Why we need unconsciousness

The first question – why do we sleep – didn’t have a good answer 20 years ago. The crass answer was that we sleep to cure sleepiness, which is the fatuous equivalent of saying that we eat to cure hunger. It tells you nothing about the nutritional benefits of food. But now, after a remarkable litany of research of the past sort of quarter century, we’ve actually been forced to upend the question and ask is there anything that sleep does not provide in terms of a functional benefit, both the brain and body? And it’s been a real struggle; we’ve found that most all tissues and physiological systems in the body and most all operations of the mind are powerfully enhanced when we get sufficient sleep, and quite demonstrably impaired when we don’t get enough. So I think that’s been a radical change of events.

I think the question about sleep evolving is interesting for at least two reasons: Firstly, if you take a step back it is the most idiotic of all things to do as a biological species. You’re not finding food; you’re not reproducing; you’re not finding a mate; you’re not caring for your young; and, worst of all, you’re vulnerable to predation! So, on any one of those grounds, and especially all of them as a collective, Mother Nature should have strongly selected against this thing called sleep. In other words, if sleep doesn’t support an absolutely vital set of functions then it’s going to be the biggest mistake the evolutionary process ever made! Now we understand it wasn’t a blunder, it was a blind stroke of genius.

The second reason I think that question is interesting is perhaps because sleep didn’t evolve. We assume that it did, and I’ve got a wacky theory that I think is going to be very difficult to prove, and I’m sure I’m sure I’m probably wrong, but I have an idea that, in fact, we started asleep and it was from sleep that wakefulness emerged. Why do we assume that wakefulness was the predecessor and then we had to evolve this thing called sleep? I think we started off sleeping, and from that wakefulness emerged. And wakefulness is, in many ways, remarkably deleterious. If you look at the brain it’s very clear that metabolically wakefulness is low level brain damage! So, I think we had to return to sleep state every time we emerged awake.

In some ways I almost don’t think that sleep did evolve in terms of an inception point, but then sleep has evolved dramatically across species. Every species that we’ve studied appears to sleep, even very old evolutionarily ancient earth worms. Bacteria in fact even have an active and a passive phase which seems to be maybe a precursor of sleep and wake. And from that point forward, sleep has fought its way through heroically every step of the evolutionary tree path. If it’s that well preserved how could it not be essential?

- Dr. Matthew Walker, “Why We Need Sleep” (Revolution Health Radio podcast, 10/8/19)

I was listening to one of my favorite health podcasts when the interviewee, a sleep specialist, said the above. And it sent a shock through me; why do we assume that sleep is a thing that evolved and not the other way around, that wakefulness was the thing that evolved? As someone who believes that the chaos of unconsciousness precedes (and follows) the rise and fall of Ego's star, this makes far more sense. The default state of the universe is unconsciousness. Consciousness is born out of unconsciousness, the way order naturally arises out of chaos in physical reality. Consciousness is just one form of order that arises out of the Unconscious.

The first several years of life appear to be a waking dream – no one has memories from that time in their life (though I have heard of an extremely shady cult leader claiming he did, as a sign of his “spiritual evolution.”) Maybe in the same way that we appear to repeat our species' evolutionary history in the womb, our childhood repeats the development of consciousness in humanity. Creation myths tell the tale of the waking of the ego from primordial chaos; every one of us lives out this myth in the story of our lives.

Just like sleep, work with the unconscious impacts every part of our lives... but our culture, gripped as it is in the Apollonian obsession with outward success, is literally incapable of comprehending such an idea. This is why it was such a shock to hear. Even for me, someone who deeply values the unconscious. Why sleep when you can make money, or work out, or do anything else that has a practical benefit? Why do the hard work of psychological and spiritual development when you can make money, or work out, or do anything else that has a practical benefit? What purpose does any of this serve? This question only makes sense if you view life as meaningless unless you're getting something out of it. But this view is wrong, and, as with all falsehoods, even if you believe it Life will come up and smack you upside the head with the proverbial stick. That's what I think is going on here with the whole issue of sleep in the modern world.

