Tag: consciousness

I’ve always found this time of year rather strange. I find myself surrounded by people both off and online looking back over the previous year and/ or looking ahead to the next.

I find myself doing neither. What’s done is done. Lessons will be learned or they won’t and what’s to come will come and the degree to which we have any conscious agency over any of it is (as I always boringly say) greatly overstated.

The only time that matters is now, the present moment – forever on the cusp of what’s gone and what’s unfolding. Neither memory nor imagination. An ever fluid liminal zone, ungraspable yet vitally and vividly apparent. Reality in the raw.

Nothings comes next, this is always it.

Just as a man still is what he always was, so he already is what he will become. The conscious mind does not embrace the totality of a man, for this totality consists only partly of his conscious contents, and for the other and far greater part, of his unconscious, which is of indefinite extent with no assignable limits. In this totality the conscious mind is contained like a smaller circle within a larger one. Hence it is quite possible for the ego to be made into an object, that is to say, for a more compendious personality to emerge in the course of development and take the ego into its service.

— Carl Jung

It is pure fantasy to think that you could have done things differently or lived your life any other way.

This dream of an imagined past feeds an equally unhelpful delusion of the future in which you consciously learn and strive to change ‘yourself’ and do things differently.

All of these behaviours and activities happen, of course, but not as the result of conscious so-called will but automatically and spontaneously from our unconscious.

We do what we do when we do it whatever our conscious awareness may declare to the contrary.

Our thoughts and ideas are the least of us. Always late to the party that’s already in full swing, uninvited yet full of their own self importance and righteousness. Taking credit for everything and responsibility for nothing.

It comes as a great relief to realise that you could not have lived your life in any other way despite all the reasons and stories you tell yourself about how things could have been different.

They weren’t different because they weren’t.

The degree to which we think our conscious awareness has control and agency over our actions is greatly overstated.

Indeed I would go as far as to say what we think are choices and decisions are pure fantasy applied after the fact to instantiate a sense of a separate, autonomous entity of selfhood.

Our consciousness doesn’t choose or do a goddamned thing. All that important stuff is left to our great, unknowable unconscious. Our consciousness takes credit but shouldn’t, when it should be taking responsibility but doesn’t.

Patterns, symbols, archetypes, myths, stories – maps of unknowable territories. What is created when the universe attempts to apprehend itself.

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

Apparently attributed to Jesus, from the Gnostic Gospels, but could just have easily have come from Carl Jung.

No matter how hard I look I can’t find any evidence of free will, yet never fail to feel the full presence of thoughts and actions springing forth spontaneously and unbidden out of unconsciousness. Aware consciousness seems nothing more than a silent bookkeeper meticulously keeping track of everything after the fact.