Introduction
It is not enough for us human beings to become adults biologically, as all other animals do. Our minds or consciousness must be initiated via a “second birth” to bring us into accord with the reality we must face and deal with, on a daily basis. Initiations bring us into accord with reality by teaching us what kind of human being we have been all along. Each age thus had its “timeless” initiation practices belonging only to that age. When reality transformed, so too did the appropriate forms of initiations. There was no place for initiations based on “Animal Powers” for those coming into adulthood in the Industrial Age, for example.
The 19thand 20thcenturies produced what might be called psychological reality (the reality of the unconscious mind or psyche) but we had no formal, collectively endorsed practices to initiate us into the reality of our psychologicalbeing. C. G. Jung’s analytical psychology was a noble attempt towards such an initiation but we can now easily see that it has failed as a generally accepted method. Now in the 21stC matters have grown worse, much worse. Reality has shifted again and psychological beinghas been usurped by posthuman being, which, again, needs its corresponding initiatory practices.
The failure of our civilization to produce these initiations has had of course devastating consequences on the cohesions, and, indeed, coherence of society as well as the well-being of individuals who are forced to face ourreality with no preparations at all. It has become chaotic! We have failed to initiate our young into adulthood today because we have no initiatory practices that correspond to either psychological reality or posthuman reality. And we have no initiatory practices because we have failed to pay attention to the only source of initiatory practices—the same source throughout time—revelation! Certain individuals, our prophets, mystics, shamans, call them what you will, are “summoned” to face the enormous, tectonic shifts in reality, to personally endure the transformation in reality and to be “gifted” with revelation—which is then accepted by the community—leading to a new set of practices on how to become an adult.
An extraordinary early 20thC. example lies in the story of Black Elk, a Sioux Shaman who had a vision when he was nine years old that taught him and his people about a coming new world comprising people of all colours., beyond the local concerns of the Plains people of North Dakota. His people adopted the ceremonial dance that emerged from his visionary flight as being more in accord with the new reality (world).
This essay addresses the revelation of C. G. Jung in 1944 when he went on a visionary flight, as he lay dying in hospital. His description of that spiritual journey lays the groundwork for an initiatory practice into our newly discovered psychological being. But, alas, his revelation has been ignored in terms of its message to us by a mystic—a message of what we must attend to by altering our cultural practices accordingly, to come into harmony with the new world or reality that was using the mouthpiece, Jung.
But things are moving fast! Now we are in the posthuman age and once again with no adequate initiatory practice. We barely have begun to grasp the nature of this posthuman reality. And so this essay describes a revelation that speaks to the posthuman world and therefore to possible cultural practices that could align us to our new status of the posthuman being in a posthuman world.
Psychological Being and Its Initiation
Early in 1944, C. G. Jung broke his ankle and subsequently suffered a heart attack. He was hospitalized for several months in a delirium. During his convalescence he entered a form of visionary consciousness that opened to a world as real as the hospital bed in which he lay, close to death. This is what he reports:[1]
It seemed to me that I was high up in space. Far below I saw the globe of the earth, bathed in a gloriously blue light [long description follows]. I knew that I was on the point of departing from the earth.
After contemplating it for a while, I turned around. … A short distance away I saw in space a tremendous dark block of stone, like a meteorite. It was about the size of my house, or even bigger. It was floating in space, and I myself was floating in space. … An entrance led into a small antechamber. To the right of the entrance, a black Hindu sat silently in lotus posture upon a stone bench. He wore a white gown, and I knew that he expected me. … As I approached the steps leading up to the entrance into the rock, a strange thing happened: I had the feeling that everything was being sloughed away; everything I aimed at or wished for or thought, the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence, fell away or was stripped from me an extremely painful process. Nevertheless something remained; it was as if I now carried along with me everything I had ever experienced or done, everything that had happened around me. I might also say: it was with me, and I was it. I consisted of all that, so to speak. I consisted of my own history, and I felt with great certainty: this is what I am. “I am this bundle of what has been, and what has been accomplished.”
