Identity notes and research

Identity: 

Carl Truman: our cosmetic surgery or gender reassignment surgery displays bids 'for the total sovereignty of the individual with regard to personal identity.' We feel we ought to be able to choose who we are rather than being told who we are.

On identity linked to sexuality Rosaria Butterfield (Po-mo professor at uni and LGBT activist until she got saved) makes a good point: 

Sin is our biggest enemy (not the particular ways we're tempted to sin). Original sin distorts us. Actual sin distracts us, and indwelling sin manipulates us. And by us I mean Christians. If we look at sin as merely making a mistake, then we just need a new iPhone app, and we don't need a saviour. 

Notes from: The Empty Self 'gnostic and Jungian Foundations of Modern Identity'

In keeping with his view that all aspects of human psychology were ultimately traceable to erotic frustrations of various kinds Freud tried to show that Leonardo's (da vinci) immense creativity arose out of an underlying homosexual conflict.

However the answer to a lot of back and forth about the source and motive of Leonardo's greatness Jeffery Satinover notes:

In Leonardo we directly witness the only god there really is: human greatness 

Leonardo was the very prototype of modern identify formation - identity rooted in personal grandeur

Paganism and polytheism:

In the 1800s, Shelly averred that 'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.'

James Hillman agreed and justified this Jungian restructuring of modern identity saying in effect:

'There are many kinds of people and each type is governed by a different god. Each therefore has his own kind of sexuality, his own style of relationship, his own method of gaining fulfilment in work. You cannot judge a man, especially a gifted man, by the standards of one god; certainly not by the bourgeois, patriarchal standards of the so-called 'God of Israel.' Stop confronting us with the Holy One of Israel, for we are such men as will burst the bonds of all monotheistic tyranny. Leonardo and we, his many modern simulacra, are an elite, priests of Horus the falcon-god.'

In this way the door was opened to a resurgence of pagan ways of assessing and valuing human behaviour. We are not all subject to the same law of God; there are a variety of different moralities to which we may be subject, depending on to which 'god' we belong.

We see the spread of this idea in a very subtle way:

As the Renaissance proceeded, the concern with personal greatness rapidly spread. In the Middle Ages, monks and masons could toil for generations on a single illuminated manuscript or a great cathedral, and no one would ever know of them. the individual author or artist was of no account - Soli Deo Gloria: to God alone belonged the glory.

But in the Renaissance all this changed. Authors and artists began to sign their works; the pride in personal greatness slowly began to displace the greatness and glory of God.

Modern selfhood is: God stripped out of our core that we might seek our identity in self-enthronement.

The resymbolisation of the Western Psyche:

There are other examples of resymbolisation. but this is the father of them all: the psychological transformation of God into self.

Resymbolisation in Jung.

As the Judaeo-Christian tradition has weakened, spiritually-starved people have progressively replaced the very specific symbol system of the Bible, upon which Western civilisation is founded, with various mostly Eastern and pagan imports.

Good & Evil

Eden and the Fall:

The Hebrew is better translated as 'deciding for yourselves what is good and what is evil.'

The displacement of God by self is therefore also the loss of a clear, revealed vision of good and evil. How can a mind ultimately driven by natural, selfish instincts possibly generated, on its own, a vision of perfect goodness?

Thus:

nature, that which simply is (the seen real) may point to but can never replace the revelation of what should be (the unseen real)...

...The vision of the holy is, as it were, the star that we cannot touch but which points the way. To follow this star is to stand firm in the knowledge that God is wholly good.

God's vision of the good is one wherein evil is nothing but God's absence, it is not his coequal. Hell is the total absence of God as heaven is his total presence; earthly hells are his relative absence as earthly heavens are his relative presence.

Rabbit Moshe Chaim Luzzato:

...one must realise that true perfection is God's essence. every fault is merely the absence of his good and the concealment of his presence. The closeness of God and illumination of his presence is therefore the root and cause of every perfection that exists. The concealment of his presence, on the other hand, is the root and cause of every fault, the degree of deficiency depending on the degree of this concealment.

