Common sense won’t ‘cut the mustard’

[jedaisoul]

I'm more of a Joseph Campbell/ Carl Jung, man myself.

I have a deep respect for Carl Jung...

 

There exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals ... It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes.

By 'pre-existent form' Jung meant the archetype-as-such.

Unfortunately, I don't agree with Jung on archetypes. IMHO, it is quite easy to show that archetypes exist in our minds, not external to them. I don't wish to hijack this thread, so I'll just refer interested readers to my earlier thread in this forum "The Dimensions of Truth".

 

The relevance of that to this thread is whether archetypes exist as "concepts" (in our minds), or as "abstract truths" (external to us). There exist many archetypes that correspond to actual entities, e.g. "horse", and it is enticing to suggest that they exist outside our comprehension, because horses do. But there are also archetypes for things that do not, and have never, existed: unicorn, dragon, elf, fairy, gnome... These creatures are clearly borne of the human imagination, but they are just as much archetypes as those for real creatures.

 

So it is logical that all archetypes are concepts, not abstract entities. They seem to be independent of our comprehension of them because they are part of our cultural heritage, and are passed from generation to generation. However, if all references to, say, unicorns were removed from literature and art, and was never referred to again, the archetype would live on in the minds of those people who were aware of it, but it would cease to exist when the last of them died.

[Thunderbird]

I have a deep respect for Carl Jung...

 

 

Unfortunately, I don't agree with Jung on archetypes. IMHO, it is quite easy to show that archetypes exist in our minds, not external to them. I don't wish to hijack this thread, so I'll just refer interested readers to my earlier thread in this forum "The Dimensions of Truth".

 

The relevance of that to this thread is whether archetypes exist as "concepts" (in our minds), or as "abstract truths" (external to us). There exist many archetypes that correspond to actual entities, e.g. "horse", and it is enticing to suggest that they exist outside our comprehension, because horses do. But there are also archetypes for things that do not, and have never, existed: unicorn, dragon, elf, fairy, gnome... These creatures are clearly borne of the human imagination, but they are just as much archetypes as those for real creatures.

 

So it is logical that all archetypes are concepts, not abstract entities. They seem to be independent of our comprehension of them because they are part of our cultural heritage, and are passed from generation to generation. However, if all references to, say, unicorns were removed from literature and art, and was never referred to again, the archetype would live on in the minds of those people who were aware of it, but it would cease to exist when the last of them died.

 

 

I disagree,

 

Archetypes can be symbols that we give meaning to, such as a dragon in mythology which pops in unconnected cultures independently., but archetypes do exist in nature as forms.

 

These are not only animal forms such as the phyla that represent basic morphologies, but also forces that that contain a hierarchal spectrums of forms, such as light or gravity.Archetypal Elements, hydrogen, carbon, compounds, water, or in geometric forms.

 

These are geometric archetypes The Sphere, The Circle, the point, the Platonic Solids,

 

And the geometric archetype of the form of life, The Golden Ratio.

[Ahmabeliever]

OK, now you're getting over my head :)

 

Psychology starts to sound hocus pocus to the average layman and the ignorance of this terminology results in confusion. Result is we/they become dismissive of the subject.

 

Why? Subconsciously protecting oneself from admitting you don't understand. Ego.

 

This is typical of humans. The survival instinct. How we think is indeed a key to how we are, the subconscious has many ways to 'protect' an individual that may simultaneously hamper their development.

 

Getting real about religion had another problem other than what I've previously written. I WANT to live forever. And grow wiser and see and do and know more and more and more, my picture of God had us spreading through an ever expanding universe.

 

Bit of a blow there, losing my immortal soul and all those planets I was gonna visit.

 

We LOVE the myth, have a VERY hard time facing reality. Come on face it, most of us (though hypography subscribers are smarter than the average bear) are still stupid enough to listen to politicians and corporate media. We throw our votes and our cash anywhere we can in the hopes it will help us 'arrive', that something will 'click'. Everything will be ok.... Merely a lack of terminology will have us subconsciously obfuscate ourselves from truth.

