The Archetypes of the Trinity

I’ve been reading Erich Neumann’s The Origins and History of Consciousness (Amazon affiliate link), and I got to thinking about the notion of the Hero in light of some of Neumann’s writings.

One of the things that I find interesting about Neumann that I either missed or overlooked in Jung and other writers is the notion of hunger.

Yin-yang symbol; one black dot within a larger body of white and a white dot within a larger body of black. Both the dots and the bodies are identical to each other. — Yin-yang symbol common among Eastern religions, symbolizing the relationship between order and chaos.

The traditional understanding of the Hero’s Journey as posited by Campbell is that the Hero mediates between life and death.

But this is a binary system; it permits for good and evil, and the Hero is good and the world (or the element of it which is danger and chaos) is evil.

The problem with this symbolism is that the nature of life as changing is recognized, but the truth of reality and being is overlooked.

What Neumann points out that I haven’t seen other writers talk about is that the interchange between life and death is facilitated by hunger, and it occurred to me:

Archetypally understood life and death are not states we experience within our lives. We experience hunger.

We have various states of hunger, and one of the ways that we can react to hunger is sacrifice. We have a near-infinite ability to consume, though doing so in excess is harmful both to us and to others. Sacrifice is choosing not to consume so that we avoid over-consumption.

Or, in short, sacrifice is a way of saying “This is enough.”

If we believe Jung, which I generally do, our consciousness is a product of the world we live in and reflects greater objective reality. This is really Jung’s revolutionary idea. Jung expresses a statement that our consciousness is a product, which is the prevalent ideal of postmodernism but which by itself is dangerous. He also recognizes the traditional belief, that of the objective reality, that has shaped Western thought from primordial times.

When we take both these points together, the symbols of life and death do not answer the question. For instance, Buddhism teaches that the path to nirvana is to avoid hunger, but this is often wreathed in symbols of death; the highest goal is the end of a cycle of endless and miserable life in a broken world, which is not necessarily something which would be unworthy of human effort. However, as the only goal of being, the mere cessation of suffering is a lowly goal. The Hero and their contribution to the world are overlooked in the abstract.

Let’s look at the concept of the Christian Trinity. The Trinity is God; God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This is a confusing way of expressing things, since it is one entity expressed as three distinct entities, but there is an archetypal reason for the existence of the Trinity.

Let’s start with Jung’s assertion that undifferentiated God is equivalent to life; life understood as Logos and divine and perfect. Note that this is distinct from Jung’s views on Christianity; when I speak of God here I speak of an abstract figure. Jung’s interpretation of the Trinity and the God the Father within it is heretical, because he views it as a symbol of the individual’s mind, rather than a divine entity (there are other reasons that this is true, but I don’t want to get bogged down in them).

This undifferentiated God is the Trinity in complex, but it is difficult to understand why Christianity would have elements of Christ and the Holy Spirit on the same level as God the Father, when other Abrahamic religions distinguish between Christ and God (if they accept Christ as having any connection to the divine).

Within the Trinity, God the Father is associated with paradise and the perfect future, the Word/Logos, and divine will that leads away from damnation. I think it is fair to say that an archetypal understanding of God paints him as life itself, and other Abrahamic religions that do not include Christ, including gnosticism, recognize this element of God.

Christ’s own statements about His nature are confusing in this light: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.” (John 14:6, NASB)

How can one entity bring another into itself? Wouldn’t the union logically be with Christ, and not with God, if the two are the same entity?

This is where Neumann’s concept of hunger comes into play.

If we forego the dualist conception of life and death as opposites, and instead consider them as polar ends of a broader scale of hunger, with all things existing between them, we see differently.

The Hero always exists to triumph over death, but they do this through sacrifice. Sacrifice is the only way we can create more life than there would otherwise be. This is because of the world’s entropic nature. It is not an accident that it is eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, of engaging with hunger, is the sin that begins all the suffering in the world, because it is hunger that symbolizes the world as is, and neither life or death can exist within that spectrum.

The Hero moves everything toward life, but everything falls toward death of its own accord.

Christ is the ultimate Hero. He goes into the realm of the dead by an act of sacrifice that includes not only physical death but also humiliation and torment and mockery and a black mark on his secular legacy. People will, until the end of days, ask why Christ did not use His power to save Himself, and they will use this to justify denying Him.

However, this ultimate sacrifice defeats death. It is no longer something to be feared, because life has entered into it. In classical Christianity, there is this idea that Christ descends into Sheol and ascends with the spirits of the righteous dead, bringing them to Paradise where they live with the Father.

The concept of the Hero is common, and an archetypal understanding of Christ and God the Father is simple. Jung was hung up in particular about the idea of three figures, though. They do not fit the life-death dichotomy, because two questions cannot have three answers.

