Philosophy and Prehistory

It is a tendency for a structure which has found some partial practical use in a given context and situation to be extrapolated and applied to other situations and regions as well. In fact such a structure can become a preconceived category and part of a projected ontological system with claims of furnishing a more general  understanding of reality.  Contrary to what we have suggested previously it is extremely dubious that  common formal systems can have much direct relevance to our project of a philosophical psychology, that is, the project of recovering the first-person introspective science that had many remarkable developments in the 19th century (many of which appear in Husserl's Logical Investigations) and which later was tragically and wrongfully rejected or neglected. We have discussed some important aspect of the project in previous posts, for instance how it should not be confused with subjective idealism and also the view adopted on the subject, the body and the physical world. The method pertaining to formal abstract research is completely distinct from that of such a philosophical psychology. The method required actually has more similarity with that of experimental science (cf. Hume's 'experimental method of reasoning') though obviously should not be confused with it.  Abstract formal concepts and methods should only come in after substantial progress has been made in philosophical psychology.  After pure introspective insight and knowledge has been gained (as explained before, it involves the detached awareness of the stream of inner verbal discourse and imagination, divided into its sensual species and their web,  perceived in its conceptual dimension as well and as proceeding from a fundamental process of identification), then through reminiscence the philosopher may be able to return and attempt to articulate this knowledge in the language of abstract formal computable systems (maybe the systems of consciousness has some similarity to the design of operating systems, themselves based on human social structure). Until then, natural language remains an imperfect but still amazingly flexible and serviceable tool. An analogy might be used from software development: first we must have a global systems theoretic intuition and idea of how the program is to be structured and work and then can be begin its concrete coding in a given language and platform. Or rather: first we must explore and view and know the mind first-hand and only afterwards can we use  known concrete systems  as tools or language to present an approximative model of the mind.  All this of course is quite distinct from the perspective of the Logical Investigations -  or Platonic dialectics - in which the phenomenological reflection on formal and logic knowledge itself is a starting point.

It might be a very good thing to dissipate misunderstandings and distortions which would confuse this first-personal introspective methodology with that of psychoanalysis (i.e. Jung's analytic psychology), its theory of the unconscious and its proposed methods of exploration of the latter,  or with the method of the later of Husserl (we have in fact already discussed this in previous posts).  The problem with Jung revolves around the term 'religion'.  This is a large 'monster' vague concept which is incapable of definition and many partial, idealized and artificial aspects have been historically abstracted (or sanitized) to suit particular scientific, historical and philosophical theories. A question is: do we find in Jung the strange idea that religious beliefs, practices and narratives should be regarded as potentially psychological beneficial and therapeutic regardless of their objective historical, scientific, ethical and even social value and consequence? Can we say that Jung diagnosed the modern age with 'lack of religion' and that he proposed a suitably adapted 'religion' as a cure ? (the problem with Noll's famous book is that is mixes important factual material with more-or-less obvious intrusions of their author's own anthropological and historical views).  Or is the concept of 'religion' used by Jung a rather artificial idealized one that would lump together fundamentally heterogeneous things? If the lover, the poet and all art involving creative imagination are interpreted as 'religious'  then this is clearly a very different sense of the term than the usual 'theological' and 'ecclesiastic' one (even if we take into account Hegel's lucubrations about the  'religion of art' of the Greeks and the similar Hellenism in the writings of Heidegger).  And what about 'initiatic' societies like Freemasonry? And Jung's practice of analytic psychology itself? For now we will pull out from the huge vague term 'religion' a single negative aspect (which links it strongly to the term 'cult') : that of passivity, surrender and dependence on a leader or group - in which is involved passivity with regards to aspects and manifestations of one's own psyche which cause lack of cognitive clarity and calm.  Passivity is of course a very difficult and complex term when applied to consciousness and in Pali buddhism 'passive' (in the sense usually translated as 'letting go' or 'detachment')  and 'active' aspects are combined in subtle and powerful ways.  Jung is  wrong in making an analogy between an alleged western 'extrovert' tendency to dominate the world and an eastern 'introvert'  tendency to dominate the psyche.  There is very little analogy between western material domination and the goal of original Buddhism which is ultimately not any kind of  'control' and 'domination': rather its mottos are know thyself and cure thyself.  An obvious difference between our philosophical psychology and Jung is that imagination, dreams, symbols. images, myths etc. play a central role for Jung (and note the questionable importance allocated to 'gender' in  Jungian myths,  why cannot the sun be considered feminine as in ancient Japan, ancient Germanic and many other cultures? ).  And such things are indeed found both in the original Pali texts and in Platonism - but what is really important is their function and attitude that is displayed towards them therein - and such function and attitude is quite different in Tibetan Buddhism (Jung was a keen reader of the Bardö Thodöl, though his personal library also included the editions of the Pali text society). Jung's interesting remarks on the salvation of the gods in Buddhism applies to Tibetan Buddhism.