This experience gave me a feeling of extreme poverty, but at the same time of great fullness. There was no longer anything I wanted or desired. I existed in an objective form; I was what I had been and lived. At first the sense of annihilation predominated, of having been stripped or pillaged; but suddenly that became of no consequence. Everything seemed to be past; what remained was a fait accompli, without any reference back to what had been. There was no longer any regret that something had dropped away or been taken away. On the contrary: I had everything that I was, and that was everything.
Something else engaged my attention: as I approached the temple I had the certainty that I was about to enter an illuminated room and would meet there all those people to whom I belong in reality. There I would at last understand this too was a certainty what historical nexus I or my life fitted into. I would know what had been before me, why I had come into being, and where my life was flowing. My life as I lived it had often seemed to me like a story that has no beginning and no end. I had the feeling that I was a historical fragment, an excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing. My life seemed to have been snipped out of a long chain of events, and many questions had remained unanswered. Why had it taken this course? Why had I brought these particular assumptions with me? What had I made of them? What will follow? I felt sure that I would receive an answer to all these questions as soon as I entered the rock temple.
Jung says that previously he had understood his life as an historical fragment or an excerpt of a story, which left him with many unanswered questions. All these questions were to be answered when he entered the rock temple. Of course, to enter that temple would be, at the same time, to die on Earth, in the hospital bed. An emissary from Earth prevented him from this final step. His doctor arrived in his primal form, declaring that Earth still needed Jung, at which point the vision ended and Jung “returned” to the hospital bed. In a mysterious twist of cosmic justice, Jung’s return to earthly existence involved an exchange with the doctor’s life—he died suddenly soon after.
Jung had been gripped by questions, springing from an experience of his life as discontinuous, fragmented, and excerpted. What comes before, what comes after, why did I take this particular course? All these questions would be answered, not by reason or explanation, but by his re-joining, in death, the eternal thread from which he had been cut, in order to exist as the historical Jung.
This vision shows Jung asking the fundamental eternal questions that human beings have always been drawn to: where did I come from, who am I now, where am I going? Previous cultures have addressed these questions in terms of, for example, the ancestors, fate, destiny, the after life and so on. But Jung, being a pioneer of our modern psychological culture, formulated these questions in a way appropriate to his psychological being. He understood his conscious personality (who am I now?) as coming into existence as a discontinuity, born out of nothing and resting on nothing, “a story with no beginning and no end”, a fragment, an excerpt, “snipped out”.[2]
As he approached the temple (grew closer to death, we might say), he experienced a painful stripping away of attachments to earthly life (his aims, wishes, thoughts, regrets), leaving him impoverished and at the same time full: “I was what I had been and lived. … I had everything that was and that was everything.” This remarkable and enigmatic formulation of Jung’s initiation into the death process seems to say something very important about memory and identity. We normally know who we are by virtue of our conscious memories, stitched together as a continuous narrative. Our identity thus normally feels secure and permanent. Jung’s process towards death reveals that he understood this narrative as really being a literary fragment, an excerpt with missing text on other side, discontinuous—conscious identity as a historical or temporal fragment or literary snippet, having no knowledge of what lay before or after it.
The painful stripping away of attachments to this or that memory left Jung with what he calls “objective cognition”. He became conscious of his personality as a unity of memory and identity—“I was what I had been and lived.”[3] This is an amazing psychological achievement and initiation, which immediately raises the questions that Jung now faces. Now aware of the “excerpt” character of his conscious personality, he can ask, in effect, who else am I, now that I am also “beyond” my personality?[4] What lies to either side of this snippet, historical fragment, or excerpt that we each call our conscious self, or identity?
The answer to these fresh questions consisted of a further initiation into death. Jung had to enter the temple and join the company of human (spiritual) beings whose presence would show him what “historical nexus I or my life fitted into”. In other words, he was to be shown the missing temporal elements that would give contextual meaning to what otherwise is a discontinuous, ahistorical “self” torn out of its deeper temporal matrix, into an existential state of meaninglessness. It appears that to join this company and gain knowledge of the deeper “background” context that informed and gave meaning to his fragmentary conscious life is also to die, but instead, Jung was called back to life for a while longer.