Masculine and Feminine 

As we have progressively abandoned the eternal, unseen Divine standard in favour of a sequence of transitory, visible, fallen ones, our capacity to discern good from evil, truth from lie, has diminished. In like fashion the discrimination between the true feminine and the true masculine has been lost. Human beings, as individuals or as groups, are inevitably a mixture of masculine and feminine qualities, as of good and evil ones. no one is purely masculine or feminine. But now we have lost the ability to distinguish these qualities and rightly value them. The result has been a widespread disordering of relations between men and women. And because the relationship between man and woman is the basis of the family, the destruction fo the family is progressing rapidly.

The ancient Chinese understood this as well:

The Family shows the laws operative within the household that, transferred to outside life, keep the state and the world in order.

The traditional family structure is associated with the lowest levels of psychopathology and with the highest levels of human happiness and accomplishment.

A society in which there is a large proportion of stable, traditional families - that is, with a mother who remains permanently married to a father both of whom are their children's first and only parents - will produce the highest percentage of relatively healthy individuals. the smaller the proportion of such families, the higher the rates of alcoholism and drug addiction, suicide, homosexuality, pornography, promiscuity and crime. Even physical health is profoundly affect by the presence or absence of stable family structure. 

Chapter 2: Gnosticism 

Here's a good quote that could be applied to many things:

Heresies perish not with their authors, but like the river Arethusa, though they lose their currents in one place, they rise again in another.

Sit Thomas Browne 

'Arethusa' is a (mythic) river said to start in Greece and dive under the sea to rise up again in Sicily.

Gnosticism. Gnostic thought lies in its claim that salvation may be attained through secret knowledge available only to an initiated elite.

Our word devil is cognate to the German zweifel, meaning doubt, literally 'two-cased'

Gnostic 'Salvation':

As briefly noted above, the basic principles of Gnosticism is that 'salvation; is achievable through one's own mental activity (often thought of today as higher imagination; recall Blake's comments above). Gnosticism makes a subtler, more mystical, appeal than either 'faith' or 'works'; that ultimate value is itself a mental state, and that mind is capable, on its own, of achieving it ('only eat this... and you shall know...').

 The reconciliation of Good and Evil:

In the Judaeo-Christian worldview, creation exists primarily as a field in which man lives out a struggle to make good manifest against its absence, in spite of his final inability to do so on his own.

Gnosticism begins in ascetic intellectualism. Within a few generations its followers degenerate into licence, since the instincts can never be constrained by mere intellect, let alone by falsehood. Instinctive gratification soon becomes identified with spiritual progress, the whole process of degradation being dressed-up in lofty-sounding rhetoric. when, after the French revolution, the goddess Reason was enthroned in Paris (at Our Lady), it was a prostitue who was paraded through the streets to be crowned.

On the Bible's stories and against a purely 'psychological' reading:

It is their tangible reality that inspires faith; their symbolic reality that engenders meaning.

Shocking quote at a 'Re-imagining conference' a prof at Union Theological Seminary said:

I don't think we need a theory of atonement at all. I don't think we need folks hanging on crosses and blood dripping and weird stuff.

 Jung openly considered depth psychology in general - and his in particular - to be a modern reawakening of Gnosticism which he actively promoted as superior to Christianity.

Paganism and polytheism:

It is polytheism that stands behind the mantras of 'diversity', 'tolerance' and 'inclusivity' now being so widely misused. the modern, psychologised manifestation of polytheism is the plausible idea that since people differ, there must be different standards of behaviour - hence of morality - to apply to each type of person. In polytheism there is no absolute overarching standard toward which all people need aspire. For each type of person, there is a god among the many gods. There is a god for the tribe of women (who is herself a goddess), there is a god for the tribe of warriors (who is himself warlike), there is a god for the tribe of homosexuals (who is himself pansexual), as though we are not all under one God and obliged to one law.

