Theos-Talk Archives (October 1998 Message tl00016)

Matthew Lamoreux wrote:
> [Life after death reports] rely on data collected by subjective means from people
> in a state of consciousness whose testimony would not be allowed in any
> court in the world....
> These are people in severe trauma or an otherwise "altered state",
> unconscious or deeply engrossed in the subconscious....

Consciousness is comprised of both the objective and subjective. If you
have one without the other, there can be no such thing as self-aware
consciousness. From the Eastern wisdom tradition of the eternal dance of
"Yin and Yang" to ancient Jewish literature about "soul and spirit" to
the scientific discovery of the conscious and unconscious to the
colloquial folk wisdom of the head and heart to the universal
attraction/repulsion of males and females, this fundamental duality is
reflected endlessly in human culture. Unfortunately, one half of this
duality commonly represses the other, and this repression also is
evident in its endless cultural reflections.

But the two halves of the human brain are mirror images of one another,
equal in size, value, and necessity of function.  This, I believe,
reflects the divine truth of the true nature of this binary system -
that its two parts are perfect and equal partners. If so, it would then
be a mistake (the first mistake, the only mistake) to dismiss the
testimony of the unconscious simply because it IS testimony from the
unconscious.

    ...there is a vast outer realm 
    and an equally vast inner realm;
    between these two stands a man, 
    facing now one and now the other,
    and according to his mood or disposition,
    taking the one for the absolute truth
    by denying or sacrificing the other.
                            - Jung

A common story, DivisionTheory, was once being repeated around the
globe, down through history, by peoples isolated in every conceivable
cultural way. To my way of thinking, when you find hoards of people all
reporting the same story, who could not have heard the story from one
another, they are all probably reporting something with autonomous
objective reality independent of its reporters.

The courts of the world refusing to acknowledge the testimony of the
unconscious is just like courts of men not granting women, or whites not
blacks, the right to be heard. It is just like science's dismissal of
religion and art. It is the rich dismissing the poor, the day dismissing
the night, summer dismissing winter, intellect dismissing emotion, logic
dismissing intuition, left brain dismissing right brain, form dismissing
substance, objective dismissing subjective, science dismissing art,
totalitarianism dismissing freedom, sex dismissing love, law & order
dismissing right & wrong, prosecution dismissing defense, West
dismissing East, corporation dismissing individual, machine dismissing
human, security dismissing opportunity, Republican dismissing Democrat,
state dismissing church, reason dismissing faith, urban dismissing
rural, IBM dismissing Apple,  and on and on.

Matthew stated:
> ...to rely on historical "commonalties" in
> "otherworld stories" is to ignore the fact that in the otherworld continuum
> the architecture of heaven and hell looks more psychological and rife with
> consciousness schisms...

That's it exactly, Matthew. The otherworld IS psychological. The
scientific characteristics of the psyche tie in so perfectly with the
classic details about the various afterlife traditions that it seems
likely that the psyche's own innate characteristics may themselves
actually PRODUCE the afterlife experience. The modern discoveries of the
characteristic functions of the two sides of the psyche account
PERFECTLY for the reports of the afterlife that have been reported, for
millennia, in every part of the world. It is the perfect example of the
idea that "what you are will produce your experience".

Matthew asserted:
> The dualistic model of heaven and hell speaks more to the
> split psychology of an organisms in pathological denial than an explanation
> of the relationship of consciousness to "un" consciousness.

The relationship of  (not "consciousness" but rather) the conscious mind
to (not "unconsciousness" but rather) the unconscious mind IS a split
psyche, and this split in our psyches IS the direct and immediate result
of pathological denial : the barrier between the conscious and
unconscious, Freud taught, is composed entirely of "resistence" itself.
The conscious mind, with its innate free will, actively represses,
denies, and ignores the unconscious, persistently pushing the input from
the unconscious back down out of our conscious awareness.

Frank DeMarco had written:
> >Furthermore in this century, psychoanalysis and analytical psychology have
> >(re)discovered the subconscious mind.
> 
Matthew retorted:
> Ok...now you're not being entirely accurate Frank. They still don't know
> what it is or where it is.

This is true. Science has not yet truly adequately defined the full
natures of the conscious and unconscious. I doubt it ever will, as I am
convinced that these two inner components are our divine  souls and
spirits, and as such they are each infinite, meaning, among other
things, that they can never been fully defined.

