Enhanced Darwinism
DNA provides a blueprint for how to build a human body and the DNA instructions are a product of natural selection. That sums up the evolutionary approach to humanity. Where is the human mind in this theory? It isn't there. Evolutionists are forced to argue that human minds somehow emerge from the cellular operations controlled by our DNA. This is not to underplay DNA. It is the key to all life on earth.
DNA chains can be subdivided into chromosomes and subdivided further into genes. Jung proposed that the human mind has its equivalent of genes. He called these "archetypes" and they are located in what he labelled the "collective unconscious". Many people fail to see the implications of what Jung's theory amounts to, and he himself never spelt it out with perfect clarity although he hinted at it strongly.
DNA, he is really saying, is both a biological and psychological blueprint for human beings: it has physical and mental aspects. By studying only the physical side of DNA, scientists miss the crucial mental component. It is this component that has truly driven evolution and separated humans from apes. It's because DNA has a mental aspect that so many intermediate forms are missing from the fossil record. DNA is teleological: it directs its own evolution. It does not have a precise idea of its destination, but it intuits how to get there.
How long would it take to get from single-celled creatures in a primordial chemical soup to organisms that can contemplate the nature of the universe? How long would it take a monkey to randomly type a Shakespearean play? If it would take longer than the age of the Big Bang universe for a monkey, a creature with a degree of intelligence, to randomly type Hamlet - one play by one human being - how long would it take inanimate atoms to randomly come together to create one human being? It is not actually possible unless factors to which science is currently oblivious come into play. Assuming no external interference, only one thing can overcome randomness and massively accelerate evolution - teleology. If molecules have a vague "idea" of how to make themselves more complex, how to increase their functionality, they can make leaps that would take forever if left to chance.
Richard Dawkins provides an excellent demonstration of teleology at work in evolution (http://home.pacbell.net/s-max/scott/weasel.html). It appears that Dawkins didn't realise what he was doing since he is firmly opposed to teleological arguments. However, in his "weasel" example to demonstrate the power and speed of evolution, he uses a definite end (telos) to direct the entire process. Unlike Dawkins, we would never assert that a known end-point directs evolution. It is bizarre that an atheist biologist chooses such an argument to illustrate his case.
It must be emphasised that genes do not have "intelligence" in the scenario we are presenting. What they do have is a kind of primitive mind that obeys rudimentary rules of a mathematical nature, and it is from these building-block rules that the complexity of humanity arises. When Pythagoras said that everything is made of numbers, it was to this that he was referring. Mathematical rules are the basis of "mind". If all matter has mind then all matter is mathematical. And isn't that exactly what we observe? Mathematics is part of the fabric of the cosmos, which is why science can describe it with such success and make so much sense of it. Mathematics is called the queen of the sciences. Physics is applied mathematics. The whole of chemistry can be derived from quantum mechanics. As for biology, it is the chemistry of living organisms, and hence is also ultimately derived from quantum mechanics. If mathematics underlies consciousness then it means that humans will one day create artificial intelligence based on mathematical rules. Even our emotions are traceable to mathematics.
Jung introduced the concept of the "psychoid" archetype (i.e. "mind-like") to describe this basic mental aspect of matter. This concept excited the Nobel Prize winning quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli who saw it as a potential bridge between physics and psychology, matter and mind. The psychoid archetype underlay Jung's alchemical concept of the unus mundus ("one world") where mind and matter interpenetrate each other.
Since genes are composed of molecules and molecules are composed of atoms (atoms being the basic, stable building blocks of our material world), it would have been more helpful if Jung had created matching concepts. He should have described atoms as being psychoid i.e. of having qualities of mind, though highly rudimentary. As atoms combine to form molecules, so atomic psychoid qualities become more complex molecular psychoid qualities. A molecule is more "minded" than an atom, a gene more "minded" than a simple molecule, a chromosome more minded than a gene. Eventually we arrive at human beings with fully-fledged psyches built up from more elementary psychoid components.
As Wolfgang Pauli realised, if the psychoid nature of an atom could be discerned then the mental nature of molecules, genes, chromosomes, DNA and, finally, human beings themselves, could be determined and calculated. Psychology would be physics from a different perspective, its laws every bit as comprehensible. This, of course, is a revolutionary concept and most scientists flee from it in horror. Yet this is the true nature of existence. Mind and matter are inseparable twins, two sides of a single coin. Scientists have been highly successful dealing with the material side. Jung was the first prominent psychologist to attempt to put the mental side on the same footing. Unfortunately, few have followed his example.