 

I AM NOT DUMB! :hihi:

 

Psychology could serve mankind better by understanding the importance of the myth, why we need the myth, what the myth is trying to protect and how we might safely remove it.

 

Society needs to break the myth. When we come to an understanding on a global scale that God is not coming to make it all better we might then endeavour to make it better ourselves.

 

If God is not taking me to explore space, I now want to know how I may help my descendants achieve this. If God doesn't want us in Iraq, perhaps the military budget might make a few more rockets...

 

The myth is the cause and the effect is ignorance, apathy, oppression, repression, war, atrocities, greed, sexism, homophobia, bigotry, and insanity.

 

The myth is perpetuated by men for commercial gain. Psychology is their main tool.

 

Try to use psychology to smash the myth, you will have no funding.

[HydrogenBond]

Part of the practical problem of getting rid of myth and reducing things to only reason, is we end up using only half of the brain. In other words, only the left side of the brain uses reason. The right side of the brain is more spatial and as far as I know we have yet to develop 3-D logic to take full advantage of that side of the brain. The right brain does this with symbols, with myths simple exercises in 3-D logic.

 

A symbol is a 3-D concept used by the right brain. For example, the left brain reduces God to a name, label, event, end of story. The 3-D symbol of God is a complex 3-D concept of opposites. It is alpha and omega, male and female, matter and energy, big and small, etc. One uses this symbol as a 3-D data cluster, without the requirement of having to fluff it up. The right brain can do its own 3-D logic using such dense block data. This is not something the left brain is designed to do, so it appear irrational.

 

Comparing 3-D logic to 2-D logic is like comparing 2-D or rational thinking to linear or 1-D thinking. With 1-D thinking we do not reason, but merely accept a statement as true, such as the earth is flat. If you reason this through in 2-D, and came to the conclusion it was round, a 1-D thinker would be clueless. If they were in the majority, since you question their 1-D view of the world, your reasons would be treated as blaspheme. They can't grasp your reason so it will be considered evil, needing to be purged. The 3-D type thinking gets the same treatment from 2-D, since 2-D can not reason in 3-D. It is called irrational, which it is, since it does not follow 2-D laws. The laws of reason are not the best way to deal with 3-D data clusters. If we only have an (x,y) grid, to set up cause and affect, what do you do with Z. This Z axis appears irrational since it is more than just cause-affect.

 

One way to describe 3-D thought is with creativity. If someone can up with a quick solution to a problem, but could not provide logical reasons, it will be called irrational. What they will have to do is start with the solution and backtrack a line of cause and affect, so it looks like the affect or solution stemmed from a logic train. Then that is acceptable. The entire 3-D procedure becomes affect then cause-affect. But this won't be acceptable to reason unless the affect is put last after the cause and we truncate the initial affect, since it would be considered irrational.

[jedaisoul]

Archetypes can be symbols that we give meaning to, such as a dragon in mythology which pops in unconnected cultures independently., but archetypes do exist in nature as forms.

I think you are confusing two different sets of entities. Since the archetypal dragon describes an entity that exists only in our minds, the archetype also must only exist in our minds. So archetypes can be true when they represent a physical or abstract entity, and false when they describe an imaginary entity. Hence the archetype is not the physical or abstract entity. They are separate entities.

 

These are not only animal forms such as the phyla that represent basic morphologies, but also forces that that contain a hierarchal spectrums of forms, such as light or gravity. Archetypal Elements, hydrogen, carbon, compounds, water, or in geometric forms.

 

These are geometric archetypes The Sphere, The Circle, the point, the Platonic Solids,

 

And the geometric archetype of the form of life, The Golden Ratio.

