Self Hatred
Part 3
Modern life brought with it a hollowing out, and maybe more importantly a flattening of life experience, such that today, our post-modern mode is utterly dislocated and malshaped.
How? Well, probably in a bazillion ways that won’t be catalogued here. But a few obvious ways, I believe are worth consideration:
1. Division of Labor: the beast must be fed. Whatever we say, whatever we know, whatever we can reckon about our ultimate source and destination, we ain’t there now. We’re where so many geniuses remind us every chance they get: we’re in the real world.[1] In the real world, you gotta eat; you gotta rest; you gotta fuck and play and work. And you have to do so competitively and competently. Which includes efficiently. The alternative is you get washed out of existence and then all these considerations really become academic.
Competitive pressures demand for efficiency led to a fragmentation of tasks, and thus experiences. This ever fractioning and ever-reinforced experience of fractioning took us further and further away, in our phenomenal experience, from our Aesthetic Moment of full, complete and whole experience of Self. Leading to a profound kind of forgetting and estrangement.
Divisions of labor robbed us of the vantage of the whole picture; which in the end is the basis of the Self.
2. Disorienting Geometries: there are a lot of lies and traps out there: Christianity, trickle down economics, natural male enhancement, but probably the most disorienting lie we live with is: the straight line.
At best the straight line is a useful fiction, like our concept of the atom or ladies’ faked orgasms. We know that space is curved. We know that we’re constantly moving in all sorts of directions at wildly high rates, but we believe in still and straight notions of placement and motion. Ha!
I’m not prudish about useful fictions: hell, they’re adaptive. Yes, you may lose at this precocious game of Life, but it’s a mortal lock you will lose without a fine cabinet full of useful fictions. It’s when these constructs degrade life that we must reassess, and for my part: I must step in and call bullshit. So here it is kids: there’s no such thing as a straight line. There is no such thing as leaping off from a point of origin without inevitably returning to that point of origin. Straight lines suggest a beginning and a distant end point of termination. However, we lived in a phenomenal universe made up entirely of curved space. Anything that appears straight to you is a useful fiction.
Why does this matter? Two reasons: Time & Space.
Thanks to the work of so many: Kastrup, Hoffman and their predecessors we know Time is epiphenomenal. So, when we discuss time here we are speaking of it, not as ontic, but as its experienced (epistemologically).
If we speak of time as a metaphoric straight line (and we couldn’t do so if we didn’t hallucinate this geometry in the first place) we quickly head down the doomed path of historicity; which, sadly, emboldens less thoughtful types to assign ontic qualities to history, the phenomenal world and its events. This is a terrible blunder and one that has reduced one of the most active human paradigms – Christianity – to a 1, 2 punch of ontic historicity. Ouch!
Perhaps a brief retrace:
1. There’s metaphysical nature: the foundation of existence[2]; which is inconceivable to us and solely mentation (to the extent we deign to imagine it);
2. There’s a “moment” where this nature dissociates sufficiently to come in contact with its own presence in a supra-instinctual form: birthing the Self;
3. Concomitant to this dissociation is the birthing of the phenomenal world; freighted with all manner of epiphenomenal characteristics, including Time & Space, as well as archetypal modes of behavior such as the laws of thermodynamics[3]
4. Cascading down the line from the metaphysical foundation of existence, into Selfhood, then into the material world, challenges us to account for all our inherited substances and forms: our varying mental (to include rational and irrational types) faculties; physical characteristics and capabilities; and the experiential combinations that arise when these come into contact with the principles and players of this realm: demand of us to cohere a world view that keeps us in touch with meaningfulness; which simply put: braids together all this stuff so we maintain a non-eccentric wholeness.
Got it?