Just as a human being's physical nature affects his mental nature, so does his mental nature affect his physical nature. Humans are both psychosomatic (mind influencing body) and somapsychic (body influencing mind). And so is everything else in the material world. Conventional science - the belief system that matter has no mental aspect - is highly successful in the inanimate world because there the "mind" is little more than a set of mathematical operations that don't look mind-like at all. However, as soon as life enters the picture, science starts to struggle. Evolutionary theory is incomplete in the absence of a way for treating the increasing mental complexity, and resulting teleology, of biological systems as they evolve. Science has proved hopeless at defining human consciousness, the very centrepiece of our existence, without which science would not exist in the first place.
The problem of the "observer" is a well-known one in quantum mechanics. Scientists are baffled by how observation appears to affect the outcome of experiments. Of course, if they conceded that all matter has mind then "observation" is automatically built into the universe. Everything both observes and is observed. The strength of the observation is proportional to the power of the mind doing the observing. "Weak" minds may have minimal affect, while stronger minds will have commensurately stronger effects.
The current scientific paradigm, despite its successes, has huge flaws. It is an approximation to reality, not reality itself. Newtonian mechanics was highly successful for centuries and even now, having been superseded by Einsteinian Relativity theory, is still frequently used in many areas. In other words, a theory can be massively successful despite being wrong. Even when it is replaced by a more successful theory it can continue to find numerous applications. That's how people should view the current scientific paradigm: highly successful but ultimately wrong; useful but incomplete.
Our language capabilities are often deemed to be innate. How can that be accounted for genetically? How can unthinking genes (according to the traditional view) have any concept of language? So how can they give rise to innate language skills? But if the language of mathematics is the core of mind and if all matter is "minded" then it comes as no surprise to find increasing language capabilities in increasingly complex organisms, reaching their fullest expression in humans.
Jung compared archetypes to instincts. He said that the archetype was the instinct's perception of itself, or the "self-portrait" of the instinct i.e. if the instinct was the "physical" side of the coin then the archetype was the complementary mental flip side i.e. how we subjectively, mentally experience our physical, instinctual response. The term psychoid-gene or psycho-gene would be preferable to "archetype" since this terminology provides a much clearer idea that it's the mental aspect of genes that is being discussed.
An indeterminate amount of our mental life is unconscious rather than conscious. The fact that mental activity is taking place does not imply that we are aware of it. Usually, we're not. Our consciousness reflects a tiny amount of the mental aspect of our existence. Jung said that the archetypes existed within the "collective unconscious". This latter phrase is misleading because it seems to suggest that the whole of the human race shares a single, common unconscious whereas it actually means that just as all human beings share a common biological ancestry, so they share a common mental ancestry too. This common mental aspect is always unconscious until it is brought into consciousness, and when that happens the particular details are unique to each of us, reflecting our unique natures, experiences and environments, although the "big picture" will be the same for all normal human beings.
Jung said that the archetypes reveal themselves as images. If and when they enter our consciousness, they do so in the way familiar from our dreams i.e. as images of symbols, objects and people. Since dreams, according to Freud and Jung, are the "royal road to the unconscious", they will be a primary arena for the appearance of the archetypes when they seek to make themselves known to our consciousness. (Jung said that the archetypes are teleological; they are actively seeking to express themselves.) It's important to emphasise that the archetypes are controlling our mental life whether or not they become conscious. If they do become conscious then it is in image-form, Jung maintained. An example that's normally given is that every culture has a conception of a Wise Old Man. Figures like Merlin and Gandalf are classic examples of the type. (Note that an image of an archetype is called an archetypal image; the image is not the archetype itself, rather how our consciousness interprets it. The archetype, in Kantian language, is the thing-in-itself while the archetypal image is its phenomenal representation.) Jung himself claimed to have his own personal wise old man - his spirit guide called Philemon.
"Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, 'If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.' It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche…At times he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality. I went up and down the garden with him, and to me he was what the Indians call a guru."
(Many people have similar experiences but don't talk about them for fear of being thought mad. Jung himself was judged by some to be suffering from mental illness.)
Given what Jung said about having conversations with Philemon, it's odd that he omitted the idea that archetypes could also manifest themselves as sounds, language and voices rather than just images. After all, our thoughts consist of images, sounds and language, so shouldn't unconscious archetypes be capable of intruding into our consciousness in exactly the same way?
There are obvious parallels between Jung's archetypes and Julian Jaynes's hypothesis of the hallucinated voices of "the gods" arising in the right hemisphere of the brain and being obeyed by the left hemisphere of the brain (the bicameral mind theory). If we combine both theories, we get the following view of the evolution of human consciousness.