However, science, while it cannot yet say it knows everything about
them, can certainly assure us that it has a least learned a few things
about the conscious and unconscious. And "these few things", these most
basis of characteristics, the first and most apparent to be recognized,
are perfect matches with both (1) humanity's ancient shared tradition of
dual souls, and (2) humanity's 3 most common afterlife reports :
sleepwalking ghosts, a dreamworld/netherworld, and reincarnation. 

Frank had explained:
> >Peter one day thought: Suppose that at death the conscious mind goes one
> > way and the subconscious mind goes another?
> 
Matthew replied:
> For some people that does happen..around tax time.

I think this happens daily, perhaps hourly, perhaps even constantly, in
most of us.
We are so comfortable with pushing away the feelings, emotions,
judgments, guilts, that rise up from the depths of our unconscious
souls.  

Frank:
> >Consciousness conveys thought, will, purpose and input from outside.
> 
Matthew: 
> Only as it is interpreted to us by the unconscious which is the first
> consciousness that evaluates the environment.

Yes, exactly. In life, the conscious and unconscious work together, as a
team. The unconscious considers, reflects, interprets our objective
experience. The conscious mind would be crippled without it. In addition
to having no memory, it would have no reference of perspective, no
context in which to understand its environment. A disembodied conscious
mind stripped of its unconscious would still possess free will, but
would not have the slightest clue what to do with it; it would remember
nothing including its own identity, would feel no emotion whatsoever,
and would see nothing but chaos around it.

Such a state has repeatedly been reported by people who have been
hypnotically regressed to a point in time in-between lives.

 Frank had reported:
> >The subconscious contains memories and emotions.
> 
To which Matthew responded:
> And uses these to evaluate and define meaning that it bubbles up into
> consciousness. This information comes not only from historical data which
> lives inside us (not as the actual event  but a construct) , but analog data
> occurring in the environment right now.

Right. And without that input from the unconscious, lives contain no
meaning. Reports of the time spent in-between lives by disembodied
spirits also suggest a period devoid of meaning. Science repeatedly
reminds us that it can tell us "what is", but not "what should be". It
takes the testimony from the unconscious for that, but unfortunately the
courts of the land are constitutionally prejudiced against the testimony
of the unconscious.

Matthew asked:
> Why...would death split anything apart beyond the visible fact that it takes
> those we love away from us? Why would it be even more devastating than that?

What else is death if not division? We are divided in life; do you
expect this division to miraculously be healed at the moment of death?
More likely it will get worse than better; our own actions in life
all-too-often aggravate the division within us. We can and regularly do
damage our own integrity, becoming fractured, splintered, ripped apart.
We come already born with two halves, but in life we run the risk of
moving from distinguishing between them to disassociation between them. 

In life, the rule is "multiply". Is not death the opposite of life?

If we have spent most of our lives splitting our own psyches apart,
pushing away the input of the soul from the spirit, if anything this
behavior pattern could be expected to continue after death. What happens
if the conscious mind's habitual pushing away of the unconscious is
limited by the physical body? If so, as soon as the body is out of the
picture, the conscious would seem to suddenly get stronger, and its
pressure pushing away against its already-weak partner, the unconscious
soul, that much more effective.

Frank lamented:
> No wonder death is so scary. Look at all the power we give it. We can't just
> sleep and become one with time and space and energy, we have to be stuck
> with our own stupid sensory based tunnel vision...all through Eternity. We
> have to have "places to go" otherwise death doesn't make sense. 

Anyone can make up any number of stories about what happens after we
die, but no one in his right mind would then believe that those
just-created stories necessarily have any resemblance to the true facts
of the situation. In fact there is a sizable body of reports about the
afterlife, a body of fairly consistent reports which is coming, and
indeed has always come, from every corner of the globe. Those reports
consistently fall into the following categories: 

(1) ghosthood 
(2) a dreamlike netherworld
(3) reincarnation.

And it has now been discovered that the human psyche possesses the very
characteristics necessary to reproduce each of these reported
experiences.

Well, all the characteristics save one - immortality. But when you know
that the formula A + B = C is true, as in 

          A (the characteristics of the psyche) +
          B (separate survival after death) = 
          C (reports of ghosts, netherworlds, and reincarnation)

And you have A and C, my math tells me that you can deduce that B also
exists.

