As I have mentioned before in this blog; I believe that we are dreaming all the time that we are awake - underneath waking life, we are continually dreaming. And sometimes, when we are napping, we may dip into and out-of this continual dreaming.
In dreaming, we are in contact with divine, presumably angelic, influences; which is why dreams are a mode of archetype and myth. Ancient man lived always in this kind of dreamlike state, and we all lived this way as young children. Thus human history and our personal development was a process of becoming more alert, awake, conscious during waking life - but also a process of becoming cut-off from unconscious and pervasive divine influences.
So, for modern Man dream is our last vestige of that old mythic consciousness; but our task and destiny is - consciously and by choice - to return to a state of contact with divine beings. My understanding is that this was supposed to happen in The West from the late 1700s, at the time of the Romantic era.
In terms of dreaming while awake, we were supposed to become aware of it; become aware of the nature of the angelic influences from that mythic, archetypal undercurrent. However, this did not happen, Instead, Western man took the path of atheism, materialism; and embraced a metaphysics which regards God, angels, soul, myth, destiny, ultimate purpose and meaning (etc) as not-really-real. These were all relegated to the world of subjective imagination. Real-reality - the objective - that is the public realm of discourse upon which law, morality and policy are based, excluded all such matters by assumption.
The result is that we are self-blinded to the continual influences of waking dreams, which we experience only as 'gut-level' instincts, impulses and urges. Because we will not acknowledge their true nature and origin; these influences can be (and are) pervasively, systematically misinterpreted by public discourse. Thus divine destiny has been perverted in many ways, and turned to harm and evil.
An example is the sexual revolution. We all experience a divine impulse towards a different, more personal, less group-based, relation between men and women. Properly, this ought to signal a development towards our ultimate divine goal of an eternal loving and creative married union - a creative dyadic relationship.
But this has, in multiple ways, misinterpreted as a gut level instinct for personal gratification in this world - leading to all sorts of harms such as (via the public policy, the mass media and arts) mocking, maligning and subverting marriage and the family; promoting casual and lust-based promiscuity; dividing men and women into interest groups, set against each other; and the enforced promotion of same sex activity and wholesale delusion and contradiction about sexual identity. This has led to misery and suffering in this world, contributed to a pervasive atmosphere of resentment and selfish short-termism, and most significantly anti Christianity and the embrace of self-damnation.
My understanding is therefore that we must become aware of our waking dreams, or else be destroyed by them.
Currently, we are blocking our own awareness - so what we must do is to stop doing this. Stop it by whatever works, whatever means tends-to that end.... But first by acknowledging the problem.
I think that you may be talking about the imaginative faculty by which people with problem-solving intellect are able to simulate the likely outcomes of various possible approaches to a situation to estimate which is most likely to have beneficial results.
ReplyDeleteWe should clearly contrast this with the delusional faculty by which people ignore the plain reality in front of them in favor of some fiction which alleviates the emotional stress of facing the truth and having to act on it.
Of course, the mental machinery used for either activity may be the same, but the imaginative starts with reality and does not suspend differentiation between reality and what is being imagined, the entire point of the imaginary scenario is to return to reality with the solutions tested in imagination to see if they are truly effective. On the other hand, the delusion starts with the rejection of reality and seeks to extend the avoidance of facing it, thinking about the fact that it is only fiction and that reality will intrude sooner or later is contrary to the entire point.
To have a problem-solving imaginative capacity, one's imagination must simulate reality with enough fidelity to provide useful prediction of the outcomes of various postulates. I think you would say "the metaphysics must be sound", I would confine myself to saying that the physics must work, but extend "physics" to mean also all things that have predictable behavior in reality, including other persons whose patterns of voluntary action are reasonably well understood.
Thus an engineer who is imagining how to build a bridge cannot (or rather, should not) neglect accurate ideas about the force of gravity or the strength of construction materials, while a mother imagining how to celebrate a birthday should not have unrealistic ideas about how her children or guests are likely to behave or how large an expenditure is likely to cause marital strife later.
Of course, engineers also need to be aware of human factors, like how heavy and frequent traffic across the bridge may be, while mothers can hardly ignore basic physics concerning how much tape is needed to hold up decorations or how long a cake needs to bake in the oven.
The modern world is full of "five year plans", the outcome of which Orwell illustrates in Winston Smith's primary work at MiniTru. "But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at one-hundred-and-forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than one-hundred-and-forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain."
Orwell overtly decried the idea that one of the real persons we need to account for in our imagination of reality would be God. But the shadow of some supernatural arbiter of justice hangs over everything he ever wrote, Orwell chose to describe things that he found hateful because he fundamentally believed that what made them hateful was not merely his own opinion about them but some affront they posed to creation itself.
ReplyDeleteAnd I think that he was right about that. What he failed to see was that creation requires a creator, and what he found most hateful was often a matter of complete indifference to uncreated reality.