A questionable aspect of Jung (and Noll certainly identified this)  is that his ideas appear bound up with a kind of religious, cultural and even 'racial' traditionalism which Noll amply elaborates on in function of  'völkisch'  blood-and-soil ideologies.  We find this aspect of Jung  mistaken and  harmful, as is the theory of 'psychological types' applied to individuals and a fortiori to human groups such as the division between East and West or a theory races or cultures that could be 'aryan' and 'semitic',  terms only having meaning as linguistic classifications. Was Jung somehow ignorant that the ancestors of the most of the population of the Germany of his times consisted in a great portion of speakers of  Latin, Baltic, West Slavonic and Celtic alongside Germanic languages?

Contrary to Jung we claim that cultural material that is factually erroneous, immoral and which causes psychological harm to oneself and to others,  does not deserve the slightest reverence or respect just for being 'tradition'  or being associated with one's ancestors or country. And that this certainly cannot be a positive basis for psychological and spiritual progress or self-knowledge. At worst it can be represent a kind of generational trauma - the 'collective unconscious' should be viewed as containing very negative things as well, things that were imprinted through the ages by  reigning authorities .  Even on the historical plane so-called 'traditions' reveal themselves not to be continuous traditions at all, but materially triumphing aspects of a rugged process of  ideological conflict with other equally historically legitimate 'traditions' which happen to have lost through many disparate circumstances and factors.

 What is truly rooted in our essence and represents our spiritual continuity, is the spirit of questioning, criticism, evaluation and potential liberation from what is bad and wrong in 'tradition', both the social-cultural structure of  the waking world and from contingent  negative unconscious influence (which Jung would essentialize). Foucault, Guattari and Deleuze correctly hold that the true revolutionary spirit is as much about self-transformation as social transformation, but fall into error in not acknowledging that this spirit is itself a continuous and ancient tradition.

Maybe the 'collective unconscious'   of a given social group does not emerge according some dubious speculation about man's prehistory,  but is rather largely the product of the conscious creative power of special individuals.  Jung himself made a curious remark that India was not up to what the Buddha wanted to reveal and teach. 

Not only does Jung seem to have a mistaken and uncritical account of gender and  the gendering of imaginary, mythical and religious figures but we question if in Jung we find a good theory of the numinous object of consciousness at all, and in particular in the context of the whole process of the experience of eros and beauty.  Does Jung offer us a phenomenology of the modes of presentation and functions of an 'object-person' of imaginative consciousness which yet is perceived to 'be'  a known real being  or else a person of religious narratives - and the phenomenology of why particular object-image-persons are chosen, preferred, come to dominate consciousness in a numinous revelatory manner, and how these can become (including through certain spiritual practices) the initiatic vehicles for achieving higher states of consciousness and spiritual realization?