Matthew wrote:
> And to top
> it all off, death is going to punish us or reward us based on how good or
> bad we are (like the Universe cares about good or bad anyway? I mean, what
> good or bad thing is ever going to help or hurt it? ) and THEN make us do
> this crap all over again, not once by many, many times in a Karmic circle.

No. This is one of the things I find so satisfying about DivisionTheory.
The universe doesn't punish us at all. The universe is, as they say, out
of the loop. The characteristics of the psyche would, all by themselves,
produce the afterlife experience. The soul would, in effect,
automatically judge itself, and then automatically pronounce and execute
sentence upon itself, automatically sending itself to whatever heavenly
or hellish experiences it feels, based on its own inner value system,
that it deserves.

Matthew demanded:
> Arrrgh! When I die, leave me alone and let me drift off into oblivion being
> a part of everything and nothing and what more am I going to learn by doing
> more stupid "people tricks".  I think I may have the common confusion of
> Humanity down pat after the first revolution of the Wheel but what a waste
> of Time, Space and Humanity to do it again and again. 

We will all surely leave one another alone. The question is, will your
own unconscious leave itself alone? Or will your own memories rise up to
be compared with your own sense of right and wrong? Will this comparison
fill the full screen of your awareness? Will it be your whole
experience? Will you react emotionally to this comparison? If the
conscious splits off, yes.

Matthew pointed out:
> [Reincarnating without remembering] sort of goes the
> way of people housebreaking a dog by rubbing its nose in its own poop. So
> what? It's poop, its the dog's, so what? The only time repetition of a
> mistake works is if you were doing it wrong in the first place and the
> mistake was the right way, otherwise that sort of teaching needs to stay
> with public education, popular religions and parenting...not Universal
> Consciousness.

It certainly IS a waste of time doing it all over and over again. The
early Christian Gnostics taught this - that people reincarnate, but all
for naught - we are not, as New-Agers prefer to believe, evolving
spiritually through reincarnation.

This comes from the mistaken and unfounded assumption that the system,
as it is now, is the way it was designed to be, that everything is
working properly. The JudeoChristian tradition violently disagrees with
this belief, reminding us of a long-ago "Fall" of man, after which the
original divine nature of the order of things was disrupted and damaged. 

In short, the system is now broken.

If it is broken, then we could indeed be reincarnating over and over
again, getting nowhere, like a dumb animal, as the early Christians
taught:

Jesus said, "The Kingdom of the Father is like a certain woman who was
carrying a jar full of meal. While she was walking on a road, still some
distance from home, the handle of the jar broke and the meal emptied out
behind her on the road. She did not realize it; she had noticed no
accident. When she reached her house, she set down the jar and found it
empty."                                               - The Gospel of
Thomas
An ass which turns a millstone did a hundred miles walking. When it was
loosed it found that it was still in the same place. There are men who
make many journeys [lifetimes], but make no progress towards a
destination. When evening [death] came upon them, they saw neither city
nor village, neither creation nor nature, power nor angel [they were in
the isolation of the soul's afterlife]. In vain have the poor wretches
labored.
                  - The Gospel of Philip

Matthew shared: 
> This is what bothers me the most about this Frank. Even after death, do we
> think the Universe wants to punish the good and the bad and the ugly like it
> could really give a damn if you cheated on your taxes or your wife or kicked
> your dog? Only we care about that...and only we would pack that into an
> after life...

Exactly. So if it is WE ourselves who ultimately create our own
afterlife experience, but all automatically, not intentionally doing so,
then we indeed ought to watch out for an afterlife which 
"punishes the good and the bad and the ugly [and gives] a damn if you
cheated on your taxes or your wife or kicked your dog" WE give a damn,
at least we do deep down inside, and if it's what's down inside that
creates our afterlife experience for us, then we'd better "give a damn"
NOW about just what it is we DO have down inside before we die and we
only find out then.

- Peter Novak

---

END OF DIGEST

---
You are currently subscribed to theos-l as: EDITOR@THEOSOPHY.COM
List URL - http://list.vnet.net/?enter=theos-l
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-theos-l-530Y@list.vnet.net