1) DNA has a mental as well as a biological aspect. The biological part provides the instructions for building our bodies while the mental aspect provides the instructions for constructing our minds. This aspect of our DNA would create any innate, a-priori categories of perception or understanding such as those discussed by philosophers like Kant.
2) Evolutionary changes in a species occur when gene mutations create new genes that then succeed or fail according to natural selection. If a gene is successful, it will start to gain a widespread presence in the gene pool; if not, it will steadily disappear. The odds against a gene mutation leading to a good outcome are enormous (there are far more ways for a gene to go wrong), yet it appears that gene mutations are much more successful than would occur by chance. If genes aren't randomly mutating but are actually being crudely guided in some way, that would explain a higher than expected success rate of gene mutation. This would be possible if genes had "minds" - not sophisticated minds, but minds all the same that are able to intuit the nature of their environment and vaguely steer a mutation in a direction more likely to prosper. Many mistakes are still made, but not nearly many as would occur otherwise. In other words, Darwin's hugely successful and influential theory of evolution by natural selection is only partially explained by conventional gene theory. A fuller account would talk instead about "psycho-genes" - genes with minds, genes with teleological aspects. These other aspects are not yet susceptible to scientific study. Until they are, the current implementation and understanding of Darwin's theory will remain approximate, and leave scope for attacks by Creationists and Intelligent Design proponents. (What we are saying here has nothing to do with Intelligent Design except in the sense that genes have a rudimentary intelligence that, very primitively, allows them to design themselves in a certain way, thus reducing the number of mistakes and the chaos that would ensue from endless random gene mutations.) What we are describing here could be described as Enhanced Darwinism or Psycho Darwinism, based on psycho-genes. It is obviously hard to differentiate Psycho Darwinism from conventional Darwinism since there is no currently known scientific means for distinguishing "guided" gene mutation from random gene mutation. Sophisticated statistical analysis might be able to show that the odds against humanity randomly evolving from a primordial chemical soup rather through a guided process are astronomical, but that would not constitute firm proof of Enhanced Darwinism, though it would be strongly indicative. (There are many wildly different philosophical interpretations of quantum mechanics. These interpretations, although presenting radically different and contradictory views of the nature of reality, are all fully compatible with the currently available experimental results. In other words, the experimental evidence cannot be used to support or dismiss any of the candidates even though they have practically nothing in common. Quantum mechanics is the most successful scientific theory ever and yet not one of its super-intelligent practitioners can actually say what it means. No observation can prove one interpretation over another. The same is true of Darwinism versus Psycho Darwinism. Both are entirely compatible with all known experimental results and no observation could prove one over the other, yet they present radically different models of the fundamental nature of existence. Which will you choose?)
3) The mental aspect of genes, it must be emphasised, is unconscious and applies to everything, plant or animal, that contains genes. The difference between ourselves and all other gene-based organisms is that we have a highly developed consciousness. Consciousness arises, ultimately, from the detailed instructions provided by the unconscious mental aspects of our DNA. As our consciousness grows, those unconscious instructions (which are intended to explicitly guide our consciousness) break through into our consciousness as images, sounds, language, voices and intuitions. There are no other ways in which they can manifest themselves consciously.
4) The bicameral mind - the precursor of our familiar modern-day consciousness, would have had a much more obvious "archetypal" nature than it has now. Thousands of years ago, human beings would have been accustomed to archetypal beings such as Jung's Philemon appearing to them and telling them things, especially in times of crisis when urgent, potentially life-saving advice was required. In those times, the unconscious would have been throwing out a constant stream of voices, images, sounds, hallucinations and intuitions - archetypes manifesting themselves as best they could. Arguably, it is because of this ancestry that so many human beings are, in the present day, highly submissive and tolerate being treated badly: they are used to being ordered about and dominated by the voices and "gods" in their minds. (The members of the Old World Order have effectively taken the part of the "gods" that used to bark orders at people via the right hemisphere of their brains.) Jung says that archetypal images tend to have a numinous, sacred quality, making them seem part of the divine order. (Atheists might argue that it is precisely this transcendent, otherworldly nature of archetypes breaking into our consciousness that underlies humanity's "fake" religious experience.) Our modern world is full of strange phenomena that are completely ignored by science since it has no theory for dealing with them. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Psycho Darwinism not only refines standard evolutionary theory, it also offers the prospect of permitting many of the psychic phenomena that have long fascinated humanity to become amenable to scientific study via "psycho-genes".