Sleep is unconsciousness. Unconsciousness is necessary, not only for psychological health and freedom from neuroses but for life itself. The Unconscious is our home, a fact that during the day our ego, under the Maya-like spell of consciousness, forgets. Every night we return to our primeval home, and every morning we come back with nourishment that carries us through our day, until we can go back home once again.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home

- William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”

Maintaining a relationship with the animal body

Reference for an upcoming post on shame:

Here is a question by Dr. Harding: “Can you take up in further detail the section in the chapter on the Compassionate Ones where Nietzsche speaks of man as the animal with red cheeks? The interpretation given at the last seminar that he was ashamed on account of the unconsciousness of his fellow man does not seem adequate to me. Is there not an analogy with the story of Eden where we are told that when Adam and Eve had eaten of the tree of knowledge they were ashamed before God of their nakedness, which had never bothered them before? And perhaps – who knows? – they may have been ashamed of their clothes before the other animals? In fact, does not consciousness itself carry its own burden of guilt because the discerning one can no longer act with the complete rightness of unconscious instinct?”

Well, you have answered your question yourself, practically. That shame is of course a very typical reaction; it is a primitive reaction which clearly shows the distance that exists between the ego consciousness and the original unconsciousness of mere instinct. As long as man is in a merely instinctive animal condition, there is absolutely no ground for shame, no possibility of shame even, but with the coming of ego consciousness, he feels apart from the animal kingdom and the original paradise of unconsciousness, and then naturally he is inclined to have feelings of inferiority. The beginning of consciousness is characterized by feelings of inferiority, and also by megalomania. The old prophets and philosophers say nothing is greater than man, but on the other side nothing is more miserable than man, for the ego consciousness is only a little spark of light in an immense darkness. Yet it is the light, and if you pile up a thousand darknesses you don’t get a spark of light, you don’t make consciousness. Consciousness is the sun in the great darkness of the world. Man is just a little lantern in the world of darkness, and as soon as you have a certain amount of ego consciousness naturally you are isolated and become self-conscious – you can’t help it – and naturally you no longer possess the absolute simplicity of nature: you are no longer naïve. It is a great art and a great difficulty to become like unto a child again – or better still, like unto an animal; to become like an animal is then the supreme ideal.

When you have built up your consciousness to a decent degree, you become so separated from nature that you feel it to be a disadvantage; you feel that you have fallen from grace. This is of course the expulsion from paradise. Then life becomes ego misery and lawlessness and you must create artificial laws in order to develop a feeling of obedience. Having ego consciousness means that you have a certain amount of disposable willpower, which of course means arbitrary feelings and decisions, disobedience of natural laws and so on; and that gives you a terrible feeling of being lost, cursed, isolated, and wrong altogether. And of course this causes feelings of shame. Compare your state of innocence with the innocence of a little child and you have ground for shame; and compared with an animal you are nowhere. So the dawn of consciousness was naturally a tremendous problem to man; he had to invent a new law-abiding world of obedience, the careful observance of rules; instead of the herd or the natural animal state, he had to invent an artificial state. He has now succeeded in making of the state a tremendous monster, such as nature probably never would have tolerated, but he had to do it in order to compensate that sentiment d’incompletude, d’insuffisance. For we should not live instinctively any longer. We had to invent machines and law books and morals in order to give mankind a feeling of being in order, of being in a decent condition – something similar to paradise where the animals knew how to behave with each other. You see, the great world seems to be a self-regulating orderliness, an organism that moves and lives in a more or less decent way. The catastrophes are not too great or too many. There are not too many diseases – only a decent amount to kill off enough animals. But we know that we can break out at any time and destroy as no volcano and no epidemic ever destroyed, and we chiefly injure our own species; we would not dream of making an international war against flies or microbes or against whales or elephants – it isn’t worthwhile – but it is worthwhile when it is against man. That is so much against nature that on the other side, man seeks to protect himself by complicated machines, states, and contracts which he cannot observe. So this first reaction of shame symbolizes the moment when man felt his tragic difference from paradise, his original condition.

