My Notebook June 11 2009

About the post "Communion and Communality": human communication is also a "communal act of imagination" to communicate together, we must willingly suspend certain protocols of individuality: for example, people with Asperger's Syndrome have trouble socializing because they cannot suspend those protocols of the individual, and learn the protocols of society.
As we grow up and are socialized, it is these social, communal protocols we learn. These protocols are communal acts of imagination: they exist symbolically in our patterns of behavior, in our language, in our music, in all our consciousness. (The unconscious is the part of an entity that is not conscious and, hence, not symbolic - what we call dreams are memories of unconscious activity, not the unconscious itself. Since the unconscious is not symbolic, it cannot be shared as a communal act.)
It appears, then, that most of our lives are communal acts of imagination - or symbolism. War occurs when these acts do not suffice. This shows the connection between war and the unconscious: when the symbolic communality comes to an end, we are back in the realm of the very, very individual. One of these realms is the idiosyncratic unconscious. The unconscious is the dawn state of the mind: the state of the newly born. As we grow, we learn to create the various realms of consciousness: language, music, patterned behaviors, the imaging system, etc. Consciousness is built upon the foundation of the unconscious.

The way back from conscious to unconscious may be difficult or simple, depending on how we have learned to behave; if we are quick to anger, or quick to forgiveness.
 

Up until now, war has been the rule - not the exception - precisely because we have not valued the symbols of peace more highly than the symbols of war: we have praised our oppressors more highly than our benefactors, and we have lavished greater gifts on thieves than on donors.

True Religion as taught by the religious geniuses is the process of learning that the unconscious has more than war, anger, and destruction within itself: it has creation! Why is this important? The unconscious is the source of War. It is also the source of our knowledge of God. It is the source of Saints and Sinners. That is why the stories of the saints can be so bizarre sounding to us: their lives were heavy into the unconscious - like Asperger's children: a rococo individuality. If the lives of the saintly were mundane and hum-drum, they'd be us...and we're no saints.