MASOCOLOGY – Chapter Five

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HOMO ANXIOUS

There are few people who don’t feel, at heart, that there is something
missing in their life. This feeling of inadequacy can usually be centred
upon the demands of modern society – the need to succeed; to rise up
the promotional ladder; to BE someone.

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We reach out for a goal as if this is the most important thing in life, but few of us can ever REALLY succeed. The success story can only belong to the few. And this realisation leads to a lacking many of us feel.
However, whilst not denying the possibility of inadequacy felt in this life struggle, can it be the total answer to our problem? For instance, it is fascinating that the person who HAS succeeded – risen to the top of the promotional ladder – also births a deep feeling of lacking in his life.
How often the rich and famous turn in on themselves, find solace in drugs or drink, or even become reclusive. So even absolute success in modern life does NOT take away this feeling of lacking. Hence, the cause of such feelings must lie in something more subtle.
Some people D0 find the tranquility of mind that allows them to overcome their feelings of inadequacy. Such people are usually religious, be it monotheistic or pagan. It is as if the realisation of a higher entity cleanses the mind and makes a person feel whole.
Basically, belief in a deity can be seen as a psychological fix for the ills of the world.
We can, if so inclined, discount this notion as a throwback to the security religious myths offered in times past.
The gods are not really gods, but man-made fictions used to control and cleanse. People, today, just find it hard to throw off this influence and, when feeling inadequate, rush into mythological comfort.
Indeed, this is an easy explanation to offer when one looks at the sheer number of supernatural deities religion has offered.

One thing we know about the universe is that universal laws are constant. Hence, if a God or deity did exist, then there could only be one. The sheer number of contradictory deities turns religion into a farce.
But is this really the case? Perhaps the psychoanalyst Carl Jung can help us clear up the matter. He formulated the concept of a collective racial unconscious. This idea grew when he noticed the preponderance of racial, archetypal images in dreams, myths and folklore.
He came to the understanding that, at some subtle mind level, the mind of the human race is shared, and archaic images can rise out of this communality. It is easy to dismiss this idea as peudoscholarship.
In a mechanistic, material world mind is seen as purely the result of chemical interaction within the brain. The empiricist philosopher, John Locke, made it clear that the person is born with a mentally clean slate.
We are each an individual. So there is no room for inherited memory or images coming to us from other than reflection upon personal experience. But this idea does not hold up to experience.
A baby, upon birth, instinctively seeks out and sucks the mother’s breast. This simple act laughs in the face of the empiricist notion of mind. Something from pre-birth is directing the new born to know what it must do to survive.
Instinctual behaviour such as the above speaks volumes for the existence of inherited images surfacing in the mind. Indeed, through DNA we know quite a lot of who we are IS inherited.
We are an amalgam of our parents. We are the product of their collective genes. Just because science may not have found, yet, an instinctual, archetypal form of inheritance, it does not mean that such inheritance does not exist.
Indeed, the inheritance factor of DNA and the initial infant act suggest that such a form of inheritance MUST exist. And this process would represent a form of collective unconscious, for whether we came from Adam and Eve or the primeval slime, we can all trace our genetic inheritance back to the same source.

The above theorising gives credence to the ability of man to hold, within the mind, archetypal images of his deep, ancestral past. Images of Divine representation could well lie deep in the unconscious.
But the important point is that such representations could well be culturally based; NOT existent supernatural beings, but poetic, human representations of how a particular culture identified such beings as existing.
In other words, through a form of collective unconscious, man, as a cultural species, could have brought into existence a whole myriad of symbolic Divine representations. Hence, our varied contradictory deities do NOT preclude the existence of God, but merely show the various theologies we have devised as a means of understanding.
So when we fall back on religion to fill the void of our inadequacies, could the possible existence of a collective unconscious mean we really are finding comfort from a form of God?
The implications of the above question are important. When we go back to the earliest known religion – the pagan – we find that the central Divine image is Mother Earth. Throughout our earliest known cultures people everywhere on planet Earth came to the same idea that nature was Divine.
It is almost as if, when we birthed the human Ego and began to learn how to adapt nature to OUR demands, we broke our links with the Divine; cast ourselves from Eden. And we have been battling with our Ego and insecurity ever since, clumsily creating this god and that god in an attempt to feel adequate.
Indeed, one only has to look at our latest hi-tech endeavours – the internet – to see that we are attempting to create a form of higher consciousness (a Divinity?) ourselves; in a real sense the connectedness, the global reach, of the information super-highway is akin to a form of global brain, with computers representating the individual neurones, grouping together to produce consciousness.
God, it seems, has come down from the sky and been reborn in the microchip.

We may well live in a material, atheistic world, but our longing for creating Divinity is still with us. We have spent the whole of history running from it, devising gods to fill our own, egoistic needs. But the original Divinity – nature itself – is still holding us in her grasp. She will not let go. She, cannot let go. And for a simple reason.
We have iron in our blood. Yet those iron atoms are not ours. They were cooked in primeval stars and released through supernova. And when we die, those iron atoms will go on to perform tasks in some other part of interactive nature.
We have genes at the centre of our biological make-up. But they are not our genes. They came from our parents and reach back through our ancestors and beyond, through our evolutionary forebears and to the original conception of life that BECAME nature.
We can attempt to pull away as much as we like, but it is an impossible task, for everything we are belongs to nature. So how did we come to think we could leave? In the final part next week, I will attempt to show you why – and how it relates directly to our present eco-vandalism.

© Anthony North, March 2009