Yet that original condition was also not a very happy one. The primitive man did not feel his unconscious to be very satisfactory. He tried to get away from it. Of course, we have the idea that the original condition was a wonderful paradise, but as a matter of actual fact man has always tried to move away from that unconsciousness. All his many ceremonies were attempts to create a more conscious condition, and any new positive acquisition in the field of consciousness was praised as a great asset, a great accomplishment. Prometheus stealing the fire from the immortal gods has become a savior of mankind, and man’s greatest triumph was that God himself incarnated in man in order to illumine the world; that was a tremendous increase of consciousness. But every increase of consciousness means a further separation from the original animal-like condition, and I don’t know where it will end: it is really a tragic problem. We have to discover more consciousness, to extend consciousness, and the more it is extended the more we get away from the original condition.

The body is the original animal condition; we are all animals in the body, and so we should have animal psychology in order to be able to live in it. Yes, if we had no body then we could live with contracts and marvelous laws which everybody could observe and a marvelous morality which everybody could easily fulfil. But since we have a body it is indispensable that we exist also as an animal, and each time we invent a new increase of consciousness we have to put a new link in the chain that binds us to the animal, till finally it will become so long that complications will surely ensure. For when the chain between man and animal has grown so long that we lose sight of the animal, anything can happen in between, and the chain will snarl up somewhere. That has happened already and therefore we doctors have to find in a conscious individual the place where the chain begins; we have to go back and find out where it has been caught or what has happened to the animal at the other end of the line. Then we have to shorten it perhaps, or disentangle it, in order to improve the relationship between the consciousness that went too far ahead and the animal left behind.

- CG Jung, from Jung's Seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra

The plumb line of personality

The superior function and the inferior function are two points along a human line, and that human line is the plumb line of the personality which I call the spine. And I like to think of the superior function as the head of the spine, and the inferior function as the tail of the spine. This definition of the spine is a very real thing. When I discovered that I was an intuitive type, I just knew suddenly – the man who dreamed when he was depressed – had to be some kind of intuitive, and I later realized was an extraverted intuitive, and he also had to be an absent-minded bloke who lost things, and that was my inferior introverted sensation, and I felt my spine in that. Not long after that I dreamt that I was present at the birth of a baby, and I was both the person giving the birth, and I was also the person delivering the baby. If I really knew it, I was also the baby. The baby which was coming out of that healthy sense of spine, was my nature, my psychological type. That sense of self we all have is along that mysterious axis between what we are best at and what we are worst at, which is the spine of our personality, and there is our uprightness, there is our integrity. Another way of saying this metaphorically and analogically is that a personality needs to drop anchor. Some people are pretty clear about what they are best at, but it doesn’t ground them enough. What grounds them is that thing they are not so good at, the thing they can’t control with the conscious mind, the thing they can’t make money at, the thing they can’t will, the thing they can’t push around, the thing that just is and constantly brings them down to earth.

I was in my glory just a few days ago at the time of the election because I consulted the I Ching last January, January of 1992, and I asked about some presidential possibilities, and based on the answers I got I concluded Clinton could win the election, and that Bush would lose the election. Because I can’t contain anything, I let that out at a public lecture in April or so, and then I just lived in dread because if that didn’t come through, my name would be mud. It was a very strange political year, there were many vicissitudes, and Clinton finally won. Bush lost. I was the prophet of all time. I was just exactly what I wanted to be – the great extraverted intuitive prophet. And I was so filled with my happiness, my glory and all the rest that I forgot to write down the time of two of my patients and managed to ignore the writing on my calendar on the third, so I messed up three appointments in a single week. What a nerd this would-be genius turned out to be. That’s the way of the balancing act that the psyche gives us every single time between my marvelous extraverted intuition in my case, and my absolutely rotted, no good introverted sensation that can’t be trusted.