Considering life, death, and hunger instead of the dualism, we see a place for the Holy Spirit within the Trinity, and this actually answers some important questions about the Christian life.

The Holy Spirit is the replacement for hunger. Christ has conquered death, but hunger remains, a corrupting influence that makes us unfit for true life.

The Holy Spirit replaces the hunger that resides within every person. The Hero only denies hunger, and for this reason no story of the Hero ever will be complete, because the Hero still has to face death. Even victory over death is victory over death for the Hero alone, because succumbing to hunger (in the form of original sin, if not deliberate sin during one’s lifetime) makes one unworthy of archetypal true life.

The Holy Spirit exists to give us a guide toward the life we ought to live; it is God’s answer to our hunger. I think that Pascal best describes this in his Pensees:

“What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.”
Blaise Pascal, Pensées VII

This is one of the reasons why the understanding of the Trinity as God in an undifferentiated state is important; God has replaced death and God has replaced hunger for those who follow him.

Reflections on Aphorisms #107

Well, today was more productive than the last couple days, so that’s a good start. Car’s fixed, life’s good.

I’m still feeling some lingering anxiety, perhaps from the past couple weeks, perhaps due to money. I’m not hurting on money right now, but I’m basically barely breaking even and using savings to pay for my master’s program. In the long-run, I think that’s a good strategy if it works, but in the short term it’s risky.

Aphorism 147

The most deceitful persons spend their lives in blaming deceit, so as to use it on some great occasion to promote some great interest. (Maxim 124)
François de La Rochefoucauld

Interpretation

One of the things that I often find myself dealing with is the idea that I might be myself one of the liars that I claim to detest.

Of course, I don’t think that this is true (though you’ll have to take my word for it), but I’ve always wondered about the idea of self-deception.

I’ve been reading some of Kazuo Ishiguro’s work again, and one of the things that is a recurring theme in his work is the idea of self-deception and how it colors our concepts of the world around us. Particularly in The Remains of the Day, which might be one of his more famous works, this sort of self-deception in memory is a common staple in his work.

I’m not entirely sure that I’m dishonest, but if I am it’s (typically–I have not achieved moral perfection and likely never will) without my own awareness of it.

I used to find Descartes interesting, but a little eccentric. I personally adhere to a deontological philosophy (albeit a nuanced one), and I’ve found some of Descartes’ teachings interesting.

But I always used to find Descartes’ demon something of a self-indulgent thought exercise.

After all, I’m sort of a meat and potatoes guy, and I’ve always been of the idea that the simplest solution is typically the most likely. If I see and feel things, that means that they’re there. One can trust one’s perceptions when they present things that are simple.

But part of the problem with this is that there’s a major distinction between perception and consciousness.

I may perceive a light, but am I conscious of it? Most of the time, probably not, if we’re being honest. My desk lamp is something that I think of only when it is too dark and I become conscious of the lack of light, or when something goes wrong and I must get it going again.

For most of my waking, even if I sit at my desk, I am not conscious of the lamp. It sits in my field of vision, but I have culled it from my awareness because it is not something interesting. I do consider it quite a good lamp, but that’s not even enough to make me aware of its presence (and small little bouts of gratitude about everyday things like that would probably improve my life quite a bit).

If I am not really conscious of something that sits in front of me almost all the time, how can I be conscious of the greater meaning of existence?

It seems unlikely.

The only way to be honest is to admit that I am flawed and may not be reliable.

Resolution

Never assume that I am correct in my assumptions.

Make statements of truth carefully.

Don’t make doubt out to be a vice.

Reflections on Aphorisms #106

Not a whole lot of productivity today either. I’ve become hooked on Stranger Things and I just can’t seem to function. Though, to be fair, I spent a lot of time waiting in the auto shop to try and get my car fixed today.

Turns out it’s going to cost more than I expected. Take longer, too, which isn’t such a big deal because I don’t need to drive anywhere any time soon, but it’s a bad turn all ways ‘round.

Aphorism 146

Our repentance is not so much sorrow for the ill we have done as fear of the ill that may happen to us. (Maxim 180)
François de La Rochefoucauld

Interpretation

One of the things that’s been on my mind recently is horror fiction, and what makes things scary.

It’s not necessarily the unknown; we actually have a part of us that relishes novel experiences and that which we cannot predict. The unknown is often scary, but it’s not that bad by itself.

Uncertainty is much worse.

We can deal with the unknown because we have a schema for it; we are either in charge of our world or we are not, and we respond accordingly.

On the other hand, when we have uncertainty, it puts us in a dilemma.

