Psychcrocosm
A New Model of Mind In the Multiverse
© 2006 by Joseph Kerrick
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1. Through the Looking-Glass
The body is in the mind, not the mind in the body.
This is the first premise of a new model of existence which unites inner and outer, spirit and matter, microcosm
and macrocosm. The principle is simple, but it's not comprehensible unless you turn the world inside-out ~ or at
least the current dominant belief-system about the nature of the world.
A big prerequisite task is to restore the neglected half of the dyad to full reality. The proof that it's been
radically downgraded is that there is not a proper word for it in the current language, at least not any that's equal
in force and solidity to the words for the favored half, namely the physical, material, phenomenal part of the
universe. Thus we are forced to use fuzzy, ill-defined, and unfamiliar terms like "supraphysical", "spiritual", and
"numenal" to describe the complementary aspect of reality. As a first step toward a solution, I'm going to take one
of these words and reclaim the full, potent, hardcore meaning it originally had in the lexicon of Western thought.
So voila, I hereby designate the word NUMENA and its attendant grammatical forms as the generic term for the
entire realm of existence beyond the physical. Since the word has fallen into such disuse over the last 550 years,
it's probably necessary for me to point out that it is the plural of "numenon", meaning a metaphysical existant, in
the same sense as the complementary word "phenomenon" is a physical existant.
The myth of the modern age was that the world is governed by the laws of science, that only the material
universe is real, and that numenal reality does not exist. Thus all the fabled denizens of the numenal realm were
banished from existence, or at least from human belief in them. These included such entities as the human soul,
the Spirit and spirits, God and the gods, as well as demons, devils, ghosts, elves, fairies, sylphs, gnomes, etc.,
etc. Along with all these beings of the supernal, infernal, and mythopoetic worlds, there naturally vanished the
last vestige of any meaning or purpose inherent in human life.
The modern age mercifully ended in the 1960s, with a great resurgence of numenal experience. The doors of
perception opened wide once again, way beyond the perverted keyhole-peeping of the "age of reason", as vast
legions of people regained contact with the supraterrestrial entities, including their own souls and the human spirit
itself. God reappeared to humanity, proving that the reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated. And in
this latest resurrection, the One God was accompanied by the Many Gods ~ and Goddesses, of course ~ as all
the olden pantheons of pagan deities welled up afresh from the collective unconscious, and found new devotees
amongst the descendents of their ancestral tribes.
In the following chapters I am going to present a critique of the materialist worldview of the modern era, and then
a detailed overview of certain basic systems of thought and metaphysics which were (and still are) regarded as
valid by cultures other than the modern. The implications are universal, but the applications are specifically
psychological; thus my treatment will address a huge problem which remains tragically unsolved to this day: the
cure of a challenging debility which is currently labeled "mental illness".
In my presentation, I'll attempt to lay down the groundwork for a new paradigm amalgamating the spiritual and
the material in a truly operational way. If I succeed, the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts, and may
play a catalytic role in the transition to a new aeon.
2. Faust
By the year 1970 the myth of modern science had decisively broken down. This was not evident to the
populace at large, but it was recognized by certain cutting-edge philosophes who declared that we had now
entered a POSTMODERN age. For indeed, science's own discoveries in relativity and quantum physics had
shown that the ground of being of the universe is not physical but metaphysical after all, overturning one of the
pillars of the myth.
The worldview of every society is at bottom a myth, and every society is certain that its own worldview is true ~
that the main tenets of its special myth are the hardcore facts of reality, in contrast to the false myths of other
more primitive and less enlightened societies. Of course every worldview contains some elements of pellucid
truth, and these serve as validating supports, or sometimes crutches, for the larger spurious superstructure.
The myth-within-a-myth that spawned modern society was the story of Faust. According to the legend, he was
an alchemist who lived a century or so before the Renaissance in Europe. He made a deal with the Devil, called
Mephistopheles, whereby he would gain all knowledge of the physical world, and power over it, at the cost of his
soul.
