“Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.”
Jorge Luis Borges

Came across an interesting blog entry from Suzanne Taylor in The Conversation on alchemy, animism and the inner vs. outer manifestation of the spiritual dimension of existence. She quotes a piece which suggests that in psychodynamic terms “the gods, deities and spirits have become our modern day dis-eases, … the formal cause of our afflictions”. Have added this comment to her thread, culled in part from comments I’ve made elsewhere in this site.

A complex subject to unravel. A few points seem worth making here before going any further.

The first is that any description of reality that’s ever been produced is just that. A description, a map, or a model of it. It’s reality as we perceive it, and has consensual validity only insofar as others agree that it successfully models their experience of it too, or can be persuaded to accept it as such. It’s not reality itself, even though we tend to live our lives for most of the time as if that’s the case. That distinction needs to be kept in mind. All too often the map gets mistaken for the territory, or far worse, is given precedence over it. (Most of the unspeakable brutality of which we’re all capable arises from a desire to enforce a particular view of reality on those who don’t share it.)

The second is that an impartial view of the evidence would seem to suggest that reality itself doesn’t appear to favour any one view over any other. It cheerfully supports diametrically opposing viewpoints on all sorts of things to do with it, and obligingly offers up proof after proof to their proponents that enables them all to lay claim to validity. Every person alive has a valid view of reality. It may not be a view that’s shared by many others, but that doesn’t render it invalid or “wrong”. “Right” and “wrong” aren’t absolutes carved into the fabric of existence. They’re simply shorthand for “things that me and people who think like me agree with” and “things that me and people who think like me don’t agree with”.

The third is that it’s the old story of the  blind men and the elephant. So if we want to discover the whole elephant, any half-way decent attempt to construct a robust model of the nature of existence needs to accommodate as much as possible of that existence. This means encompassing the fullrange of human experience and knowledge in every field through all times, rather than flitting from one limited subset of it to another, disdainfully dismissing the remainder as somehow irrelevant or inadmissible, or the product of presumed “inferior” minds in past times or technologically unsophisticated cultures. All that’s doing is perpetually moving around to different parts of the elephant with an elephantine measure of arrogance in tow.

So what we’re talking about here in the charting of the decline of animistic and alchemical beliefs is only shifting perceptions, changing models, that have the appearance of being reflected in outer reality. For other societies, such as what remains of First Nation cultural viewpoints on all continents, the perception of the immanence of life still remains. It’s not the world that’s de-spiritualised and de-animated, it’s our perception of it that’s become so. Conceptual exclusion of any aspect of existence will dis-ease us when we encounter evidence of what’s excluded. It doesn’t fit our idea of how things should be. In other words, the mythical gods are not the formal cause of our modern dis-ease. It’s our inability to recognise and integrate the spiritual dimension of existence and include it in our conceptual model of “reality” that is the cause of our dis-ease. In some ways it doesn’t much matter how we model it, because it will only ever be an approximation, an analogy; what matters is that we do.

Then comes the question of how we relate to it – ie. whether it resides “out there” or “in here”. This comes down to what we define as “self” and what we define as “other”. If what we define as “other” is, in fact, an aspect of “self”, then it becomes part of our (Jungian) shadow to be continually reflected back to us from “out there”, possibly bringing a measure of dis-ease in the process. If, as quantum physics (not to mention various mystical traditions) seem to suggest, the entirety of existence is fundamentally correlated and the “individuality” of any part of it is only relative and contingent, then the distinction between “self” and “other” is conditional, not absolute. The realisation of that can release us from dis-ease. “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together” and even “I am He as you are He as you are me and we are all together”.

Blasphemy? Consider this. Jung perceived that archetypes relegated to shadow are ones that are unconsciously acted out. The Judaeo-Christian foundations of our society have so comprehensively severed any aspect of divinity from “self” that it becomes hopelessly inevitable that we will unconsciously act out in a god-like way. This brings our arrogance, our superiority, our conviction that our view is “right”, and tendency to imagine we have some god-given right to impose those views on every other culture on the planet into sharp relief. Cultures who recognise the spark of divinity inherent in every lifeform don’t need to act out in this way, which pretty much consigns them to being stamped out by the likes of us. As a culture we in the industrialised nations of the west have been, and continue to be, guilty of crimes against other lifeforms that make Hitler look like a pussy cat and our illusions of moral superiority quite dreadful distortions. Yet contrary to expectations, transcending the somewhat illusory nature of the distinction between “self” and “other” and accepting our divine attributes brings about a deep humility. It no longer becomes necessary to act out.

How “real” is any of this? Perhaps it’s like Borges said.

“We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.”
Rabindranath Tagore