Contrary to Jung, we have argued extensively for the profound affinity - even almost identity - between the philosophy and spirit of original Pali Buddhism and that of ancient Greek philosophy, and this correspondence and affinity certainly extends to later Buddhist philosophy and later modern Western philosophy as well. Thus we can say that original Pali Buddhism represents to lost soul, essence and root of what is best in Western humanity, provided we pay special attention to its knowledge of the universality and unconditionality of the duty of compassion and non-harm with regards to all human beings and animals. The collective unconscious of Western humanity itself needs to be healed and regenerated in the pure life-giving waters of the critical and revolutionary spirit at once new and ancient.  A very important aspect involves the study and investigations of ancient Europe (and its links to Druidism, ancient Greece and the regions in which original Buddhism developed) and the dispelling once and for all of the harmful myths or partial truths regarding our ancestors which are patent in Jung . The furor Teutonicus, the cult of *Wôthanaz  are unoriginal foreign elements borrowed from the warlike tribal gods of the Eurasian steppe nomads as patent from Beckwith's extensive book on the Silk Road; on the other hand the seeresses and prophetesses of some Germanic tribes as recounted by Roman historians were actually Druidic. Without going into this subject, we remark that the Old Turkic script and the Futhark are strikingly similar.  We attach great importance to the proof of the historical, cultural and philosophical affinity and continuity between Greco-Roman antiquity and ancient Celtic speakers (and perhaps even the culture of the Megalithic monuments). Many of the Germanic speaking tribes seem to have been at the cross-roads between the Buddhist-Greco-Roman-Celtic light of humanity and civilization and the shamanic war-god and war-retinue culture of the Eurasian steppes (which is associated to Mongolian and Turkic speaking peoples and is not in any way a specifically  'Indo-European'  religion). In the territory of what is now Germany there is a powerful substrate of Western Slavs and Balts alongside the older Celtic component which may be associated to manifestations of higher philosophy and spirituality in Germany (and similar considerations can be made for Great Britain).   The Celtic genetic and cultural influence in Iceland is very large and we can speculate that likewise the genetic and cultural influence of the Sámi on historical Scandinavia has been extensive, though in what can be reconstructed of  'Viking culture' (the object of distortions and fantasies in popular media) we find a strong presence of the Nietzschean war-and-conquest values and culture of the Eurasian Mongolian and Turkic  steppe nomads (cf. the ancient interactions of the Goths and the Huns).
 (Author note:  the considerations above are not meant to imply that there is any essential genetic association between the historical Turkic speakers at the time and what we consider negative and lower forms of culture and values. On the contrary we hope to investigate the existence of higher forms of spirituality, culture and civilization among Turkic speakers in remote antiquity as well as in more recent history).

The reason we focused on original Buddhism is because of its philosophical nature (it is not a 'religion' in the common sense of this term)  and its close correspondence to much of what is best in ancient and modern western philosophy and philosophical psychology (thus refuting  again the idea of an essential distinction between east and west).  Nor do we wish to suggest that original Buddhism exhausts ancient wisdom and valid spiritual practices (one need but glance at the Yoga-Sutra of Patanjali, the works of Plato or Plotinus to see their variety and complementarity). Also note that the speculations above on ancient peoples (a topic which deserves many books) should be taken as based primarily on ethical, religious, cultural and linguistic divisions without implying any kind of genetic or 'racial'  reductionism or essentialism.  In the future we will address all the standard criticism concerning 'cultural appropriation' and allegedly taking the artificial restricted secular view of western scholarship regarding the Pali texts, ignoring the actual living traditions of the Theravada, etc.

We need not only a typology but a systematic pathology of spiritual traditions, religions and cultures.  Not simply a linear scale between the poles of purity, spirituality, interiority, morality, universality,  'philosophicality', humanism and all their opposites, but an understanding of how pathological religions and cultures branch into many different and apparently distinct forms while preserving the same underlying negative essence.  Thus we need to understand better what a tribalist, sacrifice-based, violent, colonialist, genocidal,  fear-based culture and religion is and not be mislead by classifications like patriarchal and matriarchal or confuse  corrupted forms of certain cultures and religions with traces of or naturalistic disfigurements of something more ancient and pure.  Pure religion pertains to the science of consciousness (either solitary or through the transfiguring/manifesting path of spiritual love and communion) and morality and not to the natural world other than as an object of love and compassion and aesthetic numinous transfiguration. It is inconceivable that concepts like 'caste' or 'race'  should have any validity or role therein. 