This archetypal character symbolizes the real-life men who initiated the break from the worldview of the middle
ages, and laid the foundations of what became the modern global civilization. Their Faustian bargain gave rise to
five centuries of accelerated discovery and invention in the new strictly-physical sciences. However, it's no
accident that this was accompanied by the bloodiest wars and persecutions in recorded history, because this was
part of the bargain.
Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Spinoza, Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kropotkin,
Marx, Comte, Nietzsche, Sartre: each creative genius in turn stood on the shoulders of his forerunners,
heightening the stature of Faust in each generation ~ and hence furthering the aim of Mephistopheles, which is
the destruction of the human soul.
All cultures, societies, and scientific systems before the Age of Faust had recognized the existence of both spirit
and matter. The most advanced and enlightened paradigms had treated these two poles of the universe as a
reciprocal dyadic unity, the eternal two-in-one, the Yang and Yin whose neverending interplay generated the
whole of existence in all its harmonious diversity.
In the West, however, there was always an abrasive undercurrent to this gnosis, dualistic instead of dyadic, in
which the poles were conceived as disharmonious and antagonistic. This gave rise to beliefs that people had to
sacrifice their bodies for the sake of their souls, and live in misery on Earth in order to attain joy in Heaven.
So it's not surprising that when Faust came along, all he had to do was flip the coin and proclaim that people
should sacrifice their souls for the sake of a happy life on Earth. The diabolic alchemy in a nutshell was that the
Faustians falsely separated spirit from matter, and then declared that spirit did not even exist. Is it any wonder
that this half-witted collective belief-system gave rise to the first and second world wars, as well as to such
peculiarly modern plagues as schizophrenia?
Afflictions of the psyche increased dramatically in modern times. Underlying the suffering of so many individuals
is an actual schizoid split which occurred in the COLLECTIVE consciousness when it succumbed to the Faustian
worldview. If you doubt this, just answer a simple question: what is the "psyche"? Almost everyone will say that of
course it's the mind. But this was not always so; before the Age of Faust, the psyche was identified as the soul,
which is its true meaning in the original Greek.
It was convenient for the Faustian ideologues to retain the word "psyche" to designate the subjective awareness
and inner being of the individual ~ but obviously this could no longer be recognized as the soul, because they had
declared the soul to be non-existant. Therefore a previously-obscure word was adapted for the newly-concocted
concept of a soulless self: the "mind".
The change of meaning was not merely ideological nor semantic; in fact it marked a seismic shift in the nature of
human consciousness. Though it wasn't called by that name, the mind had a tangible existence in the premodern
aeons. The key point, however, is that it was NOT the center of consciousness, for this was lodged firmly in the
soul. As will be clarified in later chapters, the mind was a lesser entity, a preconscious or unconscious part of the
soul or higher self. The mind was a region of lower selfish desires and sexual urges, which in healthy people was
under command of the higher self, a.k.a. the soul.
When the Faustian Zeitgeist swept away the soul, the center of consciouness got ratcheted down a big notch,
like an elevator descending to a lower floor, or a man trying to climb a ladder who finds himself instead slipping
down to a lower rung. The amorphous mass of primitive will and gutteral lust on this lower level coagulated into
an entity that was at first named the "ego". Then later, when its huge unconscious darkside was finally exposed,
this underbelly became known as the "id". Together these two elements formed the new center of human
consciousness, which (in English) became known as the "mind".
This new mind was qualitatively inferior to the soul it had replaced. The soul is precisely the bridge between the
spiritual and material worlds. People who are ensouled, and know it, can apperceive a broad range of numena.
Individuals with especially sensitive souls have powers that are now called "psychic". These seem strange, exotic,
and "unscientific" in the present culture, but in all other cultures they were and are accepted as part of the normal
range of human ability. In a broader sense, even ordinary people in non-Faustian societies and pre-Faustian
Europe had a collective awareness of numenal reality. Glimpses of the future, ancestral memories, remote
"psychic" communication with family and friends, contact with various types of supraphysical beings (including
especially deceased loved ones) ~ all these things were integral aspects of life in a culture that recognized and
cultivated the human soul and spirit.
