4 Why Not Remain Unconscious?
Felicia liked her life the way it was, which made it all the harder that she had developed a nagging sense that she wasn’t living her life right. Felicia tried to put off the sense of regret that she had been feeling, but the more she pushed it away, the more it seemed to intrude. Felicia even tried drowning it out by doing more of what she typically did and with greater verve than ever. But strangely, Felicia found less satisfaction in doing so rather than more satisfaction. Indeed, her old ways seemed to be drying up of their joy and interest. Felicia could see that she was going to have to deal with her sense of growing concern and even despair over the way she was thinking, or not thinking, about her life.
Unconscious
The prior chapter addressed the value of developing a transcendent view of one’s own consciousness, of stepping back from or rising above one’s own thoughts to assess one’s psyche and spirit, perhaps to make adjustments and thereby to grow. Let’s refer to the self’s normal state, without that transcendent examination, as one of unconsciousness. Before we begin to examine our thoughts, pricked by our conscience or inner self that we can and should do better with our thinking, we are not exactly unconscious. The normal observer would rather call us conscious. But the astute observer would not yet call us awake to our conscious capacity. Just the opposite: without the transcendent mind, we are still asleep. We have the divinely gifted capacity to transcend, to step above ourselves to see ourselves as consciousness itself would behold us. And yet that capacity sleeps, unawakened by any sixth sense of loss or waste. One sees unconscious selves everywhere, like zombies stalking relentlessly and hungrily after whatever their unawakened minds grasp. One senses the darkness of that state most, though, when one first sees it within oneself.
Captive
When we are asleep, without the transcendent mind examining our thoughts, unprodded by our inner self that we can do and be better, we are captive to our thoughts. Indeed, we are captive to whatever spirit of the age, attitude of the season, and meme of the day that our minds entertain. Those entertainments may suffice for a day or season but not for long. Entertainments wear out. At least, entertainments abandon those of us who hear the call of our inner selves for more. The self doesn’t desire entertainment. The mind and ego may delight in their occupation, even if enslaved as such, subject to the unconscious powers of the stimulation. But the inner self wants resonance, connection, and co-creation with its creator, something far deeper and more profound than entertainment. And that is the call that awakes one from one’s slumber, to rise above it in transcendence.
Darkness
We sleep in darkness. The unconscious mind is dark. What enlightens the mind other than a transcendent perspective? The unconscious mind is without the light that a transcendent examination of its attention and concentration would supply it. The unconscious mind wanders, as it were, in darkness, from attention to attention. Everything is a distraction to the mind without a transcendent perspective, without a guiding star to give it hierarchy, priority, and choice of concentration. Everything that attracts our attention isn’t negative, bad, evil, or distorted. Rather, beauty and truth attract, too. What is absent from the unconscious mind is a revealing light. The attractions of the unconscious mind have no pattern, hierarchy, priority, or structure but are instead chaotic. Darkness does not offer any guiding light, leaving it without any structure to pattern and organize its chaos. Unconsciousness permits a flood to enter the mind, bringing with it whatever detritus the flood collects, from the whole of human history, experience, and desire. Unconsciousness brings both the angels and the demons.
Collective
The collection and distillation of human experience into culture, into shared words, constructs, values, language, and thought, isn’t a careful curation. It isn’t a deliberate, awakened, aware, and conscious process. No one directs what goes in or comes out of culture. The collective is instead unguided or guided only by ancient archetypes and yearnings that we know to be without shape, misshapen, disordered, and dark. The collective is unconscious, not conscious. Thus, when we are not awakened and made aware by our transcendent consciousness, we live under the collective unconscious. If, for instance, media entertains your unconscious mind, as it so thoroughly does the minds of so many in modern society, then surely you have seen that media offers not just beauty, hope, and truth. It also courts desire, greed, and titillation. It portrays and stokes violence, feeding an appetite for more of whatever one instinctively consumes. Humankind’s full capacity, at all points along the spectrum, reaches us not only through media but through the collective darkness, the collective unconsciousness that is culture.
Brokenness
Transcendence recognizes distortions, fixes faults, repairs cracks, turns defects into opportunities, and brings good from evil. Without transcendence, we fail to recognize, repair, and integrate brokenness. Even without the light of the transcendent consciousness, we learn to look away from what we recognize as darkness and distortion. We know in our hearts to distinguish what is ugly and evil from what is beautiful and good, and to seek the good while turning from the darkness. In our better moments, we push away the darkness to attend to the beautiful and good. But in doing so, we sunder ourselves into a brokenness, dividing ourselves from ourselves. We construct whitewashed tombs, looking clean on the outside but empty of anything inside other than bones. What we push away isn’t the evil we fear but instead a part of us, the good of which we don’t understand and instead misinterpret as evil. We know not to wreak violence but consequently push away our courage and strength. We know not to hate but thus push away our discernment between what is good and what is evil. Without the transcendent light that would show us the good in what we fear, we slowly crack ourselves apart until we’re broken rather than whole vessels.