In other words,  any 'higher' or 'pure' religion (if we can even use this term)  is essentially and solely about i) the science of consciousness, about self-analysis and self-awareness of consciousness ultimately achieving  a liberated super-consciousness, and ii) the transcendental unfolding of the possibility of human love.  Its foundation is intelligence of the moral law and empathy and compassion.  It has absolutely nothing to do with 'gods' (beyond an imaginative-symbolic function or as representing possible states of human consciousness).   Although we can certainly conceive of other beings analogous to humans or even in some sense 'superior' beings existing in other worlds or planes of existence,  attaching a religious significance to a relationship (worship, faith, sacrifice, prayer, rites, etc) to such beings (the number being immaterial) is a serious aberration. 

We hope to prove that the history of cultures and religions does not exhibit anything like a linear progress from so-called 'primitive' (animistic, naturalistic, war and fertility based,  etc.) to so-called 'advanced' religions (as if any religion that can justify cruelty to human beings and animals, bloodshed and genocide could ever deserve the designation 'advanced'....) but rather a complex multi-cyclic decay from higher to lower followed by partial restorations of the higher. 

Evidence can be adduced from the history of India in which many traditions which exhibit certain key 'higher' non-theistic traits are very ancient - Yoga (to a certain extent), Nyâya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Pali Buddhism, Jainism,....  Note that in ancient Greece we have already have as far back as  the 5th century Leucippus and the ethics of  Democritus (said to have traveled extensively and learnt from various now lost traditions) and Plato's critique of religion in books 2 and 3 of the Republic and concept of the transcendent good, which surely is just a transmission of Pythagorean philosophy which, according to Ovid, completely rejected animal sacrifice. And of extraordinary interest is Confucionism and the literature of Ch'an and Zen as well as the earlier highly sophisticated Mahâyâna philosophical texts: all these appears to contain powerful and complex articulations of a pure science of consciousness and well as a more-or-less explicit rejection of 'religion' in the common sense (cf. Hui Hai: the sage seeks the Mind not the Buddha, etc.). Maybe some mysterious ancient people, with some connection to Manicheism and Zoroasterianism, is behind both Mahâyâna and ancient Chinese culture. 

There are also some special 'divinities' which express something higher, older and non-theistic, the union between the science of consciousness and the moral and cosmic order of the world: such are certain ancient luminous feminine figures incarnating divine wisdom, light, life, compassion and cosmic order (which also feature prominently in Mahâyâna and Vajrayâna): for instance the ancient figured of Aredvi Sura Anahita and Daena for the Persians,  Nut for the ancient Egyptians,  Athena for the ancient Greeks and  to a certain extent Sophia and Barbelo of the so-called 'gnostic literature (the origin of the Hag Nammadi library is completely obscure, but it very likely includes  transmissions of now lost later Egyptian, Phoenician, Syrian and Chaldean traditions alongside other type of material).

It can furthermore be speculated  that many ancient 'theogonies'  (as well as perhaps emanationist and gnostic-type cosmologies) were initially symbolic-mythic expressions of pure philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness (like the paticcasamupadda and the system of samkhya, specially as interpreted by the excellent book by Mikel Burley, 2007) which in themselves had no more 'religious' significance than the categories of Kant. It is tragic that so much of the science and philosophy of the ancient world has been lost (Thracians, Chaldeans, Syrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Berbers, Druids,...or lost civilizations like Tartessos.).

All this again shows a most profound difference from Jung. It is laughable and displays a colonialist hubris to say that modern western man is on the average more 'rational' or 'logical' than other parts of humanity (historical and present). The machines modern man uses are products of controlled 'rational' thought, but modern western man per se ,  with all his capitalist fetishes and commodities,  is likely far less 'rational' and 'logical' (forgetting for a moment the problem of clarification of such monster concepts) than the average for this planet (historical and present). The smartphone is a product of the  'rational', the mental life of the personal buying and using it,  mostly not. Also there is not the slightest evidence that human beings at any period in time did not have naturally a form of consciousness containing what Jung calls the 'ego'. Another profound difference regards  Jung's theory of the 'libido' which is a grotesque distortion of the platonic and neoplatonic theory of the erôs, a primordial substance and power (prior and more vast than biological sexuality)  which allows spiritual realization through a mediating and transfiguring spiritual communion with another person - that erôs and its pure independent religion and creative imagination (the love story as the the pleroma and cycle of archetypes)  has  been degraded (naturalized, biologized and sexualized), concealed,  slandered, appropriated, inappropriately gendered,  imprisoned by historical power structures and their myths and narratives. 

