2012
Quotations from a book I'm reading: Part 2

Mirroring our culture, we had chosen to pursue altered states in a destructive way - one that accorded with our unconscious nihilism...There might be lost modalities of consciousness, inconvinient possibilities of being, suppressed by the swarming distractions and anxieties of contemporary life.

What if the evolution of consciousness, rather than an adaptive quirk of the brain, wa sactually the central drama, purpose and point, of our whole show? There are, we shall see, philosophers and psychoanalysts, mystics and physicits who propose that this is the case. Inner development is an eccentric process, advancing in sudden jumps, in revelatory sparksand fizzles - each person is his or her own private universe. Strenghtened by suffering and crisis, consciousness does not reach a new intensity according to any predicably lenar progress that can be graphed by the tools of modern science. It follows its own wayward path.

What if this deepening of awareness takes place in the margins, in the nooks and crannies of contemporary life, like a weed flowering out of the thinnest sidewalk crack? Could it be, as the somnolent masses and the professional classes press forward in the old direction, seeking the same old rewards, that the new thing self-organizes out of chaos and noise, asserts itself in fragility and silence, then takes root and vitalizes until it suddenly manifests as established truth? If something like this was the case, we would be surprised at first - even shocked - but then it might occur to us: Perhaps it has always happened this way...

...Friedrich Nietzsche found the will to superficiality - an embrace of the trivial and an instinctive avoidance of anything troubling, profound, or anomalous - to be a healthy impulse and innate tendency in the ordinary human psyche. He believed that this instinct was also hidden beneath most of the confident postulates of science. "Here and there we understand and laugh at the way in which precisely science at its best seeks most to keepus in this simlified, thoroughly artificial, suitably constructed and suitably falsified world - at the way in which, willy-nilly, it loves error, because, being alive, it loves life", he wrote in Beyond Good and Evil. This instinct toward the false and the flighty protected against the chance "that one might get a hold of the truth too soon, before man has become strong enough, hard enough, artist enough" to handle it. Nietzsche proposed that the "seeker ahter the knowledge", the "opposote-man", was "secretly lured and pushed forward by his cruelty, by those dangerous thrills of cruelty turned against oneself." The insistence on the truth was " a violation, a desire to hurt the basic will of the spirit which unceasingly strives for the apparent and superficial."

A civilization relies upon a set of unconscious agreements as to what constitutes meaning and can be allowed into discourse. When faced with information that falls outside these parameters, cultures and individuals alike forget or neglect, or actively suppress, the ill-fitting data. Yet the repressed elements return to haunt us eventually, psychologists tell us, as dissociated projections of our psyche. Ultimately, the only model of reality that can sustain us is that accounts for even the most intractable and seemingly anomalous aspects of our experience. Card Jung wrote:

We are living in what Creeks called the kairos - the right moment...This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing.

Despite what we might like to be the case, we may have no choice but to become "hard enough, strong enough, artist enough" to assist in this change...

To be continued