5) Consider the two sets of genes that are involved in our instincts for "fight or flight". Imagine that the two archetypes corresponding to these different sets of genes manifest themselves, in the case of "fight", as a military man barking out orders, or, in the case of "flight", as a runner speeding away as fast as possible and saying, "follow me". Our ancestors wouldn't have wasted time thinking. They would simply have done what they were ordered to. There is a condition called latah where victims, if they are caught by surprise (i.e. subjected to a sudden, unexpected stress) feel compelled to act out any command they hear. They can be aware that they are being ordered to do ridiculous, shameful things and yet they nevertheless carry them out to the letter. They also compulsively imitate motions of others, and if several people are present they might try to imitate all the different actions being performed. This can lead to severe injury as they manically twist and turn, trying to imitate several incompatible actions at once. It's as if they have been spontaneously hypnotised. In every way, this is consistent with the theory of the bicameral mind. Latah sufferers are perhaps the closest modern example to what our bicameral ancestors must have been like. Another good example is Tourette's syndrome. Most sufferers are left handed (implying that their right brain is more dominant than their left) and Julian Jaynes speculated that, under stress, the vestigial bicameral mind breaks through and is responsible for the uncontrolled obscenities (originating from the primitive, unregulated language areas of the right brain) that erupt from sufferers of the condition.
6) If complex behaviours of survival value are somehow mentally encoded in genes, what else might be encoded? Perhaps we have genetic material that seems to serve no biological function at all, yet the reason it's present in our DNA is that it's providing archetypal data, perhaps of a very sophisticated kind. Imagine that great mathematical, scientific and engineering instructions are embedded in our DNA - "unconscious" instructions, but accessible in the right circumstances. Imagine that mysterious ancient feats of engineering such as Stonehenge and the Pyramids were constructed according to such knowledge. Perhaps all the great secrets of human history are encoded in our DNA. Perhaps the most profound religious knowledge is stored there. Imagine that those of our ancestors who had genes that gave rise to archetypal religious experiences proved far more sexually successful than others. Those genes would then prosper in the gene pool. (According to the theory of "Y-chromosomal Adam", all humans alive today are patrilinealy descended from a single man who lived in Africa some 60,000 years ago.) It turns out there is indeed a vast amount of seemingly functionless DNA, estimated by some to be as high as 95% of the total. Richard Dawkins says in The Selfish Gene "…it appears that the amount of DNA in organisms is more than is strictly necessary for building them: a large fraction of the DNA is never translated into protein…If the 'purpose' of DNA is to supervise the building of bodies, it is surprising to find a large quantity of DNA which does no such thing. Biologists are racking their brains trying to think what useful task this apparently surplus DNA is doing." Dawkins goes on to describe this "junk DNA" as a "parasite, hitching a ride in the survival machines created by the other DNA." In fact "junk DNA" is a storehouse of incredible, unconscious knowledge that can be accessed by the right people in the right circumstances via the mechanism of Jungian archetypes. Think of the remarkable and seemingly incredible abilities of autistic savants. Their awesome abilities in specific areas are the direct consequence of their condition fortuitously giving them full access to certain archetypes largely denied to the rest of us because of our "normality". Imagine if we could tap into those same archetypes without sacrificing our normality. Image the talents and powers we might unleash, ones that could transform human civilisation. Imagine that an ancient society already once mastered such powers - the race that "myth" says populated Thule and Atlantis.
7) In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins defines a "meme" as a "unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation." He gives examples of pop tunes, ideas, catch phrases, fashions etc. Memes are produced by our consciousness, enter the meme pool and then prosper or die. They aren't of course genetically encoded: no one is suggesting that pop tunes are biologically transmitted to the next generation. Jung proposed something infinitely more radical. In effect, he said that unconscious mental units of information could indeed be encoded genetically and transmitted biologically, probably in so-called "junk DNA". It can't be stressed strongly enough that it is not conscious ideas that are stored in this way, but unconscious instructions that can only manifest themselves "through a glass darkly" in human consciousness. However, if these dimly glimpsed instructions have sufficient impact on the conscious mind and prove sufficiently useful to the recipient to the extent that he sexually prospers in life then, slowly but surely, these unconscious instructions start spreading throughout the gene pool and are potentially accessible by anyone who has inherited the right genes. For the avoidance of misunderstandings, it is crucial to re-emphasise that we are saying that archetypes are unconscious mental patterns, not conscious ideas, stored in genes. They can influence conscious behaviour and, if they prosper, they will spread through the gene pool, and, if not, they will perish. These ideas are not too far removed from the area of study known as sociobiology. Jung's "collective unconscious" is really a reference to all the unconscious mental instructions encoded in core genes that are common to all human beings. He defined an archetype as "an irrepresentable, unconscious, pre-existent form that seems to be part of the inherited structure of the psyche." His is a scientific theory but one, unfortunately, that is not yet susceptible to scientific study, just as the unconscious mind is not. Even the conscious mind defies scientific understanding.