A popular etymology of the word “religious,” is to bind fast. That is to say to secure in consciousness the content generated in the mundane realm with the intuition foisted at the Aesthetic Moment, and by inference the original mentation and source of Self.[4]
So, since to greater and lesser extents we spend an awful lot of time dedicating awareness and accumulating experiences from the mundane world, it is incumbent upon us to bind fast to our building blocks, the giver and keeper of our aesthetic. And since the rational mind is narrow, weak and unreliable: we should be putting all our paradigmatic eggs in that basket. Because we reliably become confused, distracted, forgetful and mistaken. Thus, we need to pump as much reinforced concrete into our unconscious through right and repetitive thought, and right and repetitive action. What does that sound like?
Correct-a-mundo: ritual.
And what does ritual do? It goes round and round.
It goes round and round a point: established as the axis mundi. Eliade deals with the axis mundi at length. And I do not wish to get bogged down with its explication here. The main point (pardon any indication of a pun) of the axis mundi is that its facticity immediately and throughout its existence provides the center reference from which nothing but meaningfulness may spontaneously emerge. As such, and as an axis it is both a center, establishing that all surveyed from this vantage will occur within the 360° of a circle – and not an endless, anxiety producing, meaningless, unceasing straight line. And a pillar: which extends vertically down into the depths of the realms and up to the majestic heights of the realms.
Thus, the axis mundi emulates us and we it. We are self-reflecting metaphors. Sound familiar? The human body, in natural poise and pose is a vertical pole – physically; which may rotate, and if in a moment of self possession, will see out into the world and witness the world coming into her from some combination of radius and circumference. Similarly, all the causality of the human body: from its form as shaped by gravity, scarcity, sex, aggression, consumption, play, toil, et al. reaches down into the depths of the farthest reaching roots[5] and to the furthest escaping heights of ethical, metaphysical, and all other effecting principles.
Thus goes the physical/spatial[6]
As for time, you need look no further than to lean into music and dance. Just as rhythm creates time, so does all broader ritual create its own (epistemological) time. Our rituals are uncountable. We have them for and around birth, death, melding, maturing, warring, celebrating, lamenting, ennobling: whichever mood needs suiting or occasion needs clarifying and amplifying.
These rituals are foremost: participatory. They have context. Sure, they are vulnerable to analysis, but they cannot be correctly called intellectual or propositional. The mother lode of nutritiousness comes from their participatory nature, and as such: they favor and elevate certain human dimensions and they gloss passed others. Again, depending on which element is being stressed in any given ritual[7]. And as creatures of participation and principle (sound familiar?) they set up dyads: between the participants and the audience, between the before and after, between the archetype and the actor, etc.
This last dyad is in fact key. Leave aside its conspicuous echo of the Self; wherein the archetype would be played by subjectivity, and actor would be played by object-ness. The most important thing to take away from the time created inside a ritual is that, like all other things within its ring: it is not substantially ontic. It is essentially epistemological. Rituals are a way of knowing. And all the characters (whose names were undoubtedly changed to protect the easily confused) are some level of personification: not persons, per se.
So then, knowing all this: what are you not allowed to do?
Correct-a-mundo: you’re not allowed to mistake the characters or the actors in your ritual for ontological beings. You know, and you must always remember: they are stand ins for ideas, feelings, concepts, instincts absent, fleeting and ephemeral: you’re not allowed to confuse them for the actual super-natural thing you’re trying to touch.
[1] If this claim doesn’t offend you, put your device down and never read another word I write.
[2] You may imagine it as above this realm, like Heaven, to name a culprit; or you may imagine it as the bedrock; supporting this realm from under your feet. It’s no matter as spatial relationships (and temporal ones for that matter), are all non-sense in the pre-phenomenal “world.” As the steward of your imagination: do what works and doesn’t fuck you up.
[3] Which absolutely will not be treated here, nor anywhere by the likes of me, because I have a very weak force connection to them. The foundation for my belief in this vein comes from the work and words of Mssrs. Kastrup & Jung.
[4] Kastrup likes to refer to the original mentation as “mind at large,” of MAL. Which I’m totally fine with.
[5] Some might suggest, into the collective unconscious.
[6] To the extent there is sense in separating space from time and time from space in this and the next instance.
[7] For that matter, as with any creative endeavor.