Jung’s vision was an initiation into the mystery of death and as well the essence of a human being in the 20th century.[5] He came as close to death as one could while remaining alive.
As his “spiritual teacher”, Death informed Jung what it is to be a human psychological being, transforming him along the way. He writes that, following his recovery:
A fruitful period of work began for me. A good many of my principal works were written only then. The insight I had had, or the vision of the end of all things, gave me the courage to undertake new formulations. I no longer attempted to put across my own opinion, but surrendered myself to the current of my thoughts. Thus one problem after the other revealed itself to me and took shape. Something else, too, came to me from my illness. I might formulate it as an affirmation of things as they are: an unconditional “yes” to that which is, without subjective protests acceptance of the conditions of existence as I see them and understand them, acceptance of my own nature, as I happen to be.
Jung came close to death, but did so in full consciousness (“the vision of the end of all things”). He was thus released from a fear of death, i.e., fear grounded in our everyday attachments to life. All these attachments were painfully stripped away from him as he approached the temple. A new personality was forged, “an ego that does not break down when incomprehensible things happen; an ego that endures, that endures the truth, and that is capable of coping with the world and with fate.”
Jung’s vision enabled him to penetrate into the essence of what it is to be a human being in the 20th century—a psychological being! He was initiated into knowledge of his everyday being as a unity of personality and memory. And as well, a unity of that being and what he called “objective cognition”. This psychological structure is a duality, a “two-ness”.[6] [7] This unity of opposites accounts for the self-contradictory language Jung has to use in describing various elements of his vision.
The outcome of Jung’s ordeal and initiation into the mystery of death is quite in accord with the desired outcomes of any initiatory ordeal: a full awareness of one’s mortality and “littleness” when faced with the greater incomprehensibility of life; a human being who is “aligned” with the reality of her times so that it becomes her truth; and one who can adapt to contingencies with a simultaneous soul understanding of those contingencies in terms of fate.[8] However, Jung’s initiation has a form that is appropriate only to his time, the time of the psychological human being. His initiation had to be psychological in character.
Jung speaks of a painful stripping away of all his attachments to earthly existence. Within Jung’s vision, this pain is real, as real as it was for initiates of former ages. Initiates of former ages also went through a “painful stripping away” of their ordinary attachments to life as a means of encountering the “background causes” of the phenomenal world.[9] These ordeals always targeted the body of the initiate (scarification, flesh sacrifices, enduring wasps or ants, etc.). Pain belongs to the body, yes, but Jung had found his way to the background reality informing our times—a strange reality that must also include body and yes, equally real pain! We call this reality “psychic reality” or the objective psyche—our reality, the reality of our times—and, like the realities of all former ages, our reality requires a correspondingly appropriate initiation into its truth. Jung’s vision is an outstanding example of what such an initiatory ritual would be. Jung was initiated into the truth of what a 20th century human being is, in his or her essence—a psychological reality and a complexio oppositorum at that![10]
There is so much that we can learn from his vision once understood this way. It is exemplary of the form that a modern initiation must take in order to make our psychological reality our truth so that we each can come into accord with this way of being.[11] For example, no other real human being initiated Jung, as had happened in the past. The initiatory impulse emerged from the depths of the objective psyche in the form of a vision that attained the status of reality, which must include the reality of the body and its pains and pleasures.[12] The vision must have the convincing power of empirical reality, yet understood as distinguishable from ordinary empirical reality. And it did so for Jung. The psyche can initiate us only when our whole being is engaged and participating with its processes, as was true for any initiation in the past. We can see from Jung’s subsequent report that his efforts to describe his visionary experiences are clumsy, contradictory, and inadequate. This is because the reality of the psyche cannot be understood in those categories of thought that constitute the background of our current empirical reality—for example, the fundamental inner/outer disjunction. The psyche has left such binaries behind.
When the initiate is in such a visionary state he can state quite simply and truthfully that his body is undergoing a painful stripping away. But when he returns to our current reality, all sorts of maddening questions emerge such as, “do you mean ‘body’ metaphorically, figuratively? Is it a subtle body? …” All such inadequate formulations rest on the very inner/outer disjunction that the initiate has in fact overcome.
