The dawn of human consciousness is generally agreed by archeologists and historians to be impossible to pin down in time or place, an event lost to the mists of antiquity. What artifacts and remains we do have indicate that the emergence of several external behaviors signified giant leaps in our ancestors’ inner life: use of fire, symbolic language, (and in my view, the first giant leap) the making of new tools that previously only existed in the mind of its creator. I believe tool making had to be the first breakthrough because many animals have been observed using found objects as tools or even fashioning them into better tools, but in such instances, it is simply making minor modifications to the object rather than a breakthrough involving “seeing” the tool within an object or combining several objects into a new tool.
Use of fire involves modifying the physical environment as well as an emotional breakthrough to overcome the fear of fire, and no animal has been observed to use fire in a proactive way. Symbolic language involves high level abstractions and coordination of physical, emotional and intellectual abilities. Certain marine mammals and some chimps appear to be able to learn to use it from humans, but it remains an open question whether we are the only creatures on Earth that appear to be inherently capable of it. However, the true hallmark of human consciousness, self-awareness, involves integrating other aspects of “being” than just our physical, emotional and intellectual aspects.
All of known history can be seen as our continuing struggle to better cultivate and refine our physical, emotional and intellectual resources. The globalized culture and civilization we see today is the result of this collective struggle, and there is mounting evidence that we have taken a wrong turn down the path of societal development. Sociological and technological development has grown in wildly unbalanced ways. Poverty and exploitation are rampant. Pollution and ecological disasters are ever increasing. The emotional well-being and psychological health of individuals are sacrificed for the financial gains of corporate elites, and no alternatives models seem to be able to compete with this current dominate model of development.
Though aware of these facts, few seem able to fathom an alternative approach. Yet, the reasons these things are happening and accelerating are not unknown. In fact, they have been known for a very long time: excessive materialism leads to corruption leads to a collapse of society. But how did materialism become the dominant way of understanding our existence here?
When René Descartes declared that “I think therefore I am,” he implicitly reduced the mind to a kind of matter, i.e., a thinking substance. And when Isaac Newton declared that “God in the beginning formed Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles... so very hard, as never to wear or break in pieces,” many people turned science into a form of materialistic religion. Anything that wasn’t Matter didn’t matter.
Then Darwin introduced Newton’s materialism into biology with the maxim “survival of the fittest,” and inheriting desirable traits became seen as the essential purpose of life. In Social-Darwinism, greed and accumulation became viewed as the natural virtues of society, separating one individual from the next, one country from the next, and humans from all other species.
In this way, all aspects of life were affected. The physical sciences had nothing to do with ethics, philosophy had nothing to do with the arts, and the order of the universe had nothing to do with the way in which we should live. In such a world, Jacques Monod advised “Man” to wake up to “his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. He must realize that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world; a world that is deaf to his music and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his suffering or his crimes.” No ghosts, no gods, and not much good.
In this totalitarian materialistic environment, let’s have the courage to remember that our physical reality is actually guided by a system of unseen forms (or conceptual entities) which are so powerful that even though they don’t carry any mass or energy, they are actually the only permanent reality. I say remember because this is knowledge that was available a long time ago.
The ancient Taoists posited that all creation emerged from Nothingness, an unimaginable Void beyond the vacuum of outer space and unfolded into the seemingly infinite physical manifold we see around us. The ancient Greek philosophers saw an underlying reality of perfect forms from which our physical world is projected. The major revealed religions all teach that this earthly life is but a preparation for the real world of the spirit. Numerous classical great thinkers have variously come to very similar conclusions – WHAT APPEARS MATERIAL IS NOT REAL, REALITY IS NOT PHYSICAL.
In modern times, Carl Jung rediscovered the psychic system of archetypal reality that underlies human experience and made insightful observation on the linkage between inner experience and outer reality. As it turns out, Carl Gustav Jung’s revolutionary views of the human mind are in perfect agreement with the discoveries of Quantum Physics which, during the last century, revealed the fundamental errors of Classical Physics and are slowly leading to a need for radical changes in the materialistic view of the world.
The quantum phenomenon forces us to see that the basis of the material world is non-material, and that there is an underlying realm of the world that we can’t see because it doesn’t consist of material things, but of non-material forms. These forms are real, even though they are invisible, because they have the potential to appear in the empirical world and to act on us. They form a realm of potentiality for the physical reality, and all empirical things are emanations of this realm.
There are indications that the forms in the cosmic potentiality are patterns of information without even the least bit of physicality. Physical reality, in this view, is really a virtual reality. Individual personalities in it interact as data streams joining together like avatars in a Larger Consciousness System (LCS). Religious scholars might prefer to describe this view of material reality as everything and everyone being “thoughts in the mind of an omnipotent God.”
However one chooses to phrase such a view of reality, the common thread that runs through them all, is that this view, sees all the parts appearing separate and interacting separately, but are in fact inextricably linked. In the quantum view of things, the world appears as an undivided wholeness in which all things and people are interconnected and consciousness is a cosmic property.
What I propose is that we can in our own experience of reality obtain proof that this is indeed the truth. We can directly access the decreasing physicality of “what is real” by observing our physical, emotional, intellectual, and energetic aspects, and ultimately touch the cosmic wholeness that we are all a part of. As a Jungian analyst, I am familiar with working in psychic systems of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature, and the very real healing such work brings to people.
From these systems, invisible forms appear in our minds and guide our imagination, perception, and thinking. I have experienced in myself, and observed in others, how accessing these forms can help one to know the proper order in one’s own life, and come to know the proper order of the universe. True happiness in this light can only be found by understanding the proper order of the universe, and by living in accordance with it. This means that we have to recognize the invisible background of reality, its importance in our lives, and accept the guidance that comes to us.
Jung’s teaching is an incredible achievement because it can show us how we are connected with a non-empirical realm of the universe, in which we can find our life mission. Denying the transcendent aspects of our nature can lead to serious problems for our physical health and emotional wellbeing. Embracing them can lead to being who you REALLY are.
To help people who can use the assistance, I have written a book based on my own personal experience and winding spiritual path. This book is written on the premise that the reader is able to accept that reality is not ONLY physical. If you need convincing, please take the time to read Tom Campbell’s My Big TOE (Theory of Everything) trilogy for a comprehensive scientific argument from a trained physicist.
My book is not a dogmatic argument for a particular point of view. You do not have to accept any of the explanations to do the steps in the following chapters, or for them to work. This book is also not biographical in nature, but it does contain numerous examples from my own experience illustrating some of the points I will make.
The observable fact that every single life is heading towards non-physicality (death), can cause fear - or be inspiring. The promise of this book is that with a little effort and focus, your internal settings can be firmly and permanently affixed to the INSPIRE position.
Humanity started our path to global domination by smashing flint stones together to make tools. Now we are smashing atoms together in our search to find the penultimate elemental particle in order to make better tools. In other words, we are collectively still doing the same thing in the same way. It is high time we considered our individual life, our relationships and even our place in the world in a new light. It is time we turned the page.
You can check out the book here: https://www.balboapress.com/Bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?BookId=SKU-001133616
Future posts on this channel will consist of reports from observations of the emerging flow of the collective unconscious.