8) Genes underpin human biology and psycho-genes underpin the unconscious human mind. (We are talking about genes and psycho-genes as though were different entities. They are of course exactly the same: psycho-genes are genes whose mental utility rather than biological functionality is being highlighted.) There was a time, not so many thousands of years ago, when humans were barely more conscious than apes. Then came the bicameral mind - the bridge between ape "consciousness" and modern human consciousness. The bicameral mind was controlled by unconscious archetypes that dominated the right hemisphere of the human brain. These archetypes seemed, to the incipient consciousness of the left hemisphere of the human brain, to manifest themselves as gods giving life or death orders. This was the Archetypal Age when psycho-genes dominated the human mind. Never was man more religious than at this time. The "gods" were practically hard-wired into human minds. Atheists would contend that this constitutes evidence that our religious experiences are psychological delusions, but the counter argument is that this religious mentality did not come about by accident: the psycho-genes that underpin the religious experience were successful in the ferocious environment of natural selection because they reflected the real order of things. Paradoxically, the mainstream religions of today are disastrous in religious terms. They provide nothing of the certainty that our ancestors enjoyed. Every day, our ancestors had the most profound encounters with the gods, arising from their own unconscious. They were steeped in the divine. What feelings they experienced, what wonders they beheld. The world was bathed in the glow of the sacred. How unfortunate most of us are today to be denied that numinous light.
9) The bicameral mind was eventually replaced by the modern conscious mind, although bicameralism is still present in the unconscious. Our conscious minds block most of the bicameral visions and transcendental experiences of old. It's as if we have cut ourselves off from the gods, as if evolution were telling us that we are children no longer. Now the gods wont come easily to us. If we want the divine, we ourselves must become gods.
10) Where archetypes rule the unconscious, memes rule the conscious mind. Memes are arguably far more important than genes now and control the future of the human gene pool. In the past, archetypes were in control, but they have given way to memes. Richard Dawkins said that humans are gene survival machines. He's wrong - they're meme survival machines. In a million years from now, humans will still be fascinated by Plato's philosophy or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony i.e. by particular memes. While many genes may have vanished from the gene pool in that time, Plato and Beethoven will still be going strong in the meme pool. Other meme collections will have completely vanished or will be close to the vanishing point - this is the certain fate of false religions such as Christianity, Islam and Judaism. It is now possible to understand that the point of genes and psycho-genes (archetypes) was to create scope for memes. Genes and psycho-genes are the path to memes, but memes (human culture in all of its forms) are vastly more important. If genes were at the centre of the human condition, a "red in tooth and claw" struggle would be taking place amongst humans as they vied to be top dog and command the best resources. Nietzsche asked where this struggle was. "Civilisation" - a meme construction - has done away with it. Contraception - a product of memes - actually prevents genes from coming into existence. Genes rely on sex for reproduction. Memes don't need sex; they need minds. Memes can control the reproduction of genes; genes have much less influence over the reproduction of memes. So which are the more powerful? People with defective genes who would have died in infancy can now live for decades thanks to modern medicine. Again, memes have trumped genes; they have made genes survive that would otherwise have perished. They have artificially altered the gene pool. When famines happen in Africa, aid from other countries can help to save lives that would otherwise have been lost. Again, the gene pool has been shaped by memes rather than natural selection of genes. Memes have left genes far behind. Memes, not genes, are dictating the future of the human race. We are the only species for which this is true, hence we are the most special animal in the animal kingdom. Biology, in human terms, now takes a back seat. Psychology is where it's at these days. Psychology is the study of why some memes are more successful than others. The natural selection of memes is now the cornerstone of human evolution. Cultural evolution (the arena of memes) occurs at a much faster rate than biological evolution. This is a feature entirely absent from the animal kingdom.
11) Meme evolution is accelerating. The internet allows memes to spread around the globe in hours. People can become famous overnight. Their reproductive chances could be vastly improved by a stroke of internet luck. The trouble is there's no guarantee that good ideas will prosper and poor ideas perish. The world is awash with trivial, dumb, junk memes. As they proliferate, there's less and less room for good memes. They're pushing them aside. Someone could provide the solution to every problem of the human race and be completely ignored because most people are too busy finding out the latest news regarding Megan Fox. Satan and his archons love the world of memes. It's their message that most seduces the masses. The world has never been in bigger trouble than it is now. Junk memes are everywhere. Good memes are rapidly dying off, their place in the meme pool being taken by trivial nonsense.