It’s not the unknown that scares us, it’s the unknown that we don’t have an answer for that poses a threat.

And this isn’t necessarily to say that it’s the only threat we can face; people can take a fearful and anxious approach to the unknown. However, uncertainty strikes everyone equally.

Of course, the strength of conviction and belief can be stronger in some than in others (for instance, it’s possible to accept uncertain things if the uncertainty is low in emotional and psychological value), and not everyone will be crippled by uncertainty or find it odious.

I’m in a stage of my life where I’ve embraced a lot of uncertainty in exchange for the promise of a potential future.

The question I have to ask myself is whether I can maintain my value in the face of potential disaster, if I can keep going when I am opening myself to potentially losing more than I ever have.

Of course, the great practical reminder here is that everyone else still seems to be making it in the world, even if they’re not living their dreams. The number of people who are abjectly miserable is probably fairly low, and even then a lot of people who are really struggling are living in a way that leads them toward that path and could change it if they were conscious of the interactions between things in their life and psyche that create those conditions.

Resolution

Pursue value, not certainty.

Make decisions based on the future, not the present.

Bolster the strength of my faith and conviction.

Reflections on Aphorisms #97

Today was a good day overall. Not a hyper-productive days, but I give myself a reprieve on Sundays. My morning was not particularly a high point (I need to stop getting in arguments online), but the rest of the day proceeded more or less amicably.

The best part is that I feel like I am going to be very well-prepared for tomorrow, which is a good feeling to go to bed with.

Aphorism 136

There may be good but there are no pleasant marriages. (Maxim 113)
François de La Rochefoucauld

Interpretation

One of the things that I am convinced of is that we have a false association between that which is good and that which is pleasant.

Of course, there is something to be said for the idea that good things often lead to good outcomes; on a certain level this is naturally inherent, whether it is because you believe that good actions are in line with God’s will or because what we define as good is in line with what has been evolutionarily advantageous (or, if you’re someone like Carl Jung, both).

I’m not a married man. I might be a marrying man, but I’ve never really committed to relationships. This doesn’t mean that I look down on commitment; I actually respect it quite a bit, but I haven’t found within me the spark I need to do so.

Rochefoucauld’s point here speaks to me in part because some of my hesitancy with long-term relationships revolves around this notion. I’ve been blessed enough to have a generally pleasant life. There have been some interludes of misery, often quite profound misery, sometimes misery that has scarred me and sometimes misery that I can’t even remember. To give an example of the latter sort, I did quite a number on my foot this morning, for instance, swinging it back into a plastic hard-shell case and then forward into the runner of an office chair, which I was pulling toward myself. Only when trying to recall this sort of insignificant misery did I remember it, so I don’t think it’s worth mentioning.

The profound and awful misery, the kind I can remember, centers around the worst treatment I’ve ever received. I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with unkindness (in small doses), though I also believe that it tends to be counterproductive, but there’s a point at which one crosses the threshold to deliberate destruction. Only upon reflection do I look at some of the examples of events in my life which could reasonably be called unjust. A “mentor” who took every opportunity to condemn and tear down. Companions who were quick to coerce with fists and manipulation, but slow to provide support.

The thing that scares me the worst out of everything in the world (except perhaps dark outdoors spaces) is that in these situations I was incapable of seeing the damage I was sustaining. I knew on an intuitive level, but I never was able to communicate what it was. I sustained tremendous losses both on a practical level (thousands of dollars of wasted tuition, months of wasted life) and a psychological one (exaggerated feelings of inadequacy, a lingering block against looking people in the eyes).

I guess that this pain, although not the sole factor, is a major block in me developing serious relationships. As much as I hated receiving it, I would hate to become that thing which brings profound misery into other peoples’ lives. I want to believe that we can call these things evil, that they can only stem from malicious intent; Jordan Peterson has an excellent working definition of evil which can be paraphrased as “the deliberate causation of harm” if you don’t recall his much better way of saying it.

I’m not sure that all suffering comes from evil, or at least not conscious evil.

In this sense, I think that one of the difficulties in having a good relationship is that it’s painful, because you need to rid yourself of the things which make you evil. That’s not possible, because we’re flawed and victimized and broken and incapable. But if you do it right you get most of the way there, which is really all we can ask for.

With that said, I think that Rochefoucauld is wrong.

There are good and pleasant things in the world. That’s part of the reason the world exists, at least according to my faith in God. We’re given this sandbox to explore, and sure sometimes the sand is made of dead things and we’re responsible for a great deal of harm, but just because we suck doesn’t mean that we’ve been rejected and sent to a sort of grand cosmic penal colony. Actually, it might, and given my fairly dour take on things like original sin and the total depravity of man I suppose that I kind of believe that. But that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing good in the world.

