Why the unconscious shows itself in religions, myths, early proto-sciences etc.

When children make up stories about things they don’t understand the stories tell you more about how the child thinks than about what they’re trying to explain.

Primitives are very much like children in many regards. Without the framework of rationality provided by the scientific method and logical reasoning abilities, they tend to project their own beliefs and inner states out onto the world around them.

In fact projection is the main culprit here. We can see faces in the clouds (quite possibly the genesis of the idea that gods live in the sky) or in rust stains or crumbling old walls. There’s a circuit built into the brain designed specifically to search for faces and to pinpoint people you know in a crowd, and other circuits designed to tell you how trustworthy a person is from their face alone. Faces in particular are hardwired into us and we see them all around. And what we see faces on is easy to humanize.

Nietzsche said if you stare long enough into a void it looks back into you. He can be difficult to understand, but I think he meant that anything you ponder on long enough starts to take on humanlike qualities because you project them into it.

The first religion/superstition was Animism, the belief that every object has its own spirit or soul, a little humanlike personality that you can talk to and get answers from. They would ask permission of an animal before hunting it, and if its spirit gave permission then it was on, otherwise the omens bode ill and they wouldn’t hunt that one.

In a pre-scientific age people came up with all kinds of theories to explain the mysteries of nature, and those are some of the most useful things in the study of the structures and processes of the unconscious.

When people ponder and try to explain the inexplicable they often end up probing deeply into the unknown within themselves. Though it might be more realistic to say the unknown around their minds, because that’s how the unconscious is actually experienced. Not as some small part inside a well-ordered and understood mind, but rather as a vast and wild territory surrounding the little piece of property the recently-developed conscious mind (aka the Ego) has marked off as its own.

For this reason, ideas and feeling arising from the unconscious seem to come from ‘out there’ somewhere, often as if from the darkness or the deep water or some other world entirely where the rules are different from the rules of our known world. That’s because the rules inside the mind are different—there’s no gravity or wind, time works differently, people we know to be dead still show up and can be spoken with etc.

Dreams show us glimpses of this world, but ordinary dreams are bizarre and nonsensical. Actually things can be that disorganized in the unconscious much of the time, until something happens to cause it to organize itself and take on some kind of focus.

This tends to happen at times of great peril or stress, after trauma for instance or war or at peak moments of intensity in a life. This is when the archetypes will constellate (form from their normal dissolute state) and begin to take an active part in your mental life. The great disorganized mass of the unconscious will take on a somewhat human form, or whatever form will best communicate the needed ideas, and speak to you or show you symbolic images that if interpreted properly can help you solve the problem. It’s a sort of GUI or web browser to help us communicate with the deep programming, if computer analogies work for you.

People ask why the messages need to be translated. It’s not because of some failing of the unconscious—symbolism and imagery is its natural mode of communication. It’s rather because we developed these weird swollen brains with all the fancy plumbing inside like a conscious mind, art, culture, and language. Especially language. Word’s weren’t available to the mind until just last week evolutionarily speaking. The unconscious does use them but in something like a low-awareness dream (normal dreams) they tend to be thrown together randomly or nearly so, but still with some symbolic intent behind them.

So it’s a matter of the conscious mind and the unconscious natively speaking different languages. This is why the symbolic can slip in past conscious awareness and subliminal messages can be gotten directly into the unconscious. It’s also why for the most part we’re pretty ignorant about the inner world.

I think another factor is our aversion to the idea of another mind inside that in some ways rules over the entire kingdom of which the conscious mind is just an island. The Ego (conscious mind essentially in psychological terms) is tyrannical and likes to believe it’s in absolute control. But another and very strong factor I believe is a partial understanding of Freud, which is some forbidding and frightening stuff! Most people associate the unconscious with him, and what immediately comes to mind are various ideas about castration, Oedipal incest, infantile sexuality and the savagery of our natural state. Because Jung hasn’t been taught and lots of wrong notions of Freud’s (that Jung or someone else has corrected) still get bandied about by the media and schools and television programs etc. Geez, no wonder most people shy away from even thinking about the unconscious like a slug from a pile of salt!

I wasn’t intending this to get so long, I better stop here and write up the rest for tomorrow. Not sure how long that part will be, but I’ll shift focus a bit for it. I’m writing all of this—each of these blog entries (for the most part) to develop my ideas for the background of my story, which is based mainly on a Jungian understanding of mythology.