Or one could look at it the other way. One could say that what is rotten is my inflated extraverted intuition, and what is good about me is this humble introverted sensation that makes these mistakes to remind me that I need to pay attention to the here and now, the straight and narrow, and to be humble.

- A Jungian Analyst Talks About Psychological Types: A Visit with John Beebe


See also:
Inferior function
Primary ("superior") function

Symbolism: Body

[An overview will be written at some point in the future.]

 

Posts:

Symbolism: Eyebrows
The vulgarity of eating

Symbolism: Food/eating

[An overview will be written at some point in the future.]

 

Posts:

The vulgarity of eating

Reference: The vulgarity of eating

Because wolves are the personification of hunger – one is hungry as a wolf. So when he protects the corpse from the wolves, he [Nietzsche] is protecting it from being eaten by the appetite in himself which he tries to forget. You will remember he says of his hunger before, “And all day it hath failed to come: where hath it been?” This means that he did not realize his hunger for his body; he forgot his body altogether. Therefore, the body died; he overcame it. But the hunger ought to convince him that he should eat his body; then he would return to his humanity and become an ordinary human being. If you want to be an extraordinary human being, don’t eat: people who eat become vulgar. Therefore, many people make a point of not eating before others.

----------

Sipphas [followers of a religious sect] believe that it is indecent to feed before each other, so they turn their backs when they eat, or find a place where nobody sees them. To them it is just as indecent as the opposite functions of the body. Eating before others is understood by many people as a sort of taboo; there is mana in it which can easily turn into its own opposite. And here Zarathustra protects his body against the wolves because he tries to make sure that his sanctity or his superiority shall not become injured through the vulgarity of eating, which would put him down to the level of common humanity. To fill himself with physical matter would make him heavy and he could not dance any longer. He could not fly, he would be fettered to the earth. Therefore, in ascetic forms of religion people refrain from eating in order to attain spirituality; in a certain season of the year, or on certain day of the week, they make themselves light by not filling the stomach. They assume that in eating they consume all the dirt of the earth and are fettered by the earth by the heaviness of the belly. So eating is a sort of symbolism…

- C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra



Symbols:
Food/eating
Body
Earth
Flying
Wolf

See also:
Anorexia Mirabilis

Symbolism: Eyebrows

Eyebrows seem to express one's personality - sharp, angular eyebrows, or softly rounded ones; high eyebrows or low - when one thinks of a face, their eyebrows tell a story about that person's character.

In Chinese physiognomy eyebrows are one way to determine a person's temperament[1]:

• People with long eyebrows are righteous, helpful, and friendly. those with short eyebrows are restrained and have few friends.
• Thick (as in width) eyebrows are masculine, active, impulsive, and focused on the big picture. Narrow eyebrows are feminine, passive, indecisive, and detail oriented.
• Dense eyebrows are sweet-tempered and active, although if overly bushy they're cunning and self-centered. Sparse eyebrows are cool and unemotional.
• High eyebrows are sweet-tempered and family oriented. Low eyebrows are realistic and consider immediate rather than long term interests.

From an excerpt of Lauren Valenti's article "What Your Eyebrows Say About You,":

1. Curved: "A creative person." 2. Straight: "A confident and assertive person — if a woman has straight brows she can be quite masculine." 3. Angled: "Sensitive and private, but women with apex eyebrows can also be stubborn." 

1. Bushy: "Masculinity and an excess of male hormones in a woman's body. If the hair is shiny, it reflects an individual with high sexual energy." 2. Thin: "A feminine, gentle personality."

1. High: "If they are too high, they are dreamers." 2. Low: "They look too carefully at everything and often don't have time for others."