Posthuman Being and its Initiation
It must seem clear, after this small taste of the complexity of Jung’s vision, that no modern cultural practice has subsequently emerged to facilitate any such initiatory “ritual” collectively. We can say then, that as far as our psychological being is concerned, we don’t have a lot of initiates at present. This is not a small matter when we also consider the thought that our technological way of being in the 21st century, with all its corresponding practices, may have completely overtaken that of psychological man. Jung’s form of initiation may now be ontologically obsolete, in the sense that reality now has quite different contours and requires another kind of initiation altogether.[13]
We can approach this unnerving thought if we begin to understand psychology and technology not merely as as two separate compartments of knowledge.[14] We can also understand that psychology and technology are each founded within a defining style of consciousness and its correlative language and cultural practices. Language is the a priori that brings both psychology and technology into existence through their respective practices. I am not here referring to the kind of language that psychology and technology each uses pragmatically. I am referring to inceptive, originating language that in effect prepares the future. I will call this language living language—language as autonomous, bestowing inceptive ideas upon the initiate who can reach this level of reality.[15]
Jung’s visionary and transformative experience in his vision took place entirely within the domain of living language. He was transformed by it. His Red Book also vividly demonstrates this reality to us.[16] The forms of our present technological civilization are rooted in a stunning linguistic development—a further transformation that has taken place within language itself. Without our noticing it, for the most part, our language now enables us to think and speak globally, holistically, in totalities, in generalities that treat any individual, natural being as a replaceable mechanical part of a greater all-encompassing abstract whole.[17] The style of consciousness that this language reflects is “beyond” Earth, in “outer space”—alien to anything human!
The objective psyche, as reflected in language (living language), is foundational to both psychological being in Jung’s time and technological being in our own time. To conclude this essay I will try to show what kind of initiation may be required to bring us into accord with our current reality, our technological way of being, a way that appears to be completely alien to any human being, as well as to that particular kind of human being as which Jung the initiate lived.
It may very well be that the question of my essay here, “what is it to be human?” can no longer be answered by an initiation that only reveals the complexity of the two-ness of our psychological being, as in Jung’s vision in 1944. Any initiation today might be required to reveal a structure that could scarcely simply be called human in any recognizable sense any more—a union of the empirical human being with a presence that is completely alien to anything remotely human!
I was drawn to this utterly strange thinking by a vision I had in the early nineties:[18]
A man is among us; he looks quite normal, like the actor in Cocoon, except he is in fact alien. He is friendly, wants to, needs to live amongst us, and is warmly welcomed. Many therapists are excited and thrilled with the glamour of his gifts, which include space ships that could fly at dizzying speeds. I join in with this madness for a bit but lose interest and instead grow increasingly alarmed. I try to warn others. I decide to act, I want to burn him and race around looking for a flame thrower. Instead I kept grabbing fire extinguishers and spray him with those. They are useless. He tries to stop me and we seem to realize that there was nothing personal in this. He wants simply to live here and I could sense incredible danger to us. I say, “It’s just that our species can’t survive if you stay. We need to survive too!” Then I go back to my frantic search. He says, responding to my “what ifs? …” “Do you mean, what if I spit on the carpet or people?” And he does so, thus at last revealing the danger. A terrible poison was in his spittle; it dissolves flesh leaving horrible forms, like a fly dissolves its meal. I get more frantic until …
(a new scene breaks through)
There is a bed of coals, so astoundingly hot that they each glow transparent red. One would simply evaporate on them. In the midst of my passion to stop the alien, a young man, a human, flings himself as a voluntary sacrifice onto the bed of coals. He is the sacrifice who will save us. I am struck with horror and agony, a religious agony that sends me to my knees as I feel his act of sacrifice. O God! O God! O God! I imagine his flesh blackening and crisping as he rolls on the coals in apparent unspeakable agony. Yet when I actually look, though I am screaming in pain and horror and awe, I can see quite objectively that he is undergoing a different process. He is moving about, but in agony, or intentionally? That is, is he avoiding the heat or is he moving to further expose himself to it? He is not screaming. Is he in pain? He then begins to glow red just like the coal itself. He becomes transparently glowing red all over, like a clay vessel does at the highest point that forms the pot. Even more astounding, he is pregnant, almost full term! Did he enter the ordeal that way or did the transforming fire engender a new life in him?