Clarification
Yet transcending unconsciousness isn’t simply making a better you, honing a better self. Becoming conscious is you. The process of transcendence is the self you seek. Your life is in the transcendence, not in the unconsciousness you transcend. Only in the process of separating yourself from the collective darkness do you distinguish yourself. You are not yourself, not your individual and unique person until you have begun to transcend the darkness in which you dwell. To have a self, you must divide yourself from the unconscious. That the Spirit divides marrow from bone, the bones come to life when touched by the Spirit, and the dead man rises when born anew in the Spirit all figure the process of becoming yourself. To discern yourself, you must individualize your person from the collective darkness, through the transcendence that consciousness itself offers through the Spirit’s presence, rationality, and reason. The process of clarifying yourself from the collective unconscious is the self that you seek. The you that you seek is the whole of rationality, the whole of consciousness, experiencing itself through you. The collective consciousness has a you experience. God sees through your eyes when his Spirit awakes and lives within you. Transcendence gives up your self to the Spirit so that your self can receive the wholeness of consciousness.
Fall
As just suggested, the constructs and language of a traditional Christian faith reveal, parallel, and confirm this structure of consciousness. The fully transcendent creator God gave humankind conscious life by breathing his Spirit of reason into the airway of the archetype human. Until God did so, the original human wasn’t a living, conscious, self-aware being. Awareness comes only from the transcendent. Yet rather than remain in their transcendent state, in the presence of the transcendent creator, the archetype man and woman turned their attention away from the transcendent creator. They sacrificed their transcendence in order to be their own judge of good and evil. By looking down and laterally rather than up and from above, they fell asleep and became mortal like the things that held their attention. They gave up their connection to the one who is transcendence itself and thus the giver of life and author of being. Without transcendence, humankind turned ever more violent, dark, and evil, with ever shorter and more-brutish life. Traditional faith describes clearly the path of unconsciousness.
Rescue
Traditional faith also describes clearly our transcendent rescue from unconsciousness. One cannot simply command oneself to transcend, for who is it that does the commanding? And what authority has the commander over the troops? Without transcendence, all is confused unconsciousness. To restore transcendence, the creator God revealed himself as the true archetypal human in whom we live. He proves himself to be the transcendence we seek by not condemning us in our unconsciousness but instead rescuing us through his own transcendence of the darkness humankind had embraced. Christ rising from death demonstrates his transcendence from unconsciousness. His invitation to take us with him out of our darkness is proof that he is the uncreated transcendence itself. All who recognize their darkness, cast off the unaware and dead self, and embrace in their reborn self the transcendent Christ recover their original transcendent state. Christ reiterated the creator God’s original act when Christ breathed his transcendent Spirit into his rescued humankind. The Spirit of Christ, the logos or rationality, reason, word, and breath, is the one through whom we transcend our collective unconsciousness. The offer of transcendence is to be freed from captivity, rescued from death, given a new mind, and given eternally transcendent life.
Vision
This transcendence from unconsciousness and demise is not simply a psychological trick. Traditional faith shares an extraordinary image of transcendence, illustrating its divine place, redeeming power, and mystical majesty. The Old Testament prophet Ezekiel had a heavenly vision of divine entities within great wheels covered with eyes all about. The prophet saw that the spirit of the divine entities, their reason, rationality, breath, and life, was in the many-eyed wheels. Likewise, the psychological and spiritual process of transcending one’s unconsciousness is a wheeled or circular and reflective or many-eyed process. One first moves up from one’s lateral attention, the movement up constituting one’s embrace of transcendence. At the upward arc of the great wheel, one beholds the glory of the divine. Yet transcendence is not just transfixion on the divine but also then to look down again in another turn of the wheel, to examine from above one’s attention, that which needs the renewal and restoration of the divine. And then the eyed wheel goes around again. Read the vision for more insights into the power, mystery, and majesty of transcendence. Visions of heaven are revelations of transcendence.
Integrity
The process of psychological and spiritual maturation isn’t to discern, define, and identify yourself. It isn’t self-construction, self-seeking, or even exactly self-realization. It is instead to grow in your authenticity, to take on the likeness of the transcendent one, so that your thinking and actions are more consistent with who you are. Call it integrity, to strip away the obstacles, limitations, self-deceptions, delusions, and fakery that we tend to exhibit as we struggle to know who we are. We cannot know and be who we are without having a transcendent view of ourselves. We become who we are when we see ourselves as the transcendent one experiencing consciousness through us. God looks upon his world through our eyes when we transcend our unconsciousness through his own life. When we look upon our world through God’s eyes, we become ourselves. You are alive and living as you should be when you can see not only yourself but also your family, friends, and enemies through God’s eyes, as his transcendent consciousness indwells you.
Reflection
Have you sensed the despair of unconscious life? Have you reached points where nothing made sense and all was depressing? Do you have a sense that for life to have meaning and purpose requires some movement upward out of your ordinary attention? Have you at times found yourself captured by darkness? Does the despair of human history sometimes overwhelm you? Have you at times found your thoughts flooded with disorder? What or who holds your sense of self together against a flood of distracting or even deadly and despairing thoughts? Have you at times had to steel yourself against those thoughts, to maintain your sanity? If so, who was it who was doing the resisting? Do you have a go-to means of transcending your own unconscious darkness? Have you found clarity after such struggles, where you had a breakthrough to something deeper or more authentic within yourself?
Key Points
Without transcendence, we are unconscious of ourselves, in darkness.
The collective unconscious holds us captive when we have no view.
To lack a perspective on ourselves is to live in spiritual darkness.
The darkness is a chaotic flood of all that humankind has thought.
To have no view of ourselves is to be broken into disorganized pieces.
Life is in the clarification that comes with transcending darkness.
The fall of humankind gave up transcendence for unconsciousness.
Transcendence’s death and rise rescues humankind from darkness.
Transcendence is like the divine spirit in great many-eyed wheels.
Transcendence restores life and integrity within an authentic self.