W.R. Baker Reads "Lazarus Wigley" (2011)

Monday, October 3, 2011

Coherence of the Incoherence

“It is astounding that man, instigator, investor and vehicle, of all judgments and decisions and the planner of the future must make of himself such a quantite negligible.  The contradictions, the paradoxical evaluation of humanity by man himself is in truth a matter for wonder and one can only explain it as springing from an extraordinary uncertainty of judgment.  Man is an enigma to himself.”
-- C.G. Jung

O, he is cracked or he judges himself correctly:  he or she is the equal of the king cobra, the lion, the ants, and the microbes and not much more.

In understanding human behavior it is important to remember that war is only one of the many conspiracies mankind indulges in.  From plans in childhood to get Billy or Maria, to the intricacies of salesmanship, conspiracies are cooked up and concocted throughout our lifetimes and are an essential ingredient necessary for organization.

The first source impulse is the need to dominate, then to grow – expand – celebrate – and eventually to mourn – for all things fall apart.

Within this paradigm a certain type of human must dominate – to set the style for the hierarchy to emulate.  Unless inbreeding occurs all organizations become diverse sprouting antidotes and offshoots which challenge and illuminate the dominant theme.  In the American system two such antidotes were the Blues and organized crime; in Europe penetrating literature did the job.  These three examples allowed the psyche to go consciously deeper than the society would have otherwise allowed.

The psyche is the sum of all our feelings, mythic creations and equations.  If one part of the psyche registers a shock (an event, thought or equation) that rearranges our perception of reality all the other components, both physical and holographic, will feel the reverberations.  The psychic system distributes the information using devices such as repression, dreams, fantasy and logic to divert and channel the vastness of the information – to give it shape, which then gives us each our own map of the world.