Following Hegel we can see the development of art, literature and drama in ancient Greece as having (through the self-discovery of the freedom of the creative imagination dissolving religion and prefiguring the science of consciousness, which Jung did not seem to understand )  a parallel significance to that of the spiritual culture of philosophy.  This is what inspired Shelley to write Prometheus Unbound.  Indeed this development in ancient Greek literature manifests the spiritual interpretation and transfiguration of nature  which is irreconcilable with corrupt religious cults.

The modern and post-modern world seems heavily based on 'false forks', pairs of linked vague concepts which function like twin semantic whirlpools forcing the mind into two of equally false and harmful options. Forked concepts contain two components which appear opposed and even unconnected while in reality sharing the same life-blood, function and essence.  Forked concepts are 'false flag concepts' and correspond to 'every accusation is a confession',  one side accuses the other of the exact same thing that that side in reality is guilty of. Each side presents the other side as being the only possible alternative.  It is a strawmanning of the negation.  Forked concepts are standard parts of the apologetic arsenal of organized religions and cults.

The considerations set forth here do not claim to completely illuminated the multi-headed hydra of the monster concept 'religion'.   What we need is a pure a priori system of axioms, universal principles which demarcate 'pure religion' from a religion that is both false and harmful (historically, socially, culturally, scientifically, philosophically, psychologically, spiritually) and which perverts, appropriates and hijacks ethics and morality: ones steeped in bloodshed, cruelty, ignorance, racism and deceit, in making pacts for worldly ends through blood and sacrifice to one or more capricious immoral beings (whose activity is limited to war, sex,  quarreling, food and enjoying sacrifices).

In cultures dominated by a corrupt religion often a kind of semi-science of consciousness develops (which in some cultures and historical epochs is designated by the (universal) religion of love, the science of love, science of the heart)   -  although compromised by the enveloping religion and its  psychological conditioning.   Note that we have discussed the science of consciousness both in its pure solid form and in a more problematic  'relational' form based on a platonic theory of love. 

The fork: bad religion is a human cultural construction, the product of the worst instincts, impulses and ideas mankind has to offer (or in which one small social group has used to control, terrorize and exploit others).  But exactly the same instincts, impulses and ideas can be given apparently non-religious and equally bad materialistic and pseudo-scientific form. This is the key to understanding the history of the last three hundred years.

Addendum on the 'religion of love' in the West. The domination of a religious organization throughout the centuries is a complex affair. The substratum, the oppressed and hidden essence, will have its voice.  Under the tragic tyranny of a thousand years there were yet some manifestations of covert yet very powerful and significant revolution and rebellion, which we can inner spiritual  'transfigurations' and 'transformations' which while retaining the veil and semblance of submission to the reigning religious power and literalist dogma concealed something  of an entirely different philosophical and spiritual nature (though conveniently couched in a theological language in a way that would be interesting to compare to the treatment of revealed religion in Hegel's phenomenology of spirit).  The signs of such manifestations are everything which concerns the art, culture and poetry of 'spiritual', 'mystical', 'platonic' or 'neoplatonic' love (and is found in the Middle Ages, in the renaissance and specially in the baroque). Deification of the human, humanization of the divine, spiritual love as the supreme and principle sacrament and path described in the language and concepts of the reigning theology. Furthermore this religion of love involved a sophisticated and highly developed (based on concrete spiritual experience) philosophy of the soul and  of the self  and the overcoming of the self and of rebirth which is both complementary and compatible with the philosophy of Buddhism and which furthermore purifies, builds and improves upon the doctrines of the  'Christian mystics'. The symbol of a rose upon the cross is very apt, showing the unity between Buddhist anatta and the 'amor' of divine union.  See the article about Sor Violante do Céu in this collection.