Spheres of Consciousness
Explorations in the levels of consciousness throughout the world and in ourselves.
To speak again of the strange sounding doctrine, the I of your mind is your level of consciousness, but there is much consciousness in your world and body that you are unaware of. To assert what requires further investigation, consciousness belongs to a matter as a force of energy – that is, as something basic to matter in general – and this atom of matter exhibits control over a sphere of influence. All the nerves in the body combine to give one over all sense of I, and that is your mind. But the brain is made of many organs, and each one is conscious as itself, is autonomous, on its own level, but controlled at a higher level. What your I controls of the brain is not all of the brain.
The atom is conscious and autonomous as atom. The molecule as molecule, the organ as organ, the person as person, the family as family, the city as city, the nation as nation, mankind as mankind, nature as nature, and the universe as universe. We can imagine something as strange as a conscious rock, whose will and volition have to do with matters unthinkable to us, yet who can structure its microscopic elements in a way that seems random and causal to us, actually causal on one sense, but also original in another.
The merging of causality and originality may seem strange but in fact it is not. Let the cause, as it transforms into its effect, be imagined as having a set of alternatives, like an electrons choosing a fork between dendrites. The electron exists in an absolute chain of determined causality, but in any chain of causality there are yet options. The electron can swerve. The controller of such swerves would be a will, who is detected only in the electron, being only an influence, and only felt through the influenced things.
The cell in the brain likewise might be growing and willing and acting completely free of himself, yet absolutely used and incorporated by the brain-organ, and that organ by the brain system itself, and that again by the I of the person. In our thousand layers of spheres, a radial I exists in each man, so that, in each man, the full I of mankind also speaks and moves, and even the mind of the Universe. I know nothing of how economy really works, but the money knows, and uses my brain to promote herself. And she is merely part of a larger culture.
Nietzsche talked much of higher and lower men. The vertical emphasis was to counterbalance the democratic emphasis on horizontal equality. Democracy has become conflicted in its principles as “the one system to recognize universal equality,” and yet “guilty for desiring to change other systems.” Necessarily has our Democratic system turned to moralistic guilt – this is the maneuver of her philosophers and thinkers – for this at least can be a unifying emotion. The moral system itself, being a system of uniting groups, has no patience for virtue systems, where nobility, courage, strength, and power are the means to a private goal.
In the Democratic system, the ME bows to the WE, and here the WE is imagined to be above us, as part of the overmind (superego, oversoul, Leviathan, world-spirit, whatever else). The great man looks at the We as beneath his Me, as something he uses to enshrine his Me and give it the distinctions that better make his beauty stark.
For in a pure democracy, in which all the innovators and mind-criminals and other such geniuses, are chased out and declared anathema, all that is needed is an endless circle of the self-perpetuating system. The Ape repeats, the God makes. Most people are like parrots that can learn to speak new words, but never by their own effort, only by the patience of a teaching mind.
The current system has the great leaders in the role of husbands to their wives, or politicians to Jews, or borderlines to psychiatrists: the woman desires a master to manipulate. It is right of the feminists to realize that this role cannot work where the master in man is let dead. Man the sword, woman the shield, but here they both are worth mere ploughshares.
The I inhabits a ME he has constructed for himself to best see himself. The ME is merely another experience of this experiencer, but because it is the most regularly and habitually experienced, the ME feels normal, easy, and regular. There can be no ideal-I, only an ideal-me, whom the I inhabits. And the Me develops a mask, when the Me is a Me-as, such as Me-as doctor, Me-as husband, Me-as customer, and also a tweaked mask for each relationship I have, both one on one, and in combinations, with a Me-for you, a Me-for the audience, a Me-for the patient, and so forth.
We must interpret well. The Me is nothing more than an interpreter of experience, deciding for the I what is worthy of consideration, and quietly alining different habits of speech, thought, and action appropriate to the situation. Yet to analyze the Me itself, and the Me of society, the I of society, we require a close reading and a far reading. The far reading is able to turn any story, any plot, any argument for the progress of an idea (merely another form of story and plot), into the most general terms possible. All books reduce to such a formula as “Character seeks, struggles, resolves.”
Culture itself, as consciousness, is built upon many subsystems, and these subsystems have no being or life except as parts of the consciousness of every human being in the world. What to me seems a conscious self-determined choice to buy or sell X is for the monetary system a desire and free will of her own. In such a manner, legality and justice are part of the grammar of our sentences, are so thinkable that they cannot be unthought. All legality and justice concerns only one concept: ownership. And only a Will can own. How much of a given man is owned by something else, and what in him is utterly his own? We can only raise our children according to a set of demands, gently and politely “recommended” by every human being we talk to, and behind their gentle admonitions, child-protective services, lawyers, judges, and also their basis of power, the stinging wasps of the police force.