I agree that these are all abstract entites, and are conceptualised as archetypes. But, as above, the archetype is not the abstract entity. The abstract (and physical) entities exist whether we are cogniscent of them or not. The archetype is a human conceptualisation of the abstract entity. It may seem unnecessary to make this distinction, but if archetypes and abstract entities were one and the same, there could not be archetypes of imaginary entities like dragons.

 

Anyway, I'm getting concerned that this discussion is drifting away from coberst's original intentions. I suspect that this discussion, if you want to take it further, should take place under the "Dimensions of Truth" thread. I agree that I did not explicitly mention archetypes there, but the structure, and meaning, of the words I'm using is explained there.

[Thunderbird]

 

Psychology could serve mankind better by understanding the importance of the myth, why we need the myth, what the myth is trying to protect and how we might safely remove it.

 

Society needs to break the myth. When we come to an understanding on a global scale that God is not coming to make it all better we might then endeavour to make it better ourselves.

 

If God is not taking me to explore space, I now want to know how I may help my descendants achieve this. If God doesn't want us in Iraq, perhaps the military budget might make a few more rockets...

 

The myth is the cause and the effect is ignorance, apathy, oppression, repression, war, atrocities, greed, sexism, homophobia, bigotry, and insanity.

 

The myth is perpetuated by men for commercial gain. Psychology is their main tool.

 

Try to use psychology to smash the myth, you will have no funding.

 

 

 

 

 

Your throwing the baby out with bathwater here. The Myth in its purest form, is the collective ethos of a culture. A story that binds societies past with its future.

 

They can be bad or good.

 

If the story reflects the best of man, a hero “archetype” these story’s can be a religion are fairy tales we tell to children give us a deep sense of who we are. I remember as a kid my archetypal hero was John Wayne, then about 22 I saw To Kill A Mocking Bird. My hero then became Adicus Finch. My Mythology evolved, My archetype of what I should aspire to changed because I understood my society on a deeper level.

If one thinks that there is some great importance that these archetypes be a historical figure, or a fictional character, I would ague that the fiction, metaphor, and myth, always precedes history. We choose are mythological archetypes, theses archetypes create our history .

These archetypes are the main tool politicians and religious use to bind us our blind us. Who are your archetypal heroes, historical, are mythological ?

If your hero is Jesus because of what he stood for, peace, compassion, the wisdom of his stories, and the way he led his life. Should it make any difference if these story was proven to be false?

 

Not in my way of thinking extract the supernatural stuff and its about the best example of a human life I've ever heard. Do I care if it actually happened..... No, if given a choice between the historical and a myth like that one..... I’ll take myth every time. If I were given the choice between a history book, and a book of mythology to study a culture I would take the book of myth every time, why? Because thats were the real archetypes are.

 

THE POWER OF MYTH

For Campbell, the "power of myth" is the power of metaphor and poetry to capture the imaginations of individuals and societies. Myth supplies a sense of meaning and direction that transcends mundane existence while giving it significance. It has four functions (p. 31): The mystical function discloses the world of mystery and awe, making the universe "a holy picture." The cosmological function concerns science and the constitution of the universe. The sociological function "supports and validates a certain social order." Everyone must try to relate to the pedagogic function which tells us "how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances." America, Campbell believes, has lost its collective ethos and must return to a mythic understanding of life "to bring us into a level of consciousness that is spiritual" (p. 14).

Campbell defends the benefits of myths as literally false but metaphorically true for the broad range of human experience. But certain myths are (at least in part) to be rejected as "out of date," particularly the personal lawgiver God of Jews and Christians. Biblical cosmology, he thinks, does not "accord with our concept of either the universe or of the dignity of man. It belongs entirely somewhere else" (p. 31).

