The modernly professed “unconscious mind” does not work at cross purposes with the conscious one. Just as, in a man, the left hand works in concert with the right, the non-verbal moves while the verbal must register, explain, justify and apologize for that movement. But it never leads this dance and never understands its partner, for it is too busy with its own proper purview: talk and thought. The “unconscious mind,” the fabled “spirit world,” the “soul” etc., are the intellect’s names for an incomprehensible nexus it has with the ineffable direction of Life’s all-containing Body wherein man exists. Thus to those of extra-dimensional Sight, mankind is like one of those five dollar mail-order ant-colonies whose activities are visible through the glass panel while they are unaware of their blatant exposure to the most casual eye. Like man, the ants, if they could speak, would call the direction of that glass panel bounding their world “God” and know not its limitation.
The silent part of man’s nature is closer to the unseen embrace of Life’s Body, directly fed by Its primal lifeblood-energy circulation. The talking part is less directly connected and can be pictured as arising as a kind of charged interference current or magnetic field. It is in these brain circuits called the intellect—the verbal outgrowth of the older, non-verbal brainstem circuitry—where Life now focuses Its push of expansion. Yet that pressure arises via the non-verbal stem of the nervous system, as that is the only conduit available to it. Thus does it seem to the poor mind that hidden hands keep shoving it out from the backstage wings into unprepared, self-conscious confrontation with the theater audience: pants-down! On stage! Oh, the painful brilliance of the spotlight! On Life’s Gong Show it may tap dance; it may run and sweat, but it can’t hide. And where oh where is that merciful “Hook” that fishes the incompetent performer off the stage? Well, there is no “Hook,” for there is no incompetence: the mind is simply designed with built-in energy pathways/flows (feelings) of the impropriety and weakness of its exposed position…and thus does it reel and spin wild-eyed, at Life’s smoking-gun urgings (“Hey, pardner, let’s see you do some tap-dancing, bang ,bang, bang. Yeah! Good! Keep it up, bang, bang, bang!” [and Life has an infinite bandolier, don’tcha know]).
Strange to tell, but dancing and sweating, which is to say, talking and thinking, extends and makes complex the verbal superstructure of man’s nervous system and thus, in a sense, expands Life’s own neural network. But for individual men, here is the sum and substance of their personal lives: the Thrill of Victory, the Agony of Defeat and/or the Glazed Eyes of Indifference. In an endless chase away from defeat and on toward victory, an individual nervous system cycles through these energy charges in greater or lesser degree uncontrollably…taking them as uniquely self-caused; eternally puzzled and thwarted by their source and direction, yet continually impressed, informed and unbalanced by their import and timing. However, a few may dance and beckon from the cracks between victory, defeat, disaffect. A few may prance and reckon what lacks, and be cheery, replete: self-elect.
Man is a Mobius Strip (inside and outside are one) and his own mirror image. And every man is fascinated therewith, unable to lift his eyes from the enforced habits of movement, feeling, and thought he calls his existence. Were man not centered and stabilized in this way, his use to Life would be nil; civilization would fly apart—rending the fabric of Life’s growth in a specific, measurable direction, destroying the integrity of It’s Greater Being. This will not be allowed; man is specifically designed to preclude it. Thus does he transfer energies, revolving in place like a spinning top…storing up momentum…responding to the subtle tilt and grain of the floor of Life’s predisposition. Swiftly, swiftly spinning, but slowly, slowly listing, intractably drawn, like sand through the hour glass…surely, surely sifting. Into Life’s siren call: man’s attraction and fall; a resourceless subtraction, a recourseless contraction, adrown’d and adrift toward the Maelstrom Ball. In sum, man is not what he thinks he is: he is what Life thinks!
So, man is not a creature divided against himself. Such a creature would not be viable—self-destructive, even—whereas it should be obvious to the perceptive that the evolution of man taken as a whole has been anything but self-destructive. At the level of an individual man’s life however, he feels in conflict with himself—that nothing ever goes as planned, or if it does, teeters on the brink of some potential disaster at every turn. Consider: to what end is it so arranged? The same end as always: Life’s greater purposes. Thus: man, the enantiomorph, is his own image in the mirror, and the mirror. Is it not always amusing then, from a particular view, that he continually surprises himself? That when he smiles or frowns or raises his hand to his lips, he is startled and dismayed like an aborigine gazing for the first time into the looking-glass? But every now and then, at some here and there, the rarest of rare men suddenly realizes that what he sees is not what he sees. Such a one is changed forever, becoming his own puppet and viewing, here and now, the landscape of the:
Height,
Depth,
Width,
Breadth,
and
DIRECTION
Behind His Eyes...