And if there’s one thing good, it’s two people coming together in a union that makes something more than 1+1. Marriage is a tool for the creation of families, and the creation of children, and there’s something divine in that.

I’m also from the sort of sect that is totally fine with marital relations and doesn’t make you feel guilty about them. I don’t know what the rules were back in Rochefoucauld’s day (Rome was sometimes a bit of a stickler about these things), but at least in more Protestant sects marriage is a pretty good deal on that front. We read the whole “be fruitful and multiply” commandment as being a free pass, basically.

Yeah, the moment to moment may sometimes suck, but it’s that passing sort of misery; the “accidentally slam your foot into something behind you then compensate by trying to fracture your toes on a chair” sort of misery. It’s not something that you’ll look back on later and even think about, because unless you let it become pathological and obsessive, you’re not going to care. The good parts will win out in the end.

To wrap up, because I’ve gone longer than usual:

Marriage is generally unpleasant because we’re unpleasant.
Connecting to people means opening yourself, and you can get hurt (or worse, you can hurt them).
I’m going to remain happily single until I work out some of my issues.
Man, marriage could actually be a good thing.

Resolution

Be the person someone would marry in their right mind.

Recognize that there is no perfection in a person.

Don’t let scars eat at my soul. That’s a stupid way to give the wicked what they want.

Reflections on Aphorisms #91

Today was a moderately successful day. I didn’t get as much physical activity or writing done, but now that I have classes (which I’m very much currently ahead on) I can justify that a little.

I also have been getting better at trying to spitball some of the writing I’ve been doing instead of waiting to perfect it in my head. I’ve been listening to Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and trying to follow some of the advice there.

Aphorism 129

The passions possess a certain injustice and self interest which makes it dangerous to follow them, and in reality we should distrust them even when they appear most trustworthy.
François de La Rochefoucauld

Interpretation

One of the things about emotion is that it tends to lead us toward things that further emotion.

If we want to feel good, we tend to lead ourselves in paths that gratify us, and we slowly develop an attachment to our own pleasure.

I forget who once said that we tend to continue doing whichever behaviors we reward in ourselves, though I’m sure that it’s a common sentiment enough that it’s been echoed and repeated to the point that you could lose yourself in a rabbit hole. Maybe Jung, or even Nietzsche? It follows some of the biological nature of the brain as a system that tends to follow both chemical processes and associations between neurons, and I’ve definitely heard it described in that language by someone who has been in the 21st century (Jordan Peterson?), though I feel like its origins may even be classical.

To a certain extent, one could also extend the idea to Rochefoucauld.

Passions are generally bad not because we should stifle our emotions and get rid of them, but because passions represent the emotion as the sole driver of our decision-making process. We need emotions so that we can prioritize things. Of course, emotion serves as a simplifying heuristic; “liking” or “disliking” something based on experience or prediction is much simpler than making a rational decision every time it comes up, but can often lead to equally good results. Going further, however, emotions are part of what makes the human experience worth living through.

Yes, emotions often include suffering, and passions are dangerous, but they’re also responsible for everything we perceive as good. Happiness in itself has no place on the scale of vice and virtue, but the purpose of virtue is to foster as much happiness as possible on a grand cosmic scale (even if it means sacrifice and struggle in the short-term) made possible through an understanding of truth and meaning.

Passions are often the result of seeking happiness above seeking virtue. It’s the desire to have the meal without the work, metaphorically speaking. There’s a children’s story in the vein of Aesop in which I believe a chicken (I should remember; animal symbols often carry archetypal significance) works to sow seeds of corn but the other animals do not help, despite being asked to help. Of course, when the harvest comes, everyone asks the chicken if they can share in the food, but the chicken keeps the grain for itself.

Without delving into the morals of the story, acting on passion is similar to desiring that which is unearned. Although passion is not necessarily innately wrong, since there are justifiable reasons for the actions that can be ascribed to passion flowing out of a desire for justice and righteousness, the fact remains that the passionate are prone to be deceived and preyed upon by those who can manipulate their emotions.

Worse, passions tend to undo the clarity of mind that would be needed to safely act upon them. Even if a wise person can rely on their feelings above the knowledge they have acquired and the counsel of peers and sages in a single instance, in repetition they wind up preparing themselves to act on passion when they believe they are simply considering the input of their emotion.

Resolution

Make emotion one counselor among many.

Avoid entitlement.

Don’t do something in an emergency that I would not do in principle.

Reflections on Aphorisms #81

An interesting thing that I’ve found as I work through the aphorisms is that there are ones that I don’t feel like I can talk about when I first examine them, and then later return to them and feel comfortable expounding on them.