Campbell's own mythic commitment is to the "transtheological" notion of an "undefinable, inconceivable mystery, thought of as a power, that is the source and end and supporting ground of all life and being" (Ibid.). He rejects the term "pantheism" because it may retain a residue of the personal God of theism. Campbell repeatedly hammers home this notion of an inefq fable ground of reality: "God is beyond names and forms. Meister Eckhart said that the ultimate and highest leave-taking is leaving God for God, leaving your notion of God for an experience of that which transcends all notions" (p. 49).

Despite such an epistemological veto on our ability to conceive of anything transcendent, Campbell draws on Carl Jung's theory of a collective unconscious to help explain the common ideas ("archetypes") that recur in the mythologies of divergent cultures worldwide. "All over the world and at different times of human history, these archetypes, or elementary ideas, have appeared in different costumes. The differences in the costumes are the results of environment and historical conditions"

[Thunderbird]

corberst;Have you checked on your unconscious life lately? How does one check on their unconscious life?

 

I think you are confusing two different sets of entities. Since the archetypal dragon describes an entity that exists only in our minds, the archetype also must only exist in our minds. So archetypes can be true when they represent a physical or abstract entity, and false when they describe an imaginary entity. Hence the archetype is not the physical or abstract entity. They are separate entities

 

I don't know why you think this is off topic.

 

I agree that these are all abstract entites, and are conceptualised as archetypes. But, as above, the archetype is not the abstract entity. The abstract (and physical) entities exist whether we are cogniscent of them or not. The archetype is a human conceptualisation of the abstract entity. It may seem unnecessary to make this distinction, but if archetypes and abstract entities were one and the same, there could not be archetypes of imaginary entities like dragons.

 

Anyway, I'm getting concerned that this discussion is drifting away from coberst's original intentions. I suspect that this discussion, if you want to take it further, should take place under the "Dimensions of Truth" thread. I agree that I did not explicitly mention archetypes there, but the structure, and meaning, of the words I'm using is explained there..

 

 

 

We are discussing the collective unconscious here.

Coberst, also mentions Newtonian physics and Quantum mechanics this represents an evolution of what is considered the Common sense view of reality. From what I gathered from studying Quantum Mechanics is our reality and what we call matter... is more of an idea, or metaphor than anything substantial. A web of connections that when looked at closely are made of more connections that are not independent of how we choose to see them. Reality is in its deepest essences is.... abstract.

[Ahmabeliever]

OK

 

I think our ideas merge in design. You want to understand the subconscious better, I want people to understand themselves better.

 

Thing is about our 'best' psychologists... All the kings horses and all the kings men were idiots, I had to find the glue!

 

Busting the mythology I grew up on has saved me from madness, literally.

 

Now I find I am actually smarter! Literally gained 5 IQ points tipping me over the elusive 144 to 147.

 

I theorise the importance of the myth is only because our ego doesn't like not to know everything. And when we smash the ego, the myth is not so important, can be addressed, and the result is peace of mind.

 

Though this is fraught with danger to the 'client', after years of people trying to find out how I tick, I healed myself.

 

Heroes are fine, Jesus was a great man, but he couldn't heal me no matter how often I asked. Belief systems based on judgement destroy the spirit. I was a child who lived in fear and shame and I COULD NOT be as holy as was expected of me no matter how I'd try.

 

Madness? Try living your life knowing yourself to be damned.

 

We try to describe all that we feel and experience in conscious language.

 

So our subconscious is filtered on the way in, and out. The filter of what comes out is ego driven. Breaking down the myth allows for objective filtering of inputs. Before then any old garbage could be clung to in the desire to 'understand'. The understanding, when filled with holes, is filled with bullshit.

 

I was forced by a court system to attend AA. Here is the MYTH in full swing. God is the only answer. you can invent a god of your own understanding, but without God, you are doomed. Now, the failure rate is about 97%...

 

So, God only helps 1 in 33 alcoholics? Or.... It's a load of crap and people are staying sick waiting for God to fix them - lack of backbone, or lack of answers, or... lack of reasoning and massive contradictory confusion due to a big GOD filter in their head.