"Living" Archetypes
We have been given permission by "Liz" to use her account of a "Third Man" encounter. This example has all the hallmarks of extreme stress conjuring a "guardian angel" archetype into consciousness, which then gives instructions regarding what to do. It's like a personified survival instinct:
"Years ago, on a lunch break from work, I walked into the middle of a bank robbery. First, I didn't believe what was happening, then as I realized I had walked into a shoot-out my vision narrowed and time slowed to a crawl.
Bullets were flying between the police and the robbers. Two young guys with guns had walked into the bank and when the robbery went sour, they took two hostages and dragged them to their car. The police had just arrived on scene, a helicopter zooming in from above, officers in cars, on foot, and I .... walked right into it.
In those big frozen moments when I was flooded with terror and everything stopped, I saw/felt the Angel materialize next to me. The Angel told me to stand exactly where I was and not to move, even if it looked from the outside as if I should move to save myself. One of the bank robbers leveled a shotgun at me and as we locked eyes, I saw him consider whether or not to fire. I did as the Angel said and never moved. The bank robber lost interest and pivoted the gun away.
I wanted to bolt when that shotgun was leveled at me. It was the natural thing to do. The wise thing was to move - run - somewhere anywhere, but the Angel said no and I did as he said. The man with the gun, I still remember his face - should he fire at me or no? But then it was as if a veil came down over his eyes and he didn't see me anymore. He turned his attention away and was dead within minutes. My Angel was gone the second I was out of danger. Then I started to shake. Then it hit me. I came out of the experience unscathed, but suffering from survivor's guilt for the deaths of others (two bank robbers, two hostages).
It's hard when your Angel kicks in but it seems that this does not occur for those around you. Why not? I have been scrupulously protected in the most outrageous situations, and yet I see others in terrible distress, suffering, fear and death. I know I'm not so special that I should enjoy such amazing protection, so there has to be a mechanism. What is the mechanism? How does the Angel kick in? I've spent most of my adult life looking for answers.
Julian Jaynes' ideas about the bicameral mind became one of my Most Favored Angel Theories about 15 years ago (I suspect trauma "reconstitutes" the bicameral mind). John Geiger's brilliant book, "The Third Man Factor," pulls the evidence together from multiple sources, outlining conditions which seem to cause the "Angel switch" to flip to the ON position.
I was raised a Buddhist so Angels and the like were never part of my belief system. I just use that term for convenience. "Angel" may create conflict in the minds of people who haven't yet had the experience because the idea is fraught with religious expectation - stained glass wings, nimbuses, beatific facial expressions - re-framing the experience as the Third Man is brilliant. A "Third Man" conveys the easy detachment and instant recognition inherent in the contact far more effectively than does the term "Angel." We humans are so close to our Third Man that when he (or she) appears we don't think it's anything extraordinary - in the moment. In his actual presence, it's the most natural thing in the world."
Liz's vivid and evocative description of her encounter with her guardian angel is only the tip of the iceberg. There are many reports of such guardian angels, and these angels are often more enduring than Liz's "emergency" angel. The key to this phenomenon may be a concept called "reification". This means taking an idea and making it into a thing - a real, tangible concrete thing ("res" is the Latin for thing.) "Liberty" becomes a statue in New York, "patriotism" becomes the Stars and Stripes flag, "treason" becomes Benedict Arnold, "justice" becomes the Supreme Court. Virtually every human concept is commonly either personified or turned into a sacred object. Anyone who mistreats the Koran - a book - has insulted Allah, apparently. An American who burns the flag insults the whole nation. If someone blew up the Statue of Liberty it would be regarded as an act of war against American liberty. This craving of humans to objectify concepts is remarkable. The reason for it is that people cannot readily form emotional attachments to abstractions. (For the same reason, a cold, intellectual presidential candidate will always lose to an idiot with the personal touch.) People can, however, invest their strongest feelings in objects, and other people in particular. The archetypes typically enter consciousness as symbols, objects, animals and, especially, as higher beings: gods. They never enter consciousness as abstract concepts. They are always reified. The reification need not stop at mere images of gods; the gods can become fully realised. They can seem like living and breathing entities, just as Philemon did to Jung. They can speak and, remarkably, they can say things that the person reifying them is convinced that he himself did not know. Some novelists have claimed that their fictional characters have taken over, so to speak, and written the books for them. Again, these characters seem to know things that the authors themselves didn't know. Aleister Crowley claimed that a being called Aiwass dictated The Book of the Law to him.