Psychology, Polytheism and the Worship of Instinct

In polytheism, ancient or modern, each group has its own god.

The pagan pschyotheology that  lurks behind Jungianism, and that has spread so widely within the church, is simply the psychologised worship of instinct.

Pagans make and worship idols that are mere representations of their own impulses - 'gods that are no gods' - gods of power, money, fame, violence, sexuality. In primitive societies, these idols are of wood and silver and stone; in civilised ones they are of words and concepts - an insignificance difference. In paganism, people worship at different altars because each has a different dominating instinct.

A morality which attempts to derive itself purely from psyche, with reference to nothing beyond, will end up being either overtly amoral (as with reductionistic psychologies deriving from Freud), or polytheistic (as are those spiritualistic psychologies that derive from Jung).

Occult and secret-knowledge practices: divination, astrology and 'sorcery'. Originally the drugs used in their practice was to produce a heightened state of 'consciousness'.

Chapter 3: The effect on public morals

An excellent chapter on the psychology of demons, well worth reading again!

The demonic

In his doctoral thesis concerning his cousin, the medium, Jung claimed that the spirit personality which possessed her was actually a dissociated part of herself - indeed, a superior aspect of her personality of which she consciously unaware and which she never accepted as herself.

Jung started by defining 'complexes' as normal sub-personalities within the human psyche. He continued by pointing out how an archetype forms the nucleus, as it were, of every complex. Since each archetype is merely the 'image' (representation in consciousness) of its underlying instince, this is to say that every complex develops around an instinct. The instincts are inherited; the complexes 'flesh out' the instinct with actual experience.

Jung's archetypes are what the ancients referred to as 'gods'.

KEY:

Let us examine what followes from Jung's scientific-sounding proposition that 'aciviated archetypes generate parapsychological events ' When an instinct is activated - aggression, r sexuality, or hunger, or the drive for nurturance and so on - one of the basic animal cravings is aroused and we find ourselves driven in accord with its dictates. Associated with the subjective sense of craving (or desire or intent) is a measurable physiological arousal. The 'parapsychological phenomena' somewhat more common in this state of instinctive/archetypal arousal encompass the supernatural moving of objects at a distance without physical force ('telekinesis', and example is Jung's 'catalytic exteriorisation phenomenon') and the supernatural transfer of information ('telepathy', 'precognition'). typically, these evetns occur in fragmentary, unreliable, fashion. 

As with 'syncronicity', the terms 'parapsychology', 'telepathy' and 'telekenisis' are but neologisms that relabel a class of events for which there exists no scientific explanation. Parapsychology research, such as it is, merely continues to demonstrate that its subject matter exists. 

There is however an older explanation for such events. this older view holds that 'parapsychological' phenomena are not entirely psychological, but at least in part spiritual. The events are ahrd to understand because the spirit(s) stage-managing them are deliberately deceptive - duplicitous - to boot. Of course, this older formulation attributes to the 'managers' of these events deliberation and intentionality and a certain maliciousness, that is, personality. 

Continued:

Let us restate it without the scientisms. There exist invisible, incorporeal being-like entities with a semi-independent consciousness. Each has its own intentions, attitudes and feelings. Each can, it seems, 'possess' us and make us identify with what it wants. Such beings appear most readily when our instinctive cravings are activated. they seem able to provide us with information in a supernatural but most often in a frustratingly partial, hence useless, fashion. They are capable of moving objects around at a distance, often in a frightening, noisy, mischievous fashion just as if they take special pleasure in practical jokes. 

If we de-sanitise the language and restore the orthodox biblical symbol-system, we recognise 'activated archetypes generating parapsychological events' as a description of demons. For that is precisely what demons have always been thought to be: beings with their own intentions, duplicitous, tricky and mercurial, attachable in some way to the hum mind, and appearing to feed upon unconstrained animal arousal; providing us with 'information', that is 'higher knowledge' which is a mixture of truth and falsehood.