I’m not sure to what degree this reflects growth and to which degree it reflects the various mindsets required to engage with a text, but I find it interesting.

Sometimes it’s the case that a point that I’ll come to while discussing one aphorism will reflect itself in another aphorism, which isn’t surprising when one focuses primarily on maxims by a single person.

This one from Rochefoucauld is another example: a few days ago I skipped over this aphorism in favor of another one (you can see it here), in part because I didn’t have anything to say about it. Now I do.

Aphorism 119

What we term virtue is often but a mass of various actions and divers interests, which fortune, or our own industry, manage to arrange; and it is not always from valour or from chastity that men are brave, and women chaste. (Maxim 1)
François de La Rochefoucauld

Interpretation

Humans are and are not moral creatures, depending on how you define them. The problem is that as with most matters which defy simple classification neither really satisfies the truth.

People can be moral creatures, and that sets us apart from everything else we’ve found in the universe. We’re capable of making decisions based on guiding principles, not just the experiences and stimuli around us.

However, that doesn’t mean that we always are. Consciousness is expensive, and we budget our attention toward the things that we view as important in the moment.

What that means practically is that more of our actions and reactions are reflex, or subconscious, than we would like. This is pretty logical, really; we don’t know exactly how much unconscious stuff we do because it’s precisely unconscious. If it’s happening and it works, then we don’t think about it.

One of the biological functions of guilt is to discourage patterns of behavior that are known to bear consequences. If I spend more money than I’ve made in a week and then notice that I’m headed in the wrong direction financially, I feel a little guilt about it. It’s a manifestation of the worries I have about my future state, even if I can’t explicitly communicate that to myself.

When we do things with unknown consequences or we actually manage to avoid everything that we associate with guilt through supreme effort, we assume automatically that it is a form of virtue.

The problem is that virtue isn’t just avoiding the things that earn us guilt.

Virtue is strength. It’s a moral sort of strength, one which does not grant mastery of others, but it’s strength nonetheless.

One of the problems with strength is that it’s relative. I can go about my daily life without doing anything that I would consider at the outer edge of my physical capacities, but that doesn’t mean that I would be considered strong. I might be “strong enough” but even that is a relative description.

Virtue is the same way. You might look at honesty and say “Well, I don’t lie on my taxes.”

That’s very good!

It’s also pretty much nothing. There’s a giant penalty for lying on your taxes. You’re forced to be honest, or at least lie well enough to get away with it, and most of us are bad liars and know that on at least an unconscious level. If you aren’t, you’re gonna get a whole lotta pain, and that could be what’s driving the honesty.

If you could make a universal statement (“I don’t lie.”) that would be a virtue. Of course, virtue being a relative strength it may be impossible to really have perfect virtue. But if every time you were to tell a lie you instead chose honesty you’d be making a lot of progress. There are further forms of dishonesty, of course: omission, over-statement, miscellaneous deception, and “white lies”” all degrade the virtues of honesty and integrity.

However, the struggle is what forms virtue. It’s not an inherent thing that some people have and others don’t, which is part of the reason why the virtuous don’t have any claim to superiority. Virtue is an interaction between the individual and the universe (to put it in hippy language; I’d argue that it’s an interaction between the individual and God), and it has to be found outside the individual’s disconnected being.

Choosing virtue may be laudable, but virtue itself is revealed. Nobody can claim to be closer to it than anyone else, because the problem with a choice is that it overlooks two key points.

First, for every virtue one chooses, there are likely virtues they have not developed.

Second, a choice is not permanent. It can be reversed. The virtuous person is not in a fixed state of virtue, and can throw away everything in a moment of moral compromise.

Resolution

Don’t enter into moral compromise.

Look for opportunities to develop virtue.

Remember that all morality is shaped by our relation to the universe.

Reflections on Aphorisms #72

Short reflection today because I’ve been bad about getting started in a timely fashion. Fortunately some of my bigger time crunches are getting done soon, so it shouldn’t be an issue for much longer.

Aphorism 110

Reason is God’s gift; but so are the passions: reason is as guilty as passion.
John Henry Newman

Interpretation

One of the things that I think people overlook about reason is the fact that it’s a neurochemical process.

Now, that’s not to say that I don’t believe that there’s more to the brain than just chemistry; I’m a religious man, and that means that I have some belief in our humanity stretching deeper than we can know.

However, I’m also not ignorant of science, and I know that a lot of how our brain works is basically electricity and chemicals.

A lot of what we consider to be really important to us is nothing more than a function that’s going on. Our emotions, for instance, seem highly driven by our brain chemistry. Consciousness is a little more complicated, which is part of the reason we don’t understand it very much.

Even so, we’d be foolish to assume that our own biological limitations are not in play with every act of reason.

