Hi all,
I find David's point interesting, although I'm not completely satisfied with the
equation social=unconscious (is this what you're after, David?)
Anyway, probably unrelated... or loosely related...
I often wonder if what we mean by "unconscious" is like, the tip of an iceberg.
A few days ago I heard a woman on TV talk show saying an interesting thing. The
context was that her son had been killed by an african immigrant. She had been
invited to the talk show because her attitude towards this event was very
unusual. After her son's death, instead of letting herself go with racial hate
(sadly, a common reaction), she began to fight for the immigrants' rights. They
asked her where did she find the strength and motivations to do that. Her son
was more or less a teenager when he died. She said that she now thought of her
son as an adult. Leaving this life, she said, of course he had left space-time
and thus had lost age-related features. He was now looking at his mother and
lovingly wanting her to grow up just like she had wanted him to grow up when he
was alive. And grow she did...
This touches me, partly because it makes sense to me (and that's strange, since
I'm an atheist). Maybe not to be taken as a literal truth (depending on what you
mean by literal and truth), but sensible. When I see a child, I sometimes think,
how amazing, what is now manifesting like this is the same thing that will, in
10 years, in 20 years, manifest itself as a man or a woman. My impression is
that the child is a facet of the same "thing" as the adult. If space-time are
just part of Maya's veil... if they are intellectual categories, SOM concepts...
if they are, in any sense, false... what does that make us? What are we outside
space-time? If I was forced to try the closest answer I can think of now, I
would guess that the term "unconscious" is at least related somehow, although I
have no idea how that works exactly.
Looking back at myself (and the people I know closely enough) through the years,
I *can* see a general concept, a general "idea" that was reflected in what I've
been, in many diverse forms depending on the space-time structure I was encased
in. It's not unlike the general "idea", for instance, behind a great artist's
work, manifesting itself in diverse ways in different works, some more immature,
some more mature, that very idea taking shape in ever more refined patterns. No
individual piece of music tells us exactly what the general idea of Mozart music
is. Actually, each individual piece of music would be meaningless in the void -
detached from the rest of Mozart and the rest of music and the history of
mankind. Likewise, each shape we take through the years is a manifestation of
what we really are, and no such manifestation tells who we really are, per se.
Growing up looks like refining a pattern towards being the absolute ourselves,
which we never become, but can somehow be perceived by those that live close to
us. And the absolute ourselves make no mistakes. For instance, the absolute son
of that mother could not hate unlucky people living a desperate life miles away
from their war-infested homelands. (the parallel to unconscious may be harder to
defend here - I think *now* I'm really going off-topic...)
I think I can only get more confusing, so I'll quit here. As I said, probably
unrelated to David's idea, but who knows. I was never really fond of the levels,
that is, not very much interested in them, and if David's only purpose was to
clarify the levels, I'm way off topic. But, I did like the subject line :)
Andrea
David Buchanan ha scritto:
> I'd be especially interested to know what Andy thinks about this post. I'd
> urge anyone familiar with Jung, Campbell and Wilber to chime in as well.
> First, a little joke I heard today...
>
> Did you hear that George W. Bush's mother-in-law lost $8,000 on her Enron
> stock? That explain the gash on his face. : )
>
> Please let me begin by asking every reader, especially the old-timers, to be
> ready to re-think some things and maybe even to let go of some long-held
> views. Its not easy. I'll present just two main ideas about the third level.
> One is about individuals and giants. The other is about the age and depth of
> the third level. Hope they interest you.
>
> The social level is about society, right? Its about the "giant", the
> collective, right? And this is contrasted with the intellectual level, which
> is about the individual, right?
>
> No. Its not right. This is one of the main misconceptions about the 3rd
> level. Collectivity and individuality both exist in both levels. The
> scientific method, for example, absolutely requires many sets of eyeballs
> and peer review. Science is clearly a intellectual activity. Sure,
> philosophers and scientists are individuals but they both need groups and
> institutions to function properly. And social evolution requires the efforts
> of individuals, such as the case of the brujo.
>
> In fact, as Ken Wilber points out, everything in the universe is both an
> individual entity AND part of a larger collective system. Its a basic
> feature of reality. I would challenge anyone to think of something that
> defies this notion. So please, take the idea that the battle between social
> and intellectual values is essentially a battle between collective and
> individual values, write it down on a piece of paper, crumple it up into a
> ball and flush it down the toilet. Its poop. Get rid of it. Ahhhh. What a
> relief.
>
> Social level values are in every individual human being. They go far beyond
> social institutions, conventions and traditions, far beyond issues of power,
> status, money, survival, and those cops and soldiers with their guns. These
> are just some of the most conspicuous features of the social level. It goes
> way deeper than that. When we talk about social level values, we're talking
> about everything that's been produced by the last 100,000 years of cultural
> evolution. The agents of cutting egde evolution in this period were not
> philosophers and scientists, they were shamans, the artists and
> storytellers. This period produced stuff like language, stories, myths,
> religions, political hierarchies, social traditions, and all kinds of
> invisible motivations that inform (form from within) us as individual to
> this very day. You know,... French culture exists, therefore Descartes
> thinks, therefore he is.
>
> My mind's got a mind of it own.
> Takes me out a walking when I'd rather be at home.
> Takes me out to parties when I'd rather be alone.
> Oh, my mind's got a mind of its own. (Jimmy Dale Gilmore - Zen country
> musician)
>
> There is a good reason why the 3rd level seems so enigmatic. The existence
> of SOM's old mind/body problem helps to point out how invisible the 3rd
> level can be. Subjects are minds. Objects are bodies and never the twian
> shall meet. Or so it seemed until very recently. Thanks to guys like Jung
> and Pirsig we can begin to see that there is more than just minds and
> bodies. There's a third thing in between. I mean, it seems pretty clear to
> me that the unconcious mind, which is effectively the source and well spring
> of all myths, religions and all sorts of non-intellectual and unconcious
> motivations, is one of the most powerful and mysterious features of the
> social level. Its one of the things that have evolved in the last 100,000
> years. Its not intellect and its not biology. The unconscious mind is
> somewhere in between and connects the two. Mind/body problem solved. Or
> rather, dis-solved.
>
> And we all still live with it everyday, weather we know it or not. We
> inherit it in the same way that we inherit our biological structures. I know
> Jungian and post-Jungian psychology has it detractors, but don't be fooled.
> The discovery of the unconscious, the collective unconscious and of
> archetypes is just as profound as Darwin's theory of evolution or
> Copernicus' discovery of heliocentric solar system. Its the kind of thing
> that causes us to re-think things in radical ways. The meaning of Jung's
> ideas is still unfolding right now in our lifetime. Mythologists like Joseph
> Campbell and Robert Graves did quite a bit in more recent years to expand on
> the things Jung was saying. Quite simply, myths express social values in
> non-intellectual symbolic language.
>
> More another day, hopefully in response to other posts on this topic. Thanks
> for your time.
>
> DMB
>
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