"In the beginning," or some variation, starts off origin
myths, also called cosmogonies. Every culture has at least one, and
sometimes several, versions of the origin of things. The most predominant
view of these cosmogonies has been to see them as an early attempt
to explain the world, as a form of pre-scientific explanation. This
is the theory put forward by Frazier in The Golden Bough and is the
most common understanding to this day. It is easy to see them in this
light from our current scientific world view, however, this view assumes
that the people who told these myths have the same psychological predisposition
as modern people. Whereas, the evidence indicates that at least one
difference is that our modern objective view of the world, including
the world's inherent distinction from ourselves, was not that of the
myth-makers. The myth-makers where speaking of the self and world
as one, the self/world is what the myths explain, not simply the objective
world as in the case of scientific explanation.
Often when we look out, we see in - the inner contents
of the psyche projected outward like a movie projector with the world
for its screen. None of this is random or out-of-the-blue, of course,
there is something about the target of the projection that provides
some kind of 'hook' upon which you can hang the projection. But chances
are, when someone gets 'under your skin' they were already there.
If we take this as a starting point, what were the myth-makers projecting
onto the creation of the universe? The answer put forward by Jung,
Neumann, and others, is that these cosmic geneses reflect not the
origin of the world, but the origin of the self in the world - consciousness.
As Jung said in The Undiscovered Self, "Without consciousness
there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists
for us only in so far as it is consciously reflected by a psyche.
Consciousness is a precondition of being." Consciousness of the world
and creation of the world would have been intertwined for the myth-makers.
It is amazing, considering the amount of effort that
has gone into the study of consciousness recently, that so little
can be said about it. We do know that it is a limited cognitive resource,
and our most precious one at that. Consider the Jewish folk tale about
a man who dreams that there is buried treasure beneath a bridge in
a distant town. He travels to the town but cannot dig for the treasure
because there are soldiers guarding the bridge. In desperation he
talks to a soldier and tells him of his dream of buried treasure.
The soldier laughs and says that if he believed in such things he
would have to dig under the kitchen stove of a man with the same name
as the treasure hunter, because the soldier had had a dream of buried
treasure there. The man returns home and digs under his own kitchen
stove, and there he finds the treasure. The treasure was there all
along, but it was not possible for the man to ever obtain it until
he became conscious of its existence. Once he became conscious of
it, he could take the steps necessary to obtain it.
With all this in mind we will take a look at a Gnostic
creation myth: The chief ruler of the world is blind because
of his power and his ignorance; and in his arrogance he said with
his power, "It is I who am God; there is no other one that exists
apart from me."
When he said this, he sinned against the entirety. And this
speech got up to the incorruptibility; then there was a voice that
came forth from the incorruptibility saying, "You are mistaken,
Samael" - which is, "god of the blind."
If we look at this myth as a projection of inner contents
of the psyche onto the field of creation - we can see that this is
a story of the self, a story of consciousness. In each of us there
is a petty dictator named "I," who decides what 'I'm going to do,'
what 'I'm going to say,' what 'I'm going to be.' And that dictator
believes that "I" is all that there is to us, and often in its arrogance
it falls on its face, because it is wrong in saying, "there is no
other one that exists apart from me." For some reason the German "Ich"
didn't get translated into the English word "I" but rather into the
Greek word "Ego," and so this petty dictator is called the Ego. The
myth is about bringing into the conscious awareness of the Ego the
fact that it is not all that there is. We all know people who say
'I'm going to loose thirty pounds,' 'I'm giving up smoking,' 'I'm
going to become a doctor,' etc.; and we know that they won't, their
Ego may think it's the only one in there, but we know better.
So, in the myth, here is the chief ruler, the Ego,
boasting that it is God, when literally out-of-the-blue a voice calls
out that that is wrong, the Ego is only a god of those who cannot
perceive the totality - the whole of what's going on. This is the
way it is within our own self, usually in such realizations the message,
"you are mistaken, Samael," packs a punch in the form of a personal
disaster or crisis of some kind.
The myth is a story of the beginning of conscious awareness
of a self greater than the Ego, of the 'entirety.' The totality of
the psyche is what Jung referred to as the Self (capital 'S'). Consciousness
is the precious resource that the Ego can bring into its relationship
with the rest of the psyche, giving it the "precondition of being."
The process of individuation was for Jung the life-long work of becoming
an individual, the inner transformation of the psyche by bringing
the unconscious contents of the psyche into conscious awareness -
a work of inner alchemy, turning dark matter into brilliant gold -
integrating towards wholeness.
© -1997 Troy W. Pierce