"What Your Eyebrows Say About You," Lauren Valenti (Marie Claire, November 2014)


In style identity (David Kibbe's system is popular but there are many), examining one's features tells us what fashion style helps us look our best. Although our actual personality may be different, each style identity is definitely associated with a certain kind of temperament. The styles are:

Dramatic: These people appear to be intense and theatrical

Grace Jones

Natural: Laid back and friendly


Jennifer Anniston

Gamine: Playful and boyish


Audrey Hepburn

Classic: Proper and reserved


Zhang Ziyi

Ingenue: Sweet and girlish

Elle Fanning


Romantic: Sexy and confident


Christina Hendricks

Ethereal: Spiritual and otherwordly


Cate Blanchett

(From "Style Identities," (Truth is Beauty))

Of course, while one's style identity can be different from one's actual personality, it definitely does give a certain impression to others. Someone who's dramatic will be judged to be unconventional and perhaps over-the-top, while an ingénue will probably be assumed to be sweet and adorable (even if these things aren't true). Eyebrows are an important part of this perceived personality typing.

The only thing about eyebrows in mythology or religion that I could find was the proscription against plucking eyebrows in Islam:

Hair which we are forbidden to remove, which includes the eyebrows. The action of removing the hair of the eyebrows is called al-namas. It is also forbidden to remove the hair of the beard.

The evidence for that is the hadeeth of ‘Abd-Allaah ibn Mas’ood (may Allaah be pleased with him) who said: I heard the Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) say: “Allaah has cursed the woman who does tattoos and the one who has them done, the woman who plucks eyebrows (al-naamisah) and the one who has it done (al-mutanammisah), and the one who files her teeth for the purpose of beauty, altering the creation of Allaah.”

(Narrated by al-Bukhaari, 5931; Muslim, 2125)

- Islam Question and Answer

Here eyebrows, or altering them, is seen as a way to heighten a woman's sexual appeal. This seems to go along with the Muslim practice of women covering themselves. These are both seen as ways for a woman to preserve her modesty.[2]

There's another element to the proscription; it can also be interpreted as encouraging people to be natural, be oneself, the self that God gave you. It is rejecting what society tells you. Others may say that something about you is a flaw, but that thing comes from the Self and is, therefore, a part of the authentic you. To try to change that is an offense against the Self, and your truth. Look at Cara Delevigne, or how important Frida Kahlo's unusual eyebrows were to her art, and her self-expression. Painting herself with her thick, unconventional eyebrows was a statement to the world, that she'd rather be herself than fit society's idea of what was beautiful... and that arguably made her even more beautiful.

Some people are beautiful in appearance and some are not; that’s just how it is and the entire matter is entirely in the hand of Allaah. Therefore, it is essential that you be patient and seek reward with Allaah, and not transgress His sacred limits for the sake of your looks. Just think….even if the whole world were to tell you that you look beautiful with your eyebrows shaped, would it even be worth a dot or an atom, if in Allaah’s eyes you were ugly? And if the whole world were to tell you that you are ugly, would it really matter as long as you were beautiful in front of Allaah????

- "Plucking Eyebrows: A topic we pretend does not exist," by Asma bint Shameem


So, eyebrows reveal (or seem to reveal) one's temperament and personality. In addition, highly groomed eyebrows are associated with sexuality, while natural ones are modest, further adding to the association of eyebrows with personality. What a person does with their eyebrows is a reflection of how they present themselves; do they "shape" their eyebrows/personality to fit societal values? Or do they present themselves in a natural, authentic way?

1. Meanings of Eyebrows in Physiognomy
2. "What is the Hijab and Why do Women Wear it?," (Arabs In America)



Outside link:
Face the Truth - What Can You Tell Just by Looking at Someone?
Narcissists have thicker, denser, more distinct eyebrows, according to a new study
Whom do we fear or trust? Faces instantly guide us, scientists say

Anorexia Mirabilis

The head of St. Catherine of Siena

We’ve been taught so effectively to loathe fat people, and especially women who refuse to make themselves small and convenient, that not even the endless drive for profit can convince some of the world’s most enthusiastic capitalists to consider them a priority.

- Amanda Mull, "Why Aren’t Fashion ‘Disruptors’ Serving Plus-Size Customers?"



First, blog news: It’s been pretty quiet here at 2Biat, and that is because I’ve been studying for my final exam. And there's also all the holiday madness that happens every year at this time, so there’s a short hiatus happening. However, I had a little brainwave today that I wanted to share to this blog.