By this time I cannot describe my own feelings at all. It’s too much. One cannot name a mystery such as this. Then, the name comes:
He is our Redeemer!
An alien consciousness with its characteristic way of speaking has entered empirical reality and its effect is intellectual and aesthetic—it captures our minds with its technological gifts while, at the same time, it destroys individual human form, instead producing horrible appearances.
Recently I visited an art show here in Sydney (July 2016) presenting a display of modern art on the theme of the posthuman:[19]
whose works encourage us to ask what it means to be human today, and what it might mean in the future. Drawing inspiration from science fiction, robotics, biotechnology, consumer products and social media, they offer experiences that raise questions around the idea of the posthuman; a concept that signals new understandings of humanity and a breakdown of boundaries between what we think of as natural and artificial.
Some of these works combined human body parts and machines in order to “speak” this new way of being. I noticed that the audience asked exclusively about the technical side of the art works (how did you do it, etc.). No one appeared to address the aesthetic aspect—sheer horror paraded in front of us[20]:
This art is saying that an alien consciousness i.e. the living language that produced our technological civilization—global, totalizing, abstract language, obliterating individual empirical differences as such and subsuming them as replaceable parts of an abstract totality, just as my dream shows—is seeking to unite with the empirical human being—it wants to humanize, but as alien.[21] At present, artists are picturing this union as a horror (but strangely not seen as such!). This linguistic horror is already facing us, almost everywhere, in the mass media. To take two popular examples in politics today, Presidential candidates routinely parade ordinary folks before the media. These people tell us their ordinary human stories of suffering, victimization, or some such, in an “alien” context that is using them for propaganda purposes and, at that level, cares nothing about their human misery at all, only that the staged performance achieve the purpose of persuading others to vote, etc. The mass media regularly chews individuals up in a similar fashion. Their tears are encouraged or even provoked but the abstract “alien” interest lies not in their human suffering but in getting a good story for the ratings.[22] The language forms that are used are a grotesque combination of personal expression and abstract, alien thinking, “so sorry you lost your spouse to cancer we’ll be back in a moment after the break …” The monstrous aesthetic form of this warped language evokes horror (or should)!
According to my dream, this horrible outcome occurs when the “alien” is countered by fear and a gesture of refusal towards his intentions—to live amongst us, as alien.[23] How is this working in actuality now, in our lives?
The “alien” is a style of consciousness “outside” of our ordinary human consciousness.[24] It constitutes the linguistic foundation of our technological civilization. For example, for this style of consciousness, nature is now to be thought as “a closed system of spatio-temporally related units of mass”.[25] We routinely think these thoughts as refleccted in the way we comport ourselves, not necessarily in what we say we believe! We manipulate other human beings according to some systemic goal, for example, when we think them as abstract human resources. We think abstractly and non-humanly via this alien consciousness, while at the same time believing ourselves to be warm human beings with high regard for others. This “alien” style of consciousness and its language has already “landed” and is shaping our technological civilization. We are daily using its gifts without any consciousness of this alien style. We just speak it, quite unconsciously.
But, as my dream shows, a dawning consciousness of the “alien” character of this new style of (technological) consciousness, on the part of the human being (i.e. the dreamer, me), is associated with terror—terror in the face of its “alien”, non-human status.
My dream also speaks of a redemptive process, one in which the human undergoes a transformative ordeal in fire—he enters a vessel where ambiguity in language is required, “is he avoiding the heat or is he moving to further expose himself to it?” etc. It is a calcinatio process that promises a new birth (he is pregnant). If terror prevails, the technological style of consciousness merely becomes invasive and destructive of any recognizable human form.[26] If, in contrast, a willing sacrifice in “fire” is made, a child may be born.
Initiation into the reality of the alien style of consciousness governing our modern technological culture involves a voluntary, fiery sacrifice, which constitutes a pregnancy. I can now say two things about this process, after some twenty-odd years subsequent to this dream-vision.