There are two realistic ways this might happen. 1) People absorb far more information during their day-to-day lives than they are consciously aware of. The characters or archetypal beings that appear to them have access to this great repository of unconsciously detected knowledge and are able to regurgitate it. 2) The collective unconscious is a kind of storehouse of human knowledge and can be accessed by these characters or archetypal beings. Either way these beings will seem better informed than the person experiencing them. Another point to consider is that these characters and archetypal beings, by simulating real people of flesh and blood, help us to empathise with others, and in fact it may be from here that empathy originates.
Many people scoff when they hear about the face of Christ or the Virgin Mary appearing in a slice of toast or the bark of a tree, but in fact what is happening here is that believers are finding in these reified images a trigger for the release of an archetypal response from the unconscious, one that is specifically religious in nature.
Reification is said to be caused by the "abstractive operator" within the brain's inferior parietal lobe. It is an extraordinary phenomenon because it can make ideas and elements of the imagination seem every bit as real and tangible as anything we have actually encountered in our lives. We could go to our deaths swearing that something that existed only in our minds was objectively real. But no one other than Jung saw his guiding spirit Philemon. Many paranormal experiences are actually instances of reification. Ghosts are usually reified imaginings. Feelings and thoughts of strangeness, mystery and the uncanny can, in the right environments, take on a quasi-reality. The widespread experience of "alien abduction" is, in the vast majority of cases, another example of reification. People, under stress, encounter in their dreams an archetype of otherness - the alien - and their minds translate this archetypal image into the context most familiar to the modern mind thanks to Hollywood movies, science fiction books and conspiracy theories; that of an alien encounter. They reify the archetypal image into a "real", solid alien and then believe in its existence without question. Virtually none of the alien encounters claimants have failed lie detector tests. Why would they? - they think it really happened. (The alien archetype has a close relationship with the archetype of the higher self since the higher self is often initially perceived as alien.)
In The Matrix, Morpheus says to Neo, "What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel; what you can taste; what you can smell and see; then real is simply electrical signals being interpreted by your brain."
The truth is we inhabit an interpreted world, a world of our own mental construction. What do we mean when we ask why the sky is blue? In fact, if every human had inherited the genes for colour blindness, no one would be asking why the sky is blue. The sky isn't blue. There aren't blue-coloured photons whizzing around. We don't know what colour the sky is or even if it has a colour at all. We know that photons of a certain frequency are scattered more by the atmosphere. These photons are interpreted by those with colour vision as being blue. But that's all it is: an interpretation. Colour is a useful construction, not a reality. The reality is hidden. For all we know the universe, in itself, may be transparent. The whole of existence could be invisible and be just a vast nexus of vibrations of different frequencies. Humans, permanently viewing the world through human goggles, will never know the truth until they escape from their human bodies.
Jung said, "All that I experience is psychic. Even physical pain is a psychic event that belongs to my experience. My sense impressions - for all that they force upon me a world of impenetrable objects occupying space - are psychic images and these alone are the immediate objects of my consciousness. My own psyche even transforms and falsifies reality, and it does this to such a degree that I must resort to artificial means to determine what things are like apart from myself. Then I discover that a tone is a vibration of air of such and such a frequency, or that a colour is a wave-length of light of such and such a length. We are all in truth so enclosed by psychic images that we cannot penetrate to the essence of things external to ourselves. All our knowledge is conditioned by the psyche which, because it alone is immediate, is superlatively real. Here there is a reality to which the psychologist can appeal, namely, psychic reality."
Our world is in danger of being highly unsubstantial. Reification makes it solid for us. The trouble is it may even solidify entities that should never be considered solid at all.
The most interesting examples of reification are the ones involving more than one person. At "holy sites" - such as Lourdes - one person can have a vivid religious experience where they reify an archetype. Others are then infected with emotional contagion and, following the first person's lead, summon up their version of the same archetype. This is labelled "Archetype Sharing." Collective experiences of the Virgin Mary are especially common. In a sense, these episodes are similar to those involving alien abduction, except they are more obviously religious in nature.
There is also a fascinating phenomenon whereby a reified archetype conjured by one person can be directly experienced by another. This is very rare and occurs most commonly where the two people involved are extremely close to each other, such as mother and daughter or identical twins, and is much more likely if both are highly intuitive to the extent that they might be described as psychic. An extremely powerful psychic - of the type that would have been regarded as a sorcerer in an earlier age - is also capable of experiencing another's reified archetype. The two parties both hear the same things being spoken by the archetypal image and can have independent conversations with it. A third person with no psychic abilities who arrived on the scene would see and hear nothing other than two human beings having a strange conversation with each other. In other words, an extremely real "vision" experienced by two people who both completely agree on the details of what happened is still by no means "real" in the sense that others would agree with. It would be regarded as a hallucination, albeit an exceptionally elaborate and powerful one.
