The energy of the gods

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

1:20 a.m. I got the sense, since our communication yesterday, that the gods at war (or at peace) channel through us, and we decide whether the small amount of force that channels through us will be used constructively or destructively.

That is as may be. Another way would be to say whether your decisions will turn that energy to good or evil purpose. Freud got a sense of how the source of the sexual energy could be diverted – sublimated – or could express in so many, many ways. Only his reading of the libido and its place in human life was colored by his starting place in a sexually repressed and culturally ingrown Europe, so he never got a fair and unprejudiced look at the subject, but regarded it as pathological more than natural. This is still being corrected in your time.

Plus he was Jewish, and so outside the Protestant mainstream of northern Europe or the Catholic mainstream of southern Europe.

And he was in silent rejection of his own religious heritage, which cut him off from an antidote to materialist skepticism, and was a city-dweller, which cut him off from a peasant’s matter of fact view of life. He was also a medical man rather than a scientist or naturalist or literary scholar, which again, inclined him to see the play of these energies as pathological. Jung served as counterweight to all these biases.

Still, Jung says he was a great man.

We are not saying different. We are showing the bias that led his rediscoveries to make less of a positive impact upon Western culture than they theoretically might have done. So this is part of the unfinished business that we are addressing.

Had Freud understood differently the forces he began to see, he might have encouraged Western intellectual man into more productive patterns. However, what he did accomplish amounted to a massive dynamiting of the roadblock that had made Western thought into a dead-end. Possibly no one could have done more than he did.

Here were his neglected vistas:

• The gods – trans-human intelligences with their own agenda – influenced human life directly and indirectly.
• These gods may equally validly be regarded as personal or impersonal, lives or energies, persons or forces.
• The gods, whatever they really are, are experienced by humans as energy flowing through themselves.
• “Energy” as in urges, “instincts,” tides of impersonally originating emotion, the fuel of all activity, be it mental or physical.
• Trans-personal energy, flowing through humans, is directed through (that is, expresses as) human individual desires, actions, and – let’s call it orientation.
• Human activity (internal or external makes little difference) is itself an input into the economy of the universe. It doesn’t stop with 3D expression. It has further consequences. It is a further cause.
• Thus, human decisions matter. To themselves, in that decisions help shape one’s further destiny, but also to the world, as, say, the outline of the Battle of Britain shaped the outcome of the war and hence of the operative possibilities after that.

This is a much broader canvas than is painted on by materialists, by those who think death is the end, by those who cannot see human activity as meaningful because taking place on “a 3rd class planet circling a 4th class star,” etc.

Only half an hour, but get some more sleep and either return to this or not.

Seems like you gave us a lot to think of in a very short half-hour. Till next time, thanks.