Exploring the Psyche

by Troy W. Pierce

Originally published in MoonRise News

    "In the beginning," or some variation, starts off origin myths, also called cosmogonies. Every culture has at least one, and sometimes several, versions of the origin of things. The most predominant view of these cosmogonies has been to see them as an early attempt to explain the world, as a form of pre-scientific explanation. This is the theory put forward by Frazier in The Golden Bough and is the most common understanding to this day. It is easy to see them in this light from our current scientific world view, however, this view assumes that the people who told these myths have the same psychological predisposition as modern people. Whereas, the evidence indicates that at least one difference is that our modern objective view of the world, including the world's inherent distinction from ourselves, was not that of the myth-makers. The myth-makers where speaking of the self and world as one, the self/world is what the myths explain, not simply the objective world as in the case of scientific explanation.

    Often when we look out, we see in - the inner contents of the psyche projected outward like a movie projector with the world for its screen. None of this is random or out-of-the-blue, of course, there is something about the target of the projection that provides some kind of 'hook' upon which you can hang the projection. But chances are, when someone gets 'under your skin' they were already there. If we take this as a starting point, what were the myth-makers projecting onto the creation of the universe? The answer put forward by Jung, Neumann, and others, is that these cosmic geneses reflect not the origin of the world, but the origin of the self in the world - consciousness. As Jung said in The Undiscovered Self, "Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists for us only in so far as it is consciously reflected by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being." Consciousness of the world and creation of the world would have been intertwined for the myth-makers.

    It is amazing, considering the amount of effort that has gone into the study of consciousness recently, that so little can be said about it. We do know that it is a limited cognitive resource, and our most precious one at that. Consider the Jewish folk tale about a man who dreams that there is buried treasure beneath a bridge in a distant town. He travels to the town but cannot dig for the treasure because there are soldiers guarding the bridge. In desperation he talks to a soldier and tells him of his dream of buried treasure. The soldier laughs and says that if he believed in such things he would have to dig under the kitchen stove of a man with the same name as the treasure hunter, because the soldier had had a dream of buried treasure there. The man returns home and digs under his own kitchen stove, and there he finds the treasure. The treasure was there all along, but it was not possible for the man to ever obtain it until he became conscious of its existence. Once he became conscious of it, he could take the steps necessary to obtain it.

    With all this in mind we will take a look at a Gnostic creation myth: The chief ruler of the world is blind because of his power and his ignorance; and in his arrogance he said with his power, "It is I who am God; there is no other one that exists apart from me."

    When he said this, he sinned against the entirety. And this speech got up to the incorruptibility; then there was a voice that came forth from the incorruptibility saying, "You are mistaken, Samael" - which is, "god of the blind."

    If we look at this myth as a projection of inner contents of the psyche onto the field of creation - we can see that this is a story of the self, a story of consciousness. In each of us there is a petty dictator named "I," who decides what 'I'm going to do,' what 'I'm going to say,' what 'I'm going to be.' And that dictator believes that "I" is all that there is to us, and often in its arrogance it falls on its face, because it is wrong in saying, "there is no other one that exists apart from me." For some reason the German "Ich" didn't get translated into the English word "I" but rather into the Greek word "Ego," and so this petty dictator is called the Ego. The myth is about bringing into the conscious awareness of the Ego the fact that it is not all that there is. We all know people who say 'I'm going to loose thirty pounds,' 'I'm giving up smoking,' 'I'm going to become a doctor,' etc.; and we know that they won't, their Ego may think it's the only one in there, but we know better.

    So, in the myth, here is the chief ruler, the Ego, boasting that it is God, when literally out-of-the-blue a voice calls out that that is wrong, the Ego is only a god of those who cannot perceive the totality - the whole of what's going on. This is the way it is within our own self, usually in such realizations the message, "you are mistaken, Samael," packs a punch in the form of a personal disaster or crisis of some kind.

    The myth is a story of the beginning of conscious awareness of a self greater than the Ego, of the 'entirety.' The totality of the psyche is what Jung referred to as the Self (capital 'S'). Consciousness is the precious resource that the Ego can bring into its relationship with the rest of the psyche, giving it the "precondition of being." The process of individuation was for Jung the life-long work of becoming an individual, the inner transformation of the psyche by bringing the unconscious contents of the psyche into conscious awareness - a work of inner alchemy, turning dark matter into brilliant gold - integrating towards wholeness.

        © -1997 Troy W. Pierce