One of the things that I am kind of fixated on is the idea that we’re heuristic beings. We work based off of slapdash jury-rigging, cognitively speaking, and we don’t have a whole lot of self-awareness for what’s carefully considered and what is a hack to get through the day alive.

Like, think of phobias. If you can’t do certain things, you’re at a distinct disadvantage, but it’s also really useful for your brain to just out-and-out say “I’m not a fan of dark places” when you’re thinking about going into a dark place, because you don’t know what danger’s there.

Reason may exist on a level above the heuristic, but it’s still drawn from it. Deliberately thinking about things can let us achieve a new perspective, but it’s the same pair of eyes feeding those observations as feed our intuition.

The other day I shared a diagram in which I pointed out that there’s basically three fundamental parts to the universe as it pertains to us : the predictable future, the expected unknown, and the entirely unknown.

The predictable future is what our heuristics and reason try to grasp, and reason goes a step further into the expected unknown.

The problem with reason is that it can only turn unknown to expected unknown, rather than unknown into predictable future.

Never forget that our limitations are a lot more than they look. We’re basically miracle boxes, but even then we’re squishy ones with not a whole lot of stored information.

Resolution

Don’t forget to evaluate my assumptions.

The unknown remains the unknown, even if you think you’ve figured it out. Don’t assume there’s a fundamental difference between its two states.

Go fast when the heuristics are good.

Reflections on Aphorisms #68

I’ve got a bad thing going on where I keep writing right next to bed-time, so it’s going to be another single aphorism night.

However, I Think this one is going to be interesting, even though the writer is anonymous. It’s an interesting point, though.

Aphorism 106

Clever liars give details, but the cleverest don’t.
Anonymous

Interpretation

Lies are a funny thing. They’re a difficult thing to do well, even though they come naturally to us.

A lie is an attempt to tell an alternative account than that which exists in the universe, and it’s something which is associated both with intelligence (since good liars need to be smart) and foolishness (because you can’t outrun reality).

One of the things that we notice is that people who are lying often go to great lengths to justify their lies, and people who are not will be very comfortable in telling a story that’s much more barebones.

I’ve studied how social engineers do things, and one of the things that’s really interesting is that they don’t actually try to tell good lies most of the time, even though they have to deceive people to do their jobs right.

Instead, they start with befriending people and only once they’ve gotten some territory will they actually tell a lie. When they do, they always keep it vague, and usually their stories pass muster. If you say there’s a problem with an elevator, for instance, that’s a lot better than saying what the problem is.

One of the things that this ties into is a sort of peculiar injunction to honesty. The best lies lack details because they can’t match reality (at least, not on purpose).

By leaving out details, you give enough room for the people on the receiving end to fill in the picture you paint. In a sense, you use a falsehood cloaked in the reality which is known to other people.

After all, how much do any of us really know about our surroundings? Probably not all that much, even if we’re trained for situational awareness. We have a lot of heuristics, however, and our heuristics are fairly broad so that we can adapt to as many situations as possible. You want to be flexible enough to manage almost anything, not left in the dust when the smallest change occurs.

The problem is that this provides a sort of extension of proto-reality, potential presents and futures that cover the space beyond our senses.

The diagram above indicates a sort of diagram of how I conceive the mind’s state in the universe.

It’s “not to scale” as it were, in the sense that I’ve chosen the angles to make the diagram neatly legible rather than as any sort of statement about how the mind works.

In the center you have the heuristic, and the heuristic would actually extend as a full circle and overlap with validation.

This is the way we think about the world.

Notice that the heuristic extends into the unknown; this is a reflection of the unconscious and the role it plays in shaping the psyche, and is where subconscious bias and other formative factors that we aren’t necessarily aware of play.

Part of the heuristics section is the validation. This is the place where our perceived current and past realities match our expectations. Although this appears to be getting broader, it’s worth noting that the degree to which this is actually part of our heuristics may be inflated by the fact that we are generally conscious of those things which we expect.

Again, the representation here is not to scale.

We have the expected future out front. This is where our expectations meet reality in a relatively accurate fashion. If I expect for the sun to come up tomorrow, and I am correct, then this is an assumption based on my heuristic that I can safely put in the expected future.

Think of this as the prediction spot.

Next you have the expected unknown (E.U. in the chart). These are the places where we know that something will happen, but we aren’t sure what. Although I’ve diagrammed this as a relatively small portion, I think that for many people, especially people like me who tend to navel gaze, this is actually a large part of our minds and heuristics. Think about it this way: I don’t know that my commute in the morning will be pleasant, so I plan for it being potentially painful.

