How do we begin the wind-down of the arms race of hyper-rationality, perhaps most logically via schooling or religion, when such an initiative comes at the cost of culturally worshiped productivity and profit, our latest deieties, and with the meager and minimized benefits of spiritual and mental health to boast as valor?
The Christian concept of sin (from the Greek hamartia—to ‘miss the mark,’ an archery term that bears significance as the profession of sorts of the upright brother of Hermès, Apollo, the archer) is misidentified as fallenness from god, missing the mark’. What is it then to miss the mark, to have a faulty aim, from the perspective of god? If god is solar, and masculine, and symbolized by every culture as ‘attention’ as evidenced by the eye of Ra (the sun god), by fire gazing (which I believe to be an early focus training instrument—remaining present in the midst of an entrancing substance), by the eye atop the pyramid in US currency, and by Mesopotamian god, Marduk with his many head-encircling eyes, then let us say that the nature of god in at least one key sense (key because it is the primary cultural and religious symbol used to signify him) is attention, awareness: consciousness. Herein I find that archery term meaning to sin imbued further with meaning, for great attention must be paid to hit the mark. And for it to be a sin! What must that mean? Sin comes with consequence. Sin can be widely abstracted then because there is a way to miss the mark with lack of attention in every single behavior we perform—even every thought we have: couldn’t you always have paid better attention to what you were doing, even in routine behaviors, and similarly, couldn’t you have more carefully chosen the words with which you constructed your thoughts? The consequences of these misses can be greater or lesser, and thereby there are greater and lesser sins. I’d like to state here that I think god in the solar, paternal, heavenly, ascendant, spiritual sense is the god of attention: of hitting the mark. For man, hitting the mark means the path, the way of living matches the ideal patterns of living such that life functions despite its natural tragedies as best as can be hoped for by a being cursed with consciousness of time and therein its ability to abstract, and thereby aware of its own inevitable death, aiming truly at goodness for himself, his family, and his community; and finally, ultimately becoming a hero for having matched the heroic pattern of his forefathers along with a flourish, a hermion, perhaps that earns him an inscription in history just like those great men, men of emulation and bravery and flourish, themselves, and with a long time having passed, an inscription so deep may he become a saint, a god of his particular domain of bravery that might be counted beattitudinal, ordinal, cannonical, a worthy component of the spirit of consciousness, of god.
From the perspective of this god, man, a microcosmic representation of the spirit of attentive consciousness writ large, an observer-projector of narrative, himself, must fall short of an ultimate focus: how could man pay attention to everything? Thus man cannot become god, he can only make a more narrowly attempt inside his manageable scope and domain. Thus, to a god of all-pervasive attention (all seeing, all knowing, omnipresent) man would indeed be best characterized —especially if we place god psychologically ‘up’ above, as the sun, in the heavens where we cannot reach— as fallen, for he is naturally, physically and psychologically below indeed. Below an impossible standard of all-knowing simultaneous attention. To that god, we are certainly ‘fallen’, but that would also seem to imply strongly that we once were ‘up there’ with him.
I contend we were not. I contend alongside Neumann in many ways that in the Great move out of unconsciousness, we began on earth and have an essentially feminine unconsciousness about us. Surely we physically originated on earth. Just as surely we originated with mental hardware capable primarily of instinct, and only secondarily and only with long suffering and striving, of rationality, individuated egoic thought, the heroic impulse, hierarchical sexual selection adjusted for such behaviors—behaviors of attention: consciousness. We are an outcropping of Mother Earth. Consciousness is an accidental exaptation of the grandest ever evolutionary standalone complex; subjectivity (the god orientation—god being in part, that great observer in genesis ‘seeing that it was good’) comprised of thumbs, binocular vision, a stomach and body animated by hunger and libido, and at bottom an animal cursed to hunt (though blessed to be an aimer, an archer) by his unplantedness that lead him to meat, that brain growing protein rich source of sustenance that makes him drool like a true Pavlovian. Our brains grew due to a protein rich diet, and at that promethian moment, we were cursed to develop a pre-frontal cortex—the seat of our consciousness. We are Earth-up, not Heaven-down.
