Tyger
Paranormal Adept
Initially I was going to call this thread 'Consciousness and the Occult' but the title it now bears was recommended instead and I have followed the recommendation.
I did so primarily because 'occult' - a very decent and serviceable word - has been - in a sense - corrupted through extensive use in recent years in various and - in some instances - unfortunate ways. It is like the word 'gay' now being used nearly exclusively in one particular sense and not in the sense of 'happy', it's usual meaning some decades back. Thus does our language shift and morph over time - a dynamic language, at the very least. However, even so, I will likely myself use the word 'occult' every now and again, and how I am using it should become clear over the course of my posts.
I will begin the discussion with an excerpt from a paper delivered at a symposium. There is no link for this (I received it as a word-attachment via e-mail) - but it brings up a very familiar scenario regarding the evolution of consciousness that I have encountered (firstly) in occult writings, and then subsequently in mainstream literature on the subject, as in Julian Jaynes' 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind'. As noted in the abstract of this paper the idea is found in the work of Owen Barfield and Carl Jung and many others.
“Spiritualization, de-spiritualization and re-spiritualization: Questions from an ‘evolution-of-consciousness’ perspective” - Martin Lockley, Professor, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Colorado, Denver
Abstract
As individual ontogeny broadly recapitulates evolutionary phylogeny, the ontogeny of consciousness from birth to death may hold clues to the evolution of consciousness. Did humanity, like the individual, 'fall‘ into self consciousness, thereby discovering a physical, material, secular world that compromises and 'crowds out‘ spiritual sensibility? This view, explored by Steiner, Barfield, Gebser, Jung, Long, Welburn, Wilber and others, has intriguing implications, widely manifest in our human obsession with origins and destiny (physical and spiritual). Does Barfield‘s 'hero‘s journey‘ paradigm (original participation - separation - final participation) represent a natural 'life cycle‘ of spiritualization, de-spiritualization and respiritualization associated with the dynamic evolution (ontogeny and phylogeny) of consciousness? Does history in fact reveal that most early cultures took humanity‘s spiritual origins for granted due to a deep sense of participation in cosmic events? Is the weakening of this worldview merely a passing symptom of modernity‘s self-conscious separation from cosmos, and the resultant dethroning of religious institutions/paradigms in favor of scientific materialistic secularism? What next? Is Thompson‘s identification of a 'post-religious spirituality' a meaningful metaphor for re-spiritualization processes that are evolutionarily predictable—even inevitable. Can humans sustain a sense of separation from the cosmos and still regard it a viable, philosophic/scientific perspective on reality?
It is a very long paper and I could copy-and-paste it here over time but perhaps this is enough to get things started with those interested in such a discussion.
No 'rules' or constraints to this thread except good-will in the spirit of classic intellectual debate - which means it will likely be pretty free-ranging, with many 'threads' of thought being pursued simultaneously - part of the fun of such discussions.
I did so primarily because 'occult' - a very decent and serviceable word - has been - in a sense - corrupted through extensive use in recent years in various and - in some instances - unfortunate ways. It is like the word 'gay' now being used nearly exclusively in one particular sense and not in the sense of 'happy', it's usual meaning some decades back. Thus does our language shift and morph over time - a dynamic language, at the very least. However, even so, I will likely myself use the word 'occult' every now and again, and how I am using it should become clear over the course of my posts.
I will begin the discussion with an excerpt from a paper delivered at a symposium. There is no link for this (I received it as a word-attachment via e-mail) - but it brings up a very familiar scenario regarding the evolution of consciousness that I have encountered (firstly) in occult writings, and then subsequently in mainstream literature on the subject, as in Julian Jaynes' 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind'. As noted in the abstract of this paper the idea is found in the work of Owen Barfield and Carl Jung and many others.
“Spiritualization, de-spiritualization and re-spiritualization: Questions from an ‘evolution-of-consciousness’ perspective” - Martin Lockley, Professor, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Colorado, Denver
Abstract
As individual ontogeny broadly recapitulates evolutionary phylogeny, the ontogeny of consciousness from birth to death may hold clues to the evolution of consciousness. Did humanity, like the individual, 'fall‘ into self consciousness, thereby discovering a physical, material, secular world that compromises and 'crowds out‘ spiritual sensibility? This view, explored by Steiner, Barfield, Gebser, Jung, Long, Welburn, Wilber and others, has intriguing implications, widely manifest in our human obsession with origins and destiny (physical and spiritual). Does Barfield‘s 'hero‘s journey‘ paradigm (original participation - separation - final participation) represent a natural 'life cycle‘ of spiritualization, de-spiritualization and respiritualization associated with the dynamic evolution (ontogeny and phylogeny) of consciousness? Does history in fact reveal that most early cultures took humanity‘s spiritual origins for granted due to a deep sense of participation in cosmic events? Is the weakening of this worldview merely a passing symptom of modernity‘s self-conscious separation from cosmos, and the resultant dethroning of religious institutions/paradigms in favor of scientific materialistic secularism? What next? Is Thompson‘s identification of a 'post-religious spirituality' a meaningful metaphor for re-spiritualization processes that are evolutionarily predictable—even inevitable. Can humans sustain a sense of separation from the cosmos and still regard it a viable, philosophic/scientific perspective on reality?
It is a very long paper and I could copy-and-paste it here over time but perhaps this is enough to get things started with those interested in such a discussion.
No 'rules' or constraints to this thread except good-will in the spirit of classic intellectual debate - which means it will likely be pretty free-ranging, with many 'threads' of thought being pursued simultaneously - part of the fun of such discussions.