I have had other dreams-visions that amplify the meaning of the “fire”. It seems that as reified categories of thought such as inner/outer, spirit/matter, mind/body, etc., break down, “fire” is released—the fire of living language, fluid, ambiguous, and hot.[27] The human mouthpiece must attain the state of mind that can hold living language so that he/she can receive the alien speech of our technological civilization and thereby “humanize” it. What would such state of mind be like? I will include here a quote from Nietzsche who tells us his experience of this level of living language in order to write Thus Spake Zarathustra[28]:
Has any one at the end of the nineteenth century any distinct notion of what poets of a stronger age understood by the word inspiration? If not, I will describe it. If one had the smallest vestige of superstition in one, it would hardly be possible to set aside completely the idea that one is the mere incarnation, mouthpiece [my italics] or medium of an almighty power. The idea of revelation in the sense that something becomes suddenly visible and audible with indescribable certainty and accuracy, which profoundly convulses and upsets one—describes simply the matter of fact. One hears—one does not seek; one takes—one does not ask who gives: a thought suddenly flashes up like lightning, it comes with necessity, unhesitatingly—I have never had any choice in the matter. There is an ecstasy such that the immense strain of it is sometimes relaxed by a flood of tears, along with which one’s steps either rush or involuntarily lag, alternately. There is the feeling that one is completely out of hand, with the very distinct consciousness of an endless number of fine thrills and quiverings to the very toes;—there is a depth of happiness in which the painfullest and gloomiest do not operate as antitheses, but as conditioned, as demanded in the sense of necessary shades of colour in such an overflow of light. There is an instinct for rhythmic relations which embraces wide areas of forms (length, the need of a wide-embracing rhythm, is almost the measure of the force of an inspiration, a sort of counterpart to its pressure and tension). Everything happens quite involuntarily, as if in a tempestuous outburst of freedom, of absoluteness, of power and divinity. The involuntariness of the figures and similes is the most remarkable thing; one loses all perception of what constitutes the figure and what constitutes the simile; everything seems to present itself as the readiest, the correctest and the simplest means of expression. It actually seems, to use one of Zarathustra’s own phrases, as if all things came unto one, and would fain be similes: ‘Here do all things come caressingly to thy talk and flatter thee, for they want to ride upon thy back. On every simile dost thou here ride to every truth. Here fly open unto thee all being’s words and word-cabinets; here all being wanteth to become words, here all becoming wanteth to learn of thee how to talk.’ This is MY experience of inspiration. I do not doubt but that one would have to go back thousands of years in order to find some one who could say to me: It is mine also!
Such encounters with the “lightning bolt” powers and fire of living language, in its non-human, alien status, may prepare an adequate human vessel to receive or unite with the alien speech of technology.[29] From such a union a “child” may be born and this child is human. My present understanding of such an initiatory mystery is the following, to conclude this essay:
Language is on the way to becoming conscious of itself in its status of being “alien” to anything we have thought of as being human.[30] To become conscious of itself as such, i.e., as living language, it needs its human mouthpiece, and so is entering the human domain of experience but as “alien” to that experience. The dream’s promised human birth then is simply (and profoundly) the completion of centuries of living language coming home to itself as such, no longer substantiated as the gods or divine nature etc. My book, The Peril in Thinking, explores the dreadful empirical consequences that happen worldwide when thinkers like Nietzsche find their way to the fires of living thinking and fail to humanize it—Heidegger being a major example of this initiatory failure, as my book describes. He is not to be blamed. Those fiery forces of living language are terrible, as terrible as the furnace of a nuclear bomb, on their way to producing a birth.[31]
The birth, an ordinary human birth, is simply this: Living language now knows itself as such, i.e. living language, autonomous, with its own mysterious telos. Yet it also is humanized as the human mouthpiece. The child is thus “alien-human”, a poor description to be sure. From the ordinary human perspective, (dead) language is known as a pragmatic tool to be used for our purposes, that is, until the alien consciousness wishes to speak, at which moment the human must surrender his or her concerns, handing over his or her “speech centres” or artist hand etc., to that other within who can thus “speak”, while the human participant begins to shape that alien speech into a thing of beauty rather than into a monster, as our artists are warning us about at present.
