consensus

Imagining offers freedom from the magic of certitude, by recognizing that beliefs begin in images and are always images too, images that have lost their wings and fallen into truths. The angelic aspect of human being is the unbounded imagination.

When consensus within a culture is driven by a desire for certitude, the safety and comfort of offering our agreement with prevailing opinions of a political or social nature, beliefs more easily become confused with truth*, truth then becomes static and personal, rather than an array of personified images or angelic messages.

The concreteness of modern cosmology, where only measured, quantifiable “facts” make up a monolithic reality, assures a never-ending opposition of disagreement, drawing the battle lines between competing visions, not only of what is true and false, but of a very black and white fabric that weaves the story we believe we’re in.

The idea that a truth exists is different from the idea that a truth can be known. For the Greeks, it was the particular burden, emphasis of power, along with place and lineage that gave each god its essence of being. Necessary, as expressions of an invisible world, these gods remained above or below the human world, and our awareness of that setting apart, from our world to theirs, was a humbling factor that informs of one’s place and time as an in-between place; limited, liminal, finite, not to be possessed, but to the contrary, that which possesses us. But this possession is also an embrace, a surround that pulls us away from our human-only world, uniting us not only with life on planet earth, but with all the possibilities that an invisible dimension holds that we can only come to know through reflection upon the images as we experience them.

But in this human-only world, if something can’t be seen, measured or quantified, it either doesn’t exist, can’t be trusted, and most importantly, can’t be exhorted into the safety of consensus. If the gods, and the images they present through our expression, account for the powers that influence us, it hardly matters whether or not they really exist in some tangible way that can be proven. The gods, all that has been written about them, at the very least, express through us something eternal about our condition. Therefore, it matters not whether we believe in them, but that they believe in us.

What Jung called a complex, (Ezra) Pound called an image. For Pound, an image is “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” “The Image is more than an Idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.”

In our secular post-modern world, could it be that the absence of any powers beyond us heightens our thirst for belief, confusing it with truth because we experience the world entirely from a human-only perspective? Could both cultural and personal suicide along with fantasies of Armageddon be an expression of a loss of the experience of those powers beyond humanity that twist human subjects into just one more object devoid of worth? In a world in which we believe ourselves to be the sole carriers of consciousness, does this existential aloneness lead us to question the reality of our experience of being?

1024px-The_remains_of_a_star_gone_supernova

Sun-like star in the final stages of its life.

And what of death, the dead? Is their absence, the finality of human existence through death, calling into question our very aliveness? For what a strange world it is if everything around us is truly dead except for us. No wonder the need then, to search for physical life beyond our tiny place in the cosmos. With the intrusion of a lack of belief in the invisible realm beyond the physical, we must now find other physical beings to give us back the reality and validation of our own existence.

By A.JEHANNE (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0

Perhaps Western culture now finds itself in the most frightening episode of its brief existence. The psychic burden of living such short physical lives has us in a frenzy to now become the very powers once attributed to the gods. Powers that simultaneously create and destroy with an unprecedented fury. Whether it’s the idea that we alone can save ourselves from the wreckage of our own doing, or the idea that we must progress by any means necessary, our lack of felt experience as one creature among many, with an eye for beauty and empathy, has completely escaped us as the narrowing of our world has destroyed the experience and recognition of all except the material, human world of the here and now.

The past, once valued for connecting us to the ancestors, is now filled with familial and cultural ghosts of the sins of the father, that only bring us pain and shame for the wounds we experience as deeply personal, victimizing us with every thought and memory we are stuck with. In a material world, where nothing matters but the physical, there’s no way to see, let alone experience the multidimensional layers of an eternal, archetypal background that binds both our wounds, and the possibility of their healing, to those very ancestors we now spurn. To escape the haunting, we must kill the past with our profane business, drugs, political battles, and forward thinking, where hope tells us that someday, somehow, we will usher in a pain-free existence, a unity of peace, love and well-being for all.

*Curiously, we have more recently chosen to refer to truth as fact, and oppose it to “fake” as in the idea of fake news. But fake’s opposite would more accurately be called “real,” which asserts a dimension of unreality rather than falsity to our current condition.

All quotes from: Hillman, James. Philosophical Intimations (Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman Book 8). Spring Publications.

Possession

The conceptual framing of one’s experience into spatial designations of ‘inner and outer,’ ‘self and other,’ ‘me and not me,’ ‘real and imaginary,’ shape, categorize, which through the force of habit and time coagulates into an assumed identity referred to as ‘me.’ Inversely, out of all that remains, the discarded elements of raw experience become what is not me; the dispossessed, unseen, invisible, incomprehensible “other.” Possession is the coagulator of the psyche’s primary boundaries that form an identity.