One of the things I’m studying about is eating disorders. This is something I have a very personal relationship with. It’s been a long time but for years I hated myself, and hated my body in particular. It took a long time to heal all those wounds. And this is, sadly, a very common problem.

We have a history of starving the body, everything from sages in the desert to the tradition of girls fasting to show how close to God they are. Modern anorexia is basically the same thing as this religious anorexia. Both are hateful towards the body, carnality, desire, and anything perceived of as “weakness,” especially moral weakness. Both are attempts to destroy the feminine within the body.

To love a large, curving, ample female body is to love the flesh. To hate the flesh is to hate the feminine Goddess that lives within the flesh, in our body. This is sharpest in anorexia but the societal obsession with small, spare, hungry bodies – bodies from which all the soft, warm animal comfort has been carved away – is in itself hatred toward the feminine because the body, the animal, is the feminine principle.

The way out of the pit of self-hatred is self-love. When we can finally acknowledge the tremendous work our bodies do, keeping us alive and bearing the burden of our abuse and contempt, then we can finally become friends with ourselves. And more, we can finally literally start to embody the missing sacred feminine back into the world, through our soft, fragile, but amazing and resilient bodies.

… And now you see more what the jewels behind the meat are. Our hero wanted the flesh and instead he fell into the jewels, the eternal or the divine. He has to realize that divine aspect of the flesh. It is not enough for instance, for a Christian who has up until now despised the flesh, to say, “now I’m going to throw my prudish prejudices overboard. I’m going to have juicy sex and enjoy it.” That would be eating the flesh. That’s nothing. If he does that he doesn’t move one inch out of the old kingdom, he’s still caught in it. He only adds the dimension of so-called sin to it. But nothing has happened. He has to realize that the flesh is a form of the divine, a divine revelation, and that sexuality is divine.

That’s what Jung fought with Freud about. He agreed completely with Freud that sex should be liberated and should be lived, not treated with prudish repression, but he wanted to say that sex is a religious experience as in Tantra. And if you live it, therefore, only with the idea, “That’s very healthy for my hormones and makes me physically better,” then you have missed the whole point. Then you have eaten dead meat, rotten meat. The redemption of the feminine means not the redemption of the flesh; it means the redemption of the divinity of the flesh, of the divine, archetypal, godlike aspect of the flesh…

- The Cat: The Virgin's shadow



Further reading:

Anorexia Mirabilis and the Fasting Girls (Megan, cvltnation.com)
The Cat: Redeeming the feminine


[Image from Anorexia Mirabilis and the Fasting Girls]

Symbolism: Eye

This is the first of the aggregator posts on various symbols. Ideally, these posts will contain an overview of the symbol (in the vein of previous posts on symbols) along with links to both outside resources and to posts on 2BiaT of quotes from various Jungian and other books that amplify the symbol. But, seeing how much time and effort writing these overviews takes, many of these will be uploaded without the overview and I will try write one up in the future. This is the first post like that - about the symbol of the eye - I will write up a full overview as soon as I am able.

A similar thing will be done for glossary posts, both future ones and those that have already been done: any posts that relate to a particular topic will be linked to in the glossary post in question.

Posts:

"Telepathy"

"Telepathy"

Many gods and demons of various mythological culture groups have such a large eye on their breast; thus they see everything that takes place on earth. This motif points to the fact – which we can observe time and again in the analysis of the drams of patients – that the unconscious in us often seems to possess a knowledge of things which were previously inexplicable and which, seen rationally, we cannot know. Such terms as “telepathy” do not explain the phenomenon. But we are able to recognize every day that dreams speak to people of things which they obviously cannot know. The unconscious seems to have something like a diffuse intuitive knowledge which reaches into our surroundings, and which Jung called “absolute knowledge” (because it’s detached from consciousness) or the “luminosity” of the unconscious.

- Marie Louise von Franz, Dreams, p. 9