With the triumph of Faustian materialism, these abilities began to atrophy, along with the soul itself. Individuals
who still had vibrant souls were now seen as strangely out of step with their fellows, and their numenal abilities
were regarded as "abnormal". Ultimately such people began to be labelled insane, and many were subjected to
terrible mistreatement in the madhouses that arose and proliferated in modern times. The Faustian elite
condemned the medieval persecution of heretics by the church, and held themselves superior to it; yet the
sadistic tortures inflicted on "crazy" people over the last 550 years can accurately be seen as a bloody Inquisition
against people who were remnants, holdouts, and throwbacks to the old regime.
The total worldview of a society or civilization is often referred to as the Zeitgeist. There is some irony, however,
in applying this term to the Faustian culture, because its literal meaning is "Spirit of the Age" ~ and as we have
seen, the chief feature of the Faustian Age was the drive to annihilate Spirit. It became a "Zeit" without a "Geist",
portraying the universe as a vast mechanical edifice, empty of anything except matter in motion. In this literally
science-fictional cosmos, it was believed that order arose from chaos by sheer accident, and that living creatures
were somehow generated from dead elements.
It's not surprising, then, that this cultural matrix generated even more bizarre notions about the nature of its
newly-minted mind. Since the human creature was conceived of as a mere automaton, as empty of numenal
being as the universe in which "it" lived, then it apparently made sense to infer that the mind itself has no actual
substance, that it's simply a kind of illusion of self-awareness generated by the electrical activity of the brain.
In any other culture that ever existed on Earth, this notion would be considered absurd and ridiculous, and
anyone who took it seriously would surely be judged insane. Yet it's been so strongly imprinted into the collective
consciousness for so many generations that today most people take it utterly for granted. The perverse logic of it
gives rise to PATHOlogical beliefs, like the idea that the self of the individual will simply disappear when the body
dies and the brain ceases to function.
The truth, of course, is that the SELF is the real thing ~ the mind is part of the soul, which is made of a
substance that's MORE real than the brain and the body, and will still be there when the body is gone.
As we shall see graphically in the following chapters, the complete human constitution is made up of a nested
hierarchy of forms, of which the first, largest, and most substantial is Spirit. Contained within Spirit is the soul,
somewhat smaller but still formidable as the second most solid entity. Then within the soul is the mind, falsely
promoted by Faust as the whole of the psyche. Last, smallest, and least substantial is the merely material body,
the ephemeral physical residue and reflection of the three larger and more real numenal entities which enclose it.
By this we can see that the reality of creation and evolution is exactly contrary to Faustian dogma. It's
completely in accord, however, with the Zeitgeists of all truly enlightened cultures: essence precedes existence,
numena give birth to phenomena. In the end as in the beginning, everything proceeds from Spirit.
3. Seelenheil: the Cure of the Soul
Modern and postmodern psychology has been extremely unsuccessful in curing cases of what it calls mental
illness. In the 19th and 20th centuries there was a serious quest to understand the mind, but the best fruit of this
effort was in healing the less severe kinds of pathology, referred to generally as neuroses. For people with more
serious problems ~ those labelled psychotic ~ the only recourse was the insane asylum.
A change finally occurred with the development of drugs that altered the behavior of such individuals ~ it made
them less prone to violence and other problematic actions. The drugs also relieved internal distress for many
people, enabling them to become relatively functional, at least for limited periods of time. A decade after the
introduction of these drugs, the U.S. government instituted disability pensions for the mentally ill. The combined
result was a large decline in the population of mental institutions, as patients were farmed out to bootstrap
community programs, their families, or to life on the street.