Last, we have the blind unknown. To a certain degree this is shaping our heuristic, but it represents all of the past, present, and future that we are not consciously aware of. This is a place with very real meaning, but we cannot discern or decipher it. This is certainly under-represented on the graph. It should probably extend in all directions beyond the heuristic and known.

A good lie plays with the expected unknown. If I know that the elevator may break, and that it is important to keep it maintained, I will not question an elevator maintenance crew showing up at my facility once in a while. I may not even question them moving around, since they may have to talk to people to do their jobs. I don’t know this for sure, but it’s logical enough.

If the person who’s showed up to fix the elevator tells me that they’re there because the elevator keeps getting stuck on Floor 3 and they’re going to need to talk to Mr. Smith in his office, the lie has gotten a lot more complex. If someone says the wrong thing next time or if there is no Mr. Smith (or worse, no Floor 3), it will cause the obvious conflict with reality to pop to the forefront.

Resolution

Check my heuristics.

Don’t lie.

Don’t use information to obscure reality.

Reflections on Aphorisms #67

Well, I’ve been on a bit of a historical kick recently, so let’s start today with an aphorism about history. My bedtime’s coming up soon, so if I only wind up with one aphorism (as has been the norm this week), please forgive me.

Aphorism 105

The major fact about history is that in large part it appears criminal.
W. E. Arnold, Jr.

Interpretation

In many cases, I like to try and look up some of the more obscure figures featured in books on aphorisms to try and integrate some parts of their biography into their picture.

Whoever W. E. Arnold, Jr. is, they’re not very good at being found, and as far as I can tell this quote is found only in a handful of selections of aphorisms (namely the Viking Book of Aphorisms and the Faber Book of Aphorisms, which are fundamentally the same text) and nobody has taken the effort to fully explain who exactly they are referring to. I’ve even seen this quote attributed to a Thomas Arnold, but I have uncovered no clue of the aphorist’s identity other than his name.

So, basically, I can’t read context into this to give a deeper background.

I will say, however, as a student of history that this generally rings true.

I think that there’s a couple elements to this:

First, the past carries traditions and ideas that are different than ours.

Second, the truth of the matter is that we’re worse than we like to think.

As much as humanity shares key core foundations, it also has expressed itself in dramatically different ways over recorded history, and doubtless for a good time before that.

Behavioral psychologists have stated that every expression is the product of stimulus and response. While this is not wholly incorrect, it’s reductive in its understanding of human minds.

Jordan Peterson, author of Maps of Meaning, which I highly recommend to anyone looking for an introduction to Jungian-style psychology, argues that the behaviorists missed one key detail: perception.

It is this which gives us the differences from our predecessors, because our perceptions have changed. We still respond to the good and the bad in fundamentally similar ways, but we have redefined what they are.

Sometimes, in the case of phenomena like religion, we even introduce new concepts that we can group stimuli into. A Christian perspective is very different from the pagan ones of the Classical world, and the Abrahamic religions came to prevalence largely because of the ways that they viewed suffering and success. By encouraging incredible degrees of sacrifice and commitment, and actively forbidding the practice of other worldviews, they were able to stamp out almost every other major worldview across a whole continent (and beyond).

Because the system is so complex, it’s difficult to categorize. Sometimes the people of the past did things that would seem barbarous to us, but which served practical and ritual purposes no more malign than the act of brushing our teeth.

At times, they did things that we can aspire to, but for motives that would disgust our sensibilities.

We don’t have to pass judgment on them, though I am convinced that the denizens of the past never achieved peak moral virtue just as we the living have not.

And this is another point: oftentimes when we look at bad people in history, they were bad by their day’s standards. We certainly have people around the world today who will go down in history as villains unless their worldview goes on to predominate all others.

Sometimes they weren’t condemned in their time. Nobody complained about Julius Caesar’s borderline genocidal war of aggression in Gaul, or at least nobody who amounts to anything (and, when they did complain, it was to oppose Caesar rather than decry his abuse of the Gauls).

However, it’s worth noting that we have the same people in our world.

Joseph Campbell once wrote that “All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells are within you.”

Now, you can say what you will about Campbell. I view him as somewhat of a flawed personality, but one who was nonetheless brilliant. He falls somewhere between Freud and Jung on the scale of “Brilliant but crippled by neurosis and brilliant but too far beyond what has come before” of tragic genius.

Campbell was definitely correct in identifying the archetypal element of consciousness, though he definitely leaned toward the New Age style of thought that there was a universal trend toward good that we don’t see played out in reality.

This quote, though, is incredibly strong, and it’s the last part that I want to look at, namely the notion that all the hells reside within a person.