 

I don't attend these meetings, and I don't drink. But their MYTH had me labelled as sick for life, incurable, diseased, and in desperate need of Gods help. You know what else they say - This is the only thing that saves alcoholics, this or a profound spiritual experience.

 

I scored as high as you can in the AA indicator type test. But now I don't drink, or if I do at a party, I stop at a few, I don't even have to try to stop.

 

I call BS on AA and 12 step programmes! Again! Talking all this hocus pocus will NOT help someone who suffers a thinking illness. Fixing the conscious thought processes will. We all have this filter, if we learn to protect ourselves from bullshit, and recognise this as self preservation instead of hiding from reality as preservation, we might win.

 

I guess somewhere in all this unfathomable stuff you are talking about there is a human being, but for the life of me I can't see that any of it makes a lick of difference to how I could straighten my own thinking out.

 

I offer this honest account of some of my own experience as an example of sanity gained through the acceptance of truth. And you know the ego got smashed or I wouldn't be able to be so honest. frankly, I don't care what labels people give me anymore, they've been wrong so often it's laughable.

 

To free the mind from represssion and persecution no matter what the source. Outlined as above.

[Thunderbird]

My story is kind of reverse of yours,When I was 11 years old, I went to Sunday school and has told the bible stories.

 

I then discovered science and my beloved dinosaurs. When I ask my mother about the inconsistency between the bible and my science books, she said a very wise thing. “No one really knows for sure, figure it out for yourself“. I stopped going to church and For the next 34 years I have read my science books, and journals.

 

Two years ago I began going to another community church and started attend Sunday school every week. We discuss evolution there and the consensus is Christianity is about helping people and evolution is in the realm of science.

Our minister is the head of the Ministerial alliance, which encompasses about 47 churches of varies denominations in our small community in the Midwest. He is called upon on regular basis by other ministers to do something about the “Teaching of evolution in our schools.” He explains to them that this is not church business, The church is to help the needy. I am very happy with my church, and proud of the people I have discovered there.

[Ahmabeliever]

Ah yes, helping people.

 

The ideal is something I strive for myself. I've just discovered I don't need God to tell me what's right or wrong. There is some residual anger at having been fed a line for so long from so many.... And I really don't like the fact the church collected over $160 000 from my father over the years while we went hungry often.

 

But I've not turned into some evil degenerate through losing the God filter, which I half expected...

 

The reward in selfless acts is said to be intangible, but parts are certainly measurable. So long as my smug detector stays under the radar, I'm thinking I'm on the right track.

 

Helping myself was the first step in helping others. Maybe my concept of God is too shattered by hypocrites and contradiction to have any desire to be involved with a church on any level. That being said much of the profits from my last show went to a church inner city mission.

 

Profits from 'The Stoner Show' - went to a shelter for addicts.

 

I like communion, the meeting of people who are trying to do good. I can get that in so many other places that aren't founded on mythology. With a history of murder war atrocity and lies all the soup kitchens in the world wouldn't see me back in church.

 

Each to his own. IMO, God does not help people at all, people help people, and themselves. It's time we took credit for our own good works and stopped blaming satan when we are being assholes.

 

The truth shall set you free.

[Kriminal99]

Common sense wasn't created based on experiences in the subatomic world so of course it doesn't work for quantum physics. It wasn't created based on experiences at speeds approaching the speed of light either.

 

I suppose you could even say common sense isn't created based on extreme circumstances which cause a person to come to self awareness.

 

However, common sense is capable of allowing someone to understand arguments regarding self awareness that are created by non scientists who have developed enough self awareness to use logical reasoning combined with common experiences to understand themselves.

 

Furthermore a scientist who is not capable of understanding themselves through logic, self awareness and common experience is not capable of interpreting scientific data related to the human mind.

 

Furthermore if a person could not use "common sense" to understand an argument related to "the human mind", then it is because that so called argument in truth has nothing to do with the human condition.