Hugo Simberg [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Influence

Extending outward from one’s identity, the habit of ownership eventually include one’s experience, as it is put to memory, and the reflections absorbed into the private realms of awareness. As we come into contact with others who inhabit public or shared places a consensus, or shared reality then affirms and negates their accuracy and value. Our subjective states categorize the world, both private and public, into, among other things, truths and falsehoods predicated upon our buy-in to the consensus experienced within a cultural context, invisibly absorbed, contained and supported. One’s internal, private divisions tend to reflect and reciprocate public, external divisions. Private and public are then, two aspects of a dynamic pole defining both our individuality and the culture that often reflects the loudest and most resonant ideas and beliefs – devaluing or rejecting what lies on the perimeter and beyond; invisible, discarded, unacceptable or unbelievable according to the consensus as one experiences, absorbs and understands it.

Ideas about ourselves and others, rather than remaining fluid, tend to congeal into static objects by the force and habit of our mental states, thereby cementing for each of us a personal ‘self’ that negotiates definitions of “others.” Beyond, a privation or abstraction of a larger boundless reality remains hidden from awareness and sometimes denied any existence at all to the degree that consensus belief, opinions and buy-in influence the permission given for consideration and valuation of the private states we all experience.

The inability to incorporate and validate the existence of private experience constitutes a loss of dimension and depth, and risks reducing what is by nature fluid into static events and figures of ‘me’ and ‘you.’ What I am then becomes defined by what I censor and can articulate from experience – through the skills, body image, gender and generation that contextualize my experience. What I am not remains dispossessed, unknown and can only be seen by what is rejected – including how others are perceived to be, or to have, that are not mine. The eyes become I’s, the nose no longer knows, and the ear cannot hear.

Consciousness then, abstracts experience into concepts of what is real and imaginary, mine or not mine, friend or foe, true or false. Because our modern myth deems it culturally unacceptable not to accept, believe or buy into the existence of a one true objective reality, imagination is rarely understood as that primary aspect of each person’s experience which apprehends; filtering according to the habits of one’s culture, time and place, but rather is believed to be a special instance of ‘creativity:’ a gift that we either have or have not.

Agency

The more one’s agency looks to the consensus for validation rather than to one’s experience, which may not be consensual but rather deeply private and subjectively interior, the less agency one might avail towards the more interior realms of experience. Without a sense of one’s own agency, and its direct access to a reality less censored by either one’s own habits of filtering, or influence from the consensus, we in turn risk denying the existence of agency to other beings. Agency here is understood as the source and ability to apprehend and that which enables us to experience at all – to reflect, evaluate, reveal, hide and express. The less we can distinguish between our private direct experience and consensual filtering, the less agency available to us.

It’s no wonder that both the invisibles; God, or the gods, or even the visible living have become dead to us. Rather than experiencing any direct communion with the invisibles, it’s replaced with belief in ideas or opinions shared among visible beings and approved through a consensus of public agreements, however we come to define them.

Without acknowledging direct, private experience we submit our agency; our ability for true communion, to the human level of the so-called experts of our time, place and public opinion. As we seek for knowledge and power outside the agency of direct experience, the experts proliferate as god-like voices that provide a shared containment for an agreed upon objective reality that serves to validate our deprived and seemingly hopelessly subjective self.

The less we avail ourselves to direct experiences of private states in which we encounter all that visibly or invisibly influences us, and in turn give full agency and permission to have these direct encounters, the more we fall prey to influence as it appears to us in any form; invisible, human, or consensus opinion. The power of unseen influence is then replaced by consensual sources within the visible, human world – making heroes, villains, saviors and saints out of those affirmed and believed to literally have power. Through consensual experience we reject any notion that power might come from unseen, invisible sources. We then look to humanity for power, placing our devotions at the feet of individual public figures, crowned as leaders, professionals or experts, rather than understanding the human condition through an ongoing personal practice of expanding one’s apprehension and senses born of subjective experience. The idealism, perfection, purity once belonging to the gods, is now a choir of fallen angels echoing god-like voices in the human world, placing an impossible burden and expectation on people just like us; limited, frail and faulty.

Beware of pretty faces that you find
A pretty face can hide an evil mind
Oh, be careful what you say
Or you’ll give yourself away
Odds are you won’t live to see tomorrow

Johnny Rivers

Theoria

Explorations in contemplative writing

Tag Archives: consensus

Theoria

Explorations in contemplative writing

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