The myths and legends of ancient times still fire the human imagination. These are classic examples of archetypal images of the gods entering our consciousness, being reified and then being treated as real beings that have real and wondrous adventures. The gods of Mount Olympus were summoned into existence by this mechanism. (People are welcome to speculate on what other gods have come to us via this route.) This does not mean that God is imaginary, of course, but it does help to explain the huge variety of gods that have appeared across the world in many different cultures. These gods are how the Jungian archetypes of the religious experience manifest themselves in the human consciousness in different places and times.
Of course, most people these days do not have vivid encounters with archetypal figures from their unconscious. Even if they dream of them, they quickly forget the dream. Most of us are too locked into our memes and our conscious preoccupations. We have cut ourselves off from the world our ancestors knew so well. Those of us who want to encounter our higher selves must learn the techniques to break through to this mysterious, hidden world. That, fundamentally, is what Illumination is all about, and is what preoccupies the Illuminati. The Illuminati seek unio mystica - the mysterious, transcendent union with god.
Jung was steeped in the legends of the Holy Grail and Faust. He was also a keen student of Eastern Mysticism, Alchemy, Gnosticism and Hermeticism. Although he remained outside the world of secret societies, his phenomenally strong intuition gave him remarkable insights into many of the core teachings of ancient secret societies, and the Illuminati in particular. Members of the Illuminati made contact with Jung, but deemed him too eccentric to be formally recruited, though they did help him with some of his ideas and steer him in productive directions.
For those outside secret societies, Jung's collective unconscious is one of the truly great ideas whose true worth has never been properly recognised beyond New Age circles. Anyone who understands this key concept has made huge strides towards understanding not only themselves, but also the entire nature of the universe.
In Part 2 - Imago Dei - we will show how the collective unconscious summons forth the supreme Jungian archetype - the Self.
We were contacted by someone who wanted to tell us about a powerful dream they'd had, one that took place in an ancient temple. The strongest, most potent person in the dream was a high priestess holding a golden child. As for the dreamer, he thought he was either a priest or a lord in the dream. They were all at one end of the temple, close to the altar, while a Sumerian army was trying to break in at the temple entrance.
The priestess was giving orders, insisting that the child should be smuggled through a small hatch into a secret passage while the dreamer must help to protect the child by joining those holding back the attacking army. The dreamer was unhappy. He had an overwhelming desire to follow the child. His impression was that it was not because he was afraid of facing possible death but rather that it was somehow necessary for him to be with the child. The truth of his life lay with the golden child, he was sure. He woke up annoyed and perplexed, feeling further from the truth than ever. What did his dream mean?
This is a classic dream of the Self. The magical, golden child is the dreamer's Self (perceived as a child because the dreamer has not yet acquired a mature idea of the Self). The high priestess is an ambiguous figure. In some cases she can be a manifestation of Sophia, the goddess of wisdom, imparting precious knowledge. In this case she represents a priestess of a false religion, telling the dreamer that he should busy himself with other battles and the affairs of the world rather than go where he wants to go…with his Self. The fact that the besieging army is Sumerian is significant since Sumer is often said to be the first civilisation. In other words, we are at the dawn of recorded human history, in the age of the archetypes.
Civilisation and consciousness have taken us away from our days of close contact with the gods. The dreamer is desperate to make contact with his Self but forces are pulling him away. He is distressed because he knows if he performs his duties in relation to the outer world, he will be separated from the magical child - his Self - and may lose contact with it permanently. That's why he wakes up agitated and unhappy. He has been drawn away from where his true being lies, "into the wide world and its battlefields".
We are all being pulled away from our Self. Our world has turned its back on spirituality and now wallows in materialism, consumerism and celebrity culture. Meaning is vanishing from the human condition. Satan and his archons are best served when spirituality is in the emergency ward, fighting for its life. We have to restore it to health. Contemporary society and toxic religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam are anathema to spirituality. There can be no spiritual renaissance while they hold sway over us.
Jung's primary focus was on reconnecting the individual with the gods i.e. with the archetypes of the collective unconscious. He wanted all of us to find our inner divinity.
In the second half of the next article we will describe how Jung proposes that people should go about encountering their true Self, or, as he says in more spiritual language, how we can make contact with the most remarkable and wondrous archetype of all - the Imago Dei - the image of God.