The Egyptians knew this. So did the Mesopotamians. Every culture did. All tribal cultures did. They were matriarchal and matrilocal in our earlier stages of consciousness: they did not yet attribute to the individual man (for they had very little concept of individuality by the very nature of their proto-conscious state of which I am describing here) his procreative act, but ascribed life giving and all of the awe and reverence and due feminine-centeredness of their cultures to the woman. Hence, matrilocality. Mother at the center.
Then man woke up, performed heroic deeds, began to be selected for as individual, and thereby grew over millennia the heroic instinct that recentered culture around masculinity, heroicism, and eventually worship of heroes: gods.
With cultural concepts mixing via the development of the Will to Power, libido, centroversion’s flywheel spinning faster, conquest became valorous and tribes collided. Hereby there gods did too. And where gods war, one metagod arises in the psyche of man. That god is the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and you: monotheistic god almighty, a compilation of all gods. Marvel’s unapproachable wettest dream.
That god—God had to thereby recapitulate into the masculinized collective psyche; otherwise, mass collective cognitive dissonance.
And so, like Osiris-Ra, guiding masculine culture-forming and conquering spirit god ascended, and Mother Earth god —our first and most physical (and thereby more ‘real’ to a primarily physically instantiated being)— was pressed down into subduction (and she kind of likes it. If you ask a modern woman to speak for her deep psyche: no doubt bondage is a deep psychic reminder of this hero’s reward: proper claiming of conquered territory being the prima Nocta, the spoils of war, to put it harshly.) and here began her manipulation by man goaded on by success and hierarchical sexual reward. She was taken apart by her own sons, and her daughters sided with those mother killing heroes out of fear and fascination, as they do to this day.
But a good thing, or a simple exaptation can go too far. There are such things as runaway adaptation. After accruing his resource intensive rack, his claim via battle to the female, the Irish Elk, the very target of his desire is starved of her sustenance. In his cocksure animal obsession he and all of his kind perished of his own adaptation. Like the well endowed Irish gentlemen, man’s enlightenment can, and perhaps will, go too far.
The tools of science turning from instrument of further discovery inside of a recursive falsification framework nested inside a value hierarchy have become the highest thing in the hierarchy, whereas Ra’s eye would have us more properly behold this very phenomenon and correct for it. The ends can become a means when the observer loses context of his experimentation. The fire was meant for training the attention, not the endless roasting of meat—nor the mindless gazing obsession over its mighty power; else we’d have inscribed a flame atop the structure painstakingly pointing to the highest value.
And now we may address the question: what to do when the perversion of an ideal takes the seat of the driver and yells ‘hold my beer’ and when his paychecks are signed by the car manufacturer, the insurance broker, and the beer company, all three? What great standalone complex can counter this grand gestalt?
Our first reaction seems to be a reversion to the mother, and I’d like to give that idea some room to breathe, though I am skeptical due to the implication of a ‘fall’ back into unconsciousness, as we do not have a means by which to return-to-its-evolutionary-sender some portion of our consciousness—or do we?
Consider the metaverse, 21st century lobotomization, pablum, soma; a solution in the transmutative tradition of masculinity. The job of the elite has always been to keep the plebeian class under heel. Too many bright ideas from below, or too much decadence and they grow weary of the king and begin looking at him as a juicy scapegoat. We did in fact sacrifice the first kings each year, purportedly for fertility and its psychic adjacent sustenance, but I think also for management of ego, mass catharsis, and in proper reverence for the then-subjugated queen. Thus, instead of further enlightening the masses or relinquishing the throne of exploitation, lull them to sleep, impose draconian measures—grab them by the amygdala. This seems to be the stand-in —a readily accepted one, at that— throttling back the hyper rationality that sickens our culture. Instead of discussing balance, we have convinced our women not back to some reverent matrilocality, but that they should ascend the masculine hierarchy. Feminism is masculinism larping —shittily— as its victim; it will be its victor, and so via victimhood, but will find herself inheritor of the same persistent problem:
We have gone too far. Our solutions create our problems. We must put down our Techné (what Prometheus actually stole) and rest our torches for a bit. The cave is fully lit, and it may be more frightful now than in the shadows: a future so bright you’ll have to wear Meta shades.