This child is the new definition of what it is to be human and my dream-vision suggests a path of initiation into this new definition.
[1] All the following quotes and references are drawn from Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Ch. 10.
[2] Much like a “Big Bang”!
[3] We are all more or less conscious personalities but Jung was initiated into a consciousness of the unity of identity and memory. So this vision took him “beyond” both personality and personal memory.
[4] Hence the “outer space” imagery.
[5] The essence of what it is to be human, i.e. our definition, appears to be dependent on the “historical epoch” we are born into.
[6] This “two-ness” is now routinely, even glibly, called the ego-Self structure of consciousness. Jung’s vision shows the stark difference between an abstract definition of our psychological structure and an initiation into its reality!
[7] Objective cognition lies “behind” emotional attachments and is their “central secret”. Yet, unlike dissociation or emotional detachment, this state of mind remains in life as our ordinary attachments to life continue—a unity in duality!
[8] For example, in ancient games of chance, a man may be sold off into slavery if he lost a throw but he did so with a remarkable acceptance of his fate. E.g., see Mahabharata.
[9] This “background” was understood metaphysically as the spiritual origin of everything: Dreamtime, Platonic Forms, God, etc.
[10] To accept that there are historical epochs, each rooted in and shaped by its own background reality, would require an acceptance of a perspective on the past that Heidegger calls a history of Being.
[11] At least in the 20th century!
[12] See my quote from Nietzsche further on.
[13] By “ontologically obsolete” I mean a way of being that may be personally rewarding but can no longer address the collective reality known as our technological civilization—a reality shaping our lives across scale, maybe even bringing about our demise as a species.
[14] “Unnerving” in the sense that this thought suggests that the definition of what it is to be human has transformed yet again at an alarming, accelerating rate. A “background” process of self-transformation is accelerating, for the Earth and for us!
[15] As Jung’s vision bestowed fresh thinking on him. See quote, p. 4.
[16] All those that Jung addresses or engages in a real way are figures of speech! His greatest teacher, Philemon is a “living” figure of speech. The Red Book is a record of living, autonomous, inceptive language.
[17] Case in point: no one mourns the loss of an empirically individual component of a computer but we know that such components, when abstracted, are to be understood as indispensable parts to the whole (say the Internet). It’s the abstract “whole” that matters in language today and which drives our civilization.
[18] This and other dream-visions can be found in my book The Imperative. Available at Amazon.
[19] http://www.mca.com.au/exhibition/new-romance/
[20] Stelarc & Nina Sellars, Blender, 2005/2016. http://www.mca.com.au/exhibition/new-romance/
[21] The inceptive character of this living technological language has already happened. It has produced the technological appearances. We use this now dead language as a pragmatic tool for own purposes.
[22] I.e., alien to those ordinary human concerns we are familiar with, such as one another’s well being or suffering.
[23] This fear is unconscious and can be discerned as implicit within the multitude of power moves by those in the public eye who can ward off being treated linguistically in these ways by others. Self-deprecatory insults are an important weapon in this arsenal. If you take the mickey out of yourself for some “dumb” remark, you deflate the enemy’s attempts to do the same, etc.
[24] I.e., that welcome and habituated style of consciousness that we might call “humanistic”, where we relate to one another with care, as individuals, each with intrinsic dignity etc. (“Do unto others …”)
[25] Heidegger. Age of the World Picture, 60.
[26] How many movies do we endure, of “invading aliens”?
[27] See my books, Speech of the Unknown Future and The Peril in Thinking. Available at Amazon. This heat is registered bodily in a extreme inflammatory response. Mine lasted about twenty-five years or so.
[28] From “Introduction” to Thus Spake Zarathustra. Common, T. (tr.).
[29] It is not clear to me whether Nietzsche succeeded in “humanizing” this mighty power of living language, as my book The Peril in Thinking explores.
[30] Living language has always been alien to the human experience. Up until now we have substantiated its “alien” status as a deity and so on.
[31] An account of my encounters with these fires can be found in my books, The Imperative, and Mouthpiece, as well as my book of poems: Poems of Making, Poems of Death.