle, deeper penetration of the Light will be achieved for humanity in the end, even while the outward world degenerates and plunges into final destruction, from the flames of which will rise the new world, greater than this world was in its pristine primordial age.
geirón

2019-03-07

Just to be honest (which means to be readily truthful about things one is in knowledge of): it’s quite possible and not unlikely that Plato and Plotinus had Semitic influences. In fact, Semites lived among the Greeks and spoke Greek, those who did.

Incidentally, ?» The criticism launched by Pythagorians, Eleates, Ionians at the Homeric pantheon was not unjustified, since this pantheon testifies to pre-Hellenic non Aryan influences ; rather, it was illegitimate, since, instead of being made on the basis of a higher conception of the sacred, it was built on a truly Semitic approach of it; it was built on and could not but be built on such approach, for the simple reason that most of the so-called pre-Socratic philosophers were of Semitic origin. These had put forward so many contradictory notions that a school had to emerge to wipe out their shaky systems. Sophism developed from the endless arguments which dogmatism based on abstract subtleties gave rise to, only to pave the way to the seeming simplicity of Socrates’ humanistic method. Socrates may be considered as the one who “revealed the moral God” and who introduced the subjectivist standpoint into the Greek cosmos. Socrates claims to have the utmost respect for Athenian laws, preaches obedience to authority, and pretends to accept that laws are of divine institution and to respect the gods of the city-state, but, above the laws of the city-state, he points at laws supposedly engraved by God in the heart of all men and which require the same things in all countries. His morality is subversive in that it does not only seek to regulate, as did Greek political right, the bonds between citizens and the state, but to establish a universal morality, duties reciprocally binding all men ; that is precisely why Socrates declared himself to be a “citizen of the world”. He laid in Greece the foundations for the doctrine of universal brotherhood, which, having been professed by Platonism and then consecrated by Christianity, later gave birth to “natural law”, whose doctrine was not developed until modern times. In all these regards, Socrates’ teaching reflects his racial pedigree.

Plato, a student of Socrates, “continued the philosophy of [the latter] and struck traditional mythology a blow from which it never recovered. He combined some of the theories of Pythagoras with those of Cratylus and Heraclitus and so composed a body of doctrine in which he introduced the morality of Socrates”. (L.-F. Alfred Maury, Histoire des religions de la Grèce antique, 1859) Indeed, Platonism is based on Reason and inner conscience. Plato’s political views represent a destructive criticism against Athenian politics. Sure, the city-state is divided into four classes : labourers, artisans, whose respective function is to work and obey warriors and magistrates, who are respectively in charge of defending and of ruling the city-state. Prudence is the virtue of the magistrate, courage, the attribute of warriors ; temperance consists in the subordination of the lower classes to the upper classes ; justice lies in the accomplishment by each class of its own function and in the harmonious cooperation between each for a single purpose. Unity is the true good of the city-state. As much these views fit perfectly within traditional Greek policy, as much the views, expressed in the Republic, that the two obstacles to this unity is family and property, regarded as principles of division and enmity, are highly seditious. Everything must be common : property, women, children. True community can only be achieved if the government is in the hands of philosophers : – implicitly – of foreigners. Plato makes hospitality to these an obligation : “Our city should receive all strangers of either sex who come from other countries.”. “For the stranger having no kindred and friends, is more to be pitied by gods and men. Wherefore, also, he who is able to assist him is more zealous in his cause.” The stranger “ought to have entertainment provided them at the temples by hospitable persons, and the priests and ministers of the temples should see and attend to them.” We are here light years away from Aristotle, who, according to Diogenes Laertius, believed the activity of philosophy to have originated in Barbarians, and whose own philosophy, leaving aside its ethical aspect, with its eudemonism, a typical feature of all ancient philosophical schools, is almost completely free from exotic influences. »
Bruno Cariou, 2012.

The Axial Age as well as the consequent philosophy (Plato, etc) is a pretty recent development, in light of the Primordial Tradition.

?» To quote F. de Coulanges, “philosophy appeared, and overthrew all the rules of the ancient polity. It was impossible to touch the opinions of men without also touching the fundamental principles of their government.” »

Conversely, traditional Indo-European worldviews did not view the “two centers” in a mutually exclusive dichotomy. That is a later fixation, and imposition.

For good or ill? Who knows.

We already admit in Mouravieff that Christianity was “Progressive” — it enacted a lot of “Progress” — why attempt to deny it still? The Heathen Indo-European experience and the Christian experience are not identical, to repeat, the latter according to Mouravieff, and I seem to recall Tomberg, too, is a “Progress” over the former.

I mean it’s hard to say which is “better” — doesn’t Mouravieff also say that these differences are adjustments to the period of the cycle? Cyclical devolution is a law in Tradition, is this a yes or a no? Can anyone answer honestly?

Contrast, arguably the more holistic, if not Primordial, ‘moshka’ — contrasted with the denial of parts of the being: ?» In Hindu traditions, moksha is a central concept[5] and the utmost aim to be attained through three paths during human life; these three paths are dharma (virtuous, proper, moral life), artha (material prosperity, income security, means of life), and kama (pleasure, sensuality, emotional fulfillment).[6] »
(Wikipedia.)

Even in the Aveasta of Zoroaster this still remains unproblematic: ?» Do thou grant me benefits of both the worlds, of this corporeal and (the other) of the spiritual, which may accrue through truth, joy-giving, and happiness.” »
argusandphoenix (Logres/MS)

2019-03-01

“Hence, he may describe it as a “Semitic” imposition or world-denying, in contrast to the lower I which is focused on the world. In that case, it would be impossible to unite the two I’s.”

From reading what I’ve gotten to in Plotinus, which isn’t all of him by far, he discusses “lower” things that men or beings sink into, and which they certainly have enough light to struggle against. It’s not phrased the same way, but the idea is the same as hamartia, or unrighteousness. Have they gotten around to condemning Plato and Plotinus of being Semitic? I used to have the impression that Plato’s theory of participation was arbitrary (one always introduces another intermediary), but if one stops thinking of the structure of reality as a “thing” and begins to attempt experiential relation to personal and supra-personal centers, then there is no arbitrariness at all: two persons or Beings too far apart require an intermediary, and there is no inconsistency if the intermediary is apt (no need for an intermediary of the intermediary, etc., etc.). Thank you for this concise, and fitting post.
Jack

2019-02-28

“True consciousness implies an intimate recognition of our defects.”

Yes. I think this can be the basis for a critique of another kind of false consciousness, which is that promoted by new age interpretations of Eastern doctrines. The whole “we are infinite consciousness and primordially pure” idea which is seized upon by contemporary urban “yogis” and the like is often an evasion of real consciousness of self, which necessarily includes conscience and hence a recognition of sinfulness. They want resurrection without crucifixion, or heaven without purgatory.