[CraigD]

Psychology starts to sound hocus pocus to the average layman and the ignorance of this terminology results in confusion. Result is we/they become dismissive of the subject.

Jungian psychology sounds like hocus-pocus to most people. Among the theories of personality that have seen therapeutic application – that is, those that someone treating someone suffering from a psychiatric condition severe enough to require professional treatment would use in guiding their therapeutic approach – Jungian models are among the strangest.

 

As ThunderBird notes, and accepts, and Jedaisoul notes, and rejects, Jung proposed that components of human and non-human (ordinary animal) minds existed outside and independent of the brain. His terms for this part of minds were varied, the major ones being the collective unconscious, which emphasized its proposed shared nature, synchronicity, a term Jung coined for events inexplicable by ordinary causes, and the archetypes, which emphasized how certain thoughts are common among people of many personalities and cultures.

 

Jungian psychology is not the same thing as Jung’s theory of personality. The former is a tradition (an unusually one among clinicians – people who treat the mentally ill for a living), while the latter was the work of an individual aided by various assistants. One can be a Jungian, and believe, as several clinicians who terms themselves so with who I’ve personally discussed the subject do, and as jedaisoul does, that while Jung’s terms and models are useful, they are really “all in the head”, and any reference to it being otherwise is metaphor. Jung himself, his writing and his biographers fairly clearly conclude, believed the “mind outside of the head” is objectively real, and as such, can in principle be detected and measured with scientific experiments. His preferred term for the collective unconscious, a change he made in his later writing, was the objective psyche, emphasizing its proposed separate and objectively real nature.

 

Jung and his supporters’ efforts at such experiments were mainly what a modern social scientist would call meta-analysis and anecdotal, not controlled scientific experiments. He believed some of the strongest evidence for “mind outside of the head” could be found in studies of animal populations, were animals separated by impenetrable barriers (eg: rats on islands) shared useful knowledge (eg: that a newly introduced substance was poisonous) without ordinary communication. He also studied the traditional occult of his time and location (early 1900s Europe), attending séances and similar meetings (particularly those of his cousin, Helene Preiswerk, a professional psychic medium), accounts of which appear in his doctoral dissertation and other works. Although he concluded that many psychics were frauds, he believed that some were not, and that “spirits” were objectively real, and could be communicated with using a variety of techniques common among the spiritualist community of his experience.

 

Well-controlled scientific experiments have failed to support Jung’s conclusions of humans and animals communicating across barriers to ordinary communication, and the objectively real presence of spirits. However, his ideas remain valuable and important, and are respected even by people who reject his spiritualistic and magical beliefs.

 

Many who read Jung are startled that whole volumes of his collected work (eg: ”Collected Works of Carl Jung, volume 13: Alchemical Studies”) resemble traditional magic writings more than early 20th century psychological writings, reinforcing the impression many have that Jungian psychology is “hocus-pocus”. I read him in my early 20s, and confess that, had I not held beliefs I later rejected as superstitious and ultimately unproductive, I would have contented myself with popular and textbook overviews of Jung and his work, as his works are long, strange, and hard work to read. Due to his great influence on modern culture, however, I recommend that everyone read Jung and about Jung as deeply as they are willing.

The myth [of having an immortal soul, living forever, etc.] is perpetuated by men for commercial gain. Psychology is their main tool.

 

Try to use psychology to smash the myth, you will have no funding.

While I agree with Ahmabeliever that superstition is widely exploited for commercial gain, I consider the understanding of myths – including the ones he criticizes – important to understanding the human mind. Although the day may come (and I personally expect it will) that we understand the human mind in and entirely objective, reductionistic way, in the meanwhile, the informal approaches of psychology are all we have to handle a plethora of problems. The scientific method is, I believe, critical in this pursuit, but the deep exploration of myth on many levels remains an important tool for encouraging and guiding scientific intuition.