This is, of course, analogous to the Jungian shadow, the part of the psyche that we repress, but it’s also something beyond it. All people engage in conscious malice–evil–and have that within their nature. We may simply be blind to our own fault, making us unconsciously evil, but it should be self-evident if we look within ourselves as well as evident from the laws passed down to us that we engage in behaviors that are destructive with no real gain.

Of course, people are also noble, and it is worth pointing out that there can be no nobility without the opportunity for the opposite (this is, in part, the point of Job), and the conflict between nobility and evil is a struggle which is hard-fought by people throughout history.

Resolution

Rise above human nature.

Pay attention to how my perception shapes my decisions, and how my desire shapes my perception.

Don’t overlook the reality that others are complex.

Reflections on Aphorisms #58

Ugh, I’m falling back into a rut.

I’m going to make myself go get some serious exercise tomorrow morning and cut back on caffeine to try and make things easier. I’m just having issues focusing on anything, which is not a good recipe for being productive.

With that said, let’s begin.

Aphorism 92

In summary, modernity replaced process with result and the relational with the transactional.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from The Bed of Procrustes

Interpretation

Newton sparked a shift in our understanding of the world toward a modern empirical “rational” model.

Jung’s work with archetypes has become so significant in our day and age, because the change is so fundamental that we left a lot of things behind in our haste.

Now, it’s worth noting that the modern view probably presents a better objective picture of the world. It’s blind to everything outside our senses, and as a result it tends to result in less bias.

However, the shift from the classical and ancient to the modern also deprived us of things.

Alchemy, for instance, when understood psychologically, provides a series of changes and alterations that can impact the mind. The four steps of classical alchemy (darkening, whitening, yellowing, reddening) each reflect a life process; losing innocence, finding virtue, and so on and so forth.

Now, there were alchemists who believed in literally making things into gold, but even they were enlightened to the psychological nature (or willfully blind to it) of the field because of the notion of “as above, so below” that pervades alchemical thought.

This “as above, so below” is what we lost in the transition to the modern age.

The alchemists associated everything with great mythical and religious mysteries. Nothing existed without a will guiding it, a divine spark of being that led it to act in the way it did.

The work of Newton and Einstein serves us a whole lot better when we wish to accomplish things, but it lacks the integration with a cohesive worldview that the alchemists enjoyed.

When Taleb says we have replaced the process with the result, he refers to how we have stripped the psychological valence from everyday things.

The word “profane” actually serves as an antonym to the word “holy” in its function. We have stripped the mysteries of life of their sacred meaning, and we do so at our own peril. Think of the mystery of conception and child-birth (now considered little more than a biological process) or the mystery of the sun and moon cycles. These dominated myth, and are often given value by even relatively secularized and ecumenical religions.

A diagram showing an overview of common sacred and profane elements over time. Made by me. The faded colors on the modern side indicate increased individual variance.

The concept of the sacred and profane still exists, though it is hidden in different language and the responses have changed. We have some common elements between them (namely, social elites are always associated with being sacred figures, outsiders or ignorant people are considered profane), but the actual functioning of this is different.

Some of this stems from the fact that individuals have a greater latitude for independent moral judgment in the modern age, creating a greater variance in what is classified as sacred or profane. Part of it is also simply down to the fact that reason-based worldviews, though often flawed, should not require as much dogmatic conviction as, say, a faith-based worldview would. In thepry, dogmatic conviction is supposed to be diametrically opposed to rational thought, though it is never too far off in practice.

One of the things that has also changed here is the relationship. Some of this has to do with increased size of social circles, but it also comes down to what is sacred.

Most “sacred” (here referring to both religious and secular cultural expressions) traditions place a strong value on the family, and this is what archetypal thought goes back into. The family serves as a model for future interactions outside the family, because it is the most familiar unit of relationships (see the etymological relation?) but also the earliest that most people have conscious experience of.

A strictly rational worldview, however, doesn’t necessarily view relationship as being terribly important. So long as one fulfills obligations, and obligations are fulfilled in return, the transaction is completed to mutual benefit.

Falling more in the ancient than the modern camp in this issue, I think that this was a defining reason for my stressed relationships with many of my more modern-minded family members. Coming from a position that I have always held where certain things are expected in a relationship (with some degree of flexibility to respect the individual; i.e. you wouldn’t ask the same things of every mother or every brother), the fact that many of my family members felt and experienced love in a more transactional way was lost on me as a youth.

Now, I don’t want to condemn this; the people that I find to be like this are often great role models, but the difference in communication creates perceived deficiencies.

I think it’s also fair to say that we’re not wholly modern. Or, perhaps, that the modern worldview has not wholly dominated the collective conscious expression of humanity.

Resolution

Be patient with those different from myself.

Don’t forget to speak the same language as other people.