When the so-called "anti-psychotic" drugs first began to be utilized, no one claimed that they actually cured
psychosis, but only that they controlled its symptoms. This caveat is sometimes lost sight of today, now that the
drugs are the preferred and nearly universal form of treatment. The biggest criticism still lodged against this
status quo is that virtually all the drugs have side effects, often severe and sometimes crippling or even fatal.
A case can be made that there has also been a side effect on the largest scale, which is that mainstream
psychology has all but abandoned its effort to understand the mind. The psychiatric establishment itself has
become addicted to the panacea of medication. Why bother to look for the underlying cause of problems when
the worst symptoms can be eliminated by patching over the surface with a pill? Why ask troublesome questions
like whether such people have really been healed and made whole, when they feel better and are no longer a
burden on society?
There remains a hard core of people whose symptoms are not alleviated by any of the drugs, or who find the
side-effects unacceptable, or who make a personal decision that they don't wish to be state-sanctioned lifetime
addicts ~ or who simply wish to hold out for genuine healing, rather than a mere alleviation of symptoms. The
price for many of these people is years of hellaceous suffering, as they struggle to deal on a daily basis with
bizarre phenomena which are not understood by anyone in this society ~ including the leading lights of the
psychiatric establishment, whose salaries are largely underwritten by the pharmaceutical industry which supplies
the drugs they so liberally dispense.
As an adjunct of Faustian civilization, mainstream psychology grounds itself in external, physical factors. Its
diagnostic categories therefore consist of descriptions of objectively observable behavior, and patterns of
behavior. It studies the physiology of the brain, and alters it with drugs, in the belief that the synaptic activity of
the brain is the cause of events in the psyche, rather than their effect. But if the cause of a person's problems
actually lies in the soul, then the effort to understand and heal the problems must begin in the soul. If the ultimate
cause lies in Spirit, then nothing less than spiritual transformation will produce the cure.
The real reason that the self-styled science of psychology can't heal serious disturbances of the psyche is
precisely because it denies that the psyche is the soul, and denies that the soul and Spirit exist. Even though
there are many enlightened practitioners who are exceptions to this rule, their individual efforts and successful
healings do not change the dominant paradigm for society as a whole. Only when such a revolutionary change is
made will psychology become a METAscience ~ that is, a real science, one which includes and unites all aspects
of existence, not just the physical.
According to the literal meanings of the words, the goal of psychology is to understand the psyche, and the goal
of psychiatry is to heal it. Since I'm skeptical of the proposition that the psychiatric establishment is succeeding in
this goal, I find a need to coin new words in order to break out of the established matrix. I propose that we define
the goal of the discipline as Seelenheil, a German word whose literal meaning is "the healing of the soul" or
"spiritual welfare".
Some psychiatrists truly are skilled at the art and science of healing souls ~ but so are many other people, even
without an "MD" in psychiatry. Some of these folks have lesser credentials, e.g. as therapists. But even many
people without any official credentials at all function every day as healers in a real sense, often doing more good
than a titular doctor who mainly operates as a legal drug dealer. So once again we need a new word, not only for
the goal of the discipline but also for its practitioners. I suggest we simply add a suffix and designate such people
as Seelenheilers. To my ear, the patchwork linguistics are well atoned by the euphony.
In its vernacular usage in German-speaking countries, "Seelenheil" means "salvation", usually in the Christian
sense. I'd like to retain this general meaning, but broaden it beyond the specifically Christian doctrine of
salvation. One of the implications is that the soul can only be healed by fulfilling the ultimate purpose of its
existence.
Faustian psychology has nothing to say about the meaning of life nor the destiny of any individual. Faustian
science has become adept at determining the "what" and the "how" of the material universe, but can never
answer the "why", because this is a function of the spiritual.
Many of the positive outcomes attained by psychiatry are a matter of enabling individuals to adapt to the outer
circumstances of their lives, and to society, in a way that brings them satisfaction, or at least minimizes their
emotional discomfort. By contrast, real Seelenheil can only occur when the deepest wellsprings of the Spirit are
engaged, and are changed in a way that realigns the soul with the divinely-ordered balance of the universe itself.