Whatever is not analyzed and consciously identified remains in the power of the else. Whatever is not consciously comprehended works with us, to means we did not intend.
The ugly people are those who love ugly things, feel ugly and guilty, punished, feel they deserve it on one level, but on the conscious level, feel other people deserve it, and so they bring into their lives tragedies, pains, revenges, crimes and retributions, their vindictiveness and moral superiority, and continual suffering for everybody open to them, and this by threads so subtle you would never blame anybody but the curse of God for this parade of seemingly arbitrary and chance misfortunes. For trauma calls to trauma, the guilt in his heart works its way out and brings the random trauma to happen upon him. Histrionics and borderlines have many more surgeries, diseases, illnesses, and weird happenings than all their neighbors together, and yet they are clueless as to why. His deepest power is fear. For love and desire are too strong for him. The lust of his heart scares him, so he freezes it in anxiety. Lust and anxiety are opposites. He can only allow himself to have sex under strange and painful circumstances.
And those who ignore crimes, guilt, and wrongs do so not from tolerance or love, but to remain invisible to the eyes of others on their own crimes, guilt, and wrongs. They do not know that the deep in the soul is love, and deeper than that is creative flow.
We each speak to the layer of our friend’s heart. When we wish to touch her sensitive inner sleeve, we must whisper and insist. When we wish to speak to her WE we speak in the tone of the group, and we are no different than the group We, and she speaks the same. She is modest, but modesty always flashes a glimpse. If you catch that glimpse and can flash it back, you will have opened a tone both your hearts resonate to.
Mirror others in order to read them. Judge not at all, with the eyes that love, but let your judgments be mere measures of wariness, against the panther that leaps. But you must not consciously judge when you empathize with another, for judgment is the opposite of empathy. But where you cannot empathize, don’t fake, for others will empathize that you are a fake, and then withdraw and banish you. For such a one as has the deep complex experiences you have had, those experiences abbreviate into a part of your attitude, and this attitude-idea empathizes immediately with others of your background. You will know your own at a glance. Know, therefore, how to mentally mouth the words “I love you” when you talk to another, or think “You are now most important to me.” Look as she looks at you, gesture as she gestures to you, use her own words, reason as she reasons, and you will have understood her heart and soul.
This comes again from Care, and Care as refined Eroticism, that you sexually love her, but in such an appropriate manner that she feels only the intensity of your care. Care is systematized Eros, with a thin skin of chaos and hate to protect boundaries.
Need / Own / Will / World. We do not own the world, we merely share it. But our experience of the world is our own. Nor are the needs owned, but the needs own the will, and the will owns everything else proper to us. The own is what the will can control. Is the Under, therefore, owned? Yes, but we forget it, for the Under surprises us. The unconscious chooses our loves for us, and we can never resist, but we created the unconscious and programmed it how to choose. Ideas are characters, and philosophy is always a story. The ideas of our mind live within us. We will them, and yet we must participate with their development. And yet as adults we can see no sensation, no percept, but always the percept defined by the concept. All perception is also conception, just as all art is even more conceptual, and all art is conceptual art. What makes art “the creations worthy of contemplation” is that they are utterly structured by concepts.
If my full I is layers, so that some of my thinking is also the state thinking for himself, is part of my family thinking himself out, that means that my thoughts serve multiple functions. Perhaps the way I wash the dishes enacts a certain fantasy of the family, just as it may enact a private fantasy deep in my under-consciousness. Each act I do accomplishes fifty things. And as my secret dreams and fantasies slowly fulfill themselves through hundreds of innocent gestures and sayings, the plausible intuition will finally coincide with an external happenstance. Nietzsche was right to declare the value of a deed not in consequence, nor in intent, but in unconscious determinatin. That alone determines if we are good or bad.
The great books are the aesthetic canon – and here we place all religions as one mode of poetry and prescribed dance – so that the deep intellectuals can distribute their beauties throughout the world. We are all touched and determined by Homer, by Aeschylus’ Prometheus, by the Nibelungenlied, the Eddas, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Milton, continually, every day, in intimate matters, even if you or I haven’t read or even heard of any of these works.
What seems like idle gossip, means else in another sphere. And what is a great event for you or me, might be something else for the world as a whole.
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