In the Beginning was the Perception of Time…
Though we take it for granted today, this is a comparatively new discovery in the history of human thought. The “Word” of ancient record pointed to a compensatory psychic organization which enabled an awakening Homo Antithesus to think backwards. Prior to this, all existence flowed irreversibly forward along an unconscious gradient of life-energy toward who-knew-what. All living things more or less did what Instinct told them without thinking much about it.
Memory associations, evolving anticipations, and their impressions on the animal psyche over eons eventually coalesced in a single, unique species to form a new psychic complex. Today, we know it as consciousness, and it allowed early man to partially translate aspects of instinctual images into practical ideas for purposes of survival. Through increased awareness of past experiences and the capacity to weigh future possibilities, the new adaptation slowly proceeded.
Thoughts and ideas first appeared as hallucinations to the primitive mind. Owing to the inability to distinguish its mental activities from its surroundings, they merged with sense perceptions, and the obscure mysteries of its own psychic functioning were perceived as qualities of the environment. The mind naturally venerated what the body needed, and animals and vegetation became the first objects of worship.
Though still instinctual, even thought-obsession and compulsive object-worship were more effective for the novel beast’s survival than relative oblivion. Who knows what disasters the new species would have caused the world without these foundational structures to guide it toward the complete dominion of nature we enjoy today? Though now considered symptoms of a sick mind in the under-privileged, the marvels of modern culture could not have been built without them.
As in a mirror, thought was reflected back in reverse form; though, so vivid were the reflections, this remained obscured. The world appeared as concrete reality through the medium of species-specific senses filtered through needs for self-preservation. Things were real, of course, though early man’s perception was peculiar to the acuity of his functions and the backward logic geared toward practical understanding. He saw only the partial reality of external form — image yet merged with object as in a dream.
The unconscious doubling effects of images pointing both backward and forward slowly produced an identification with need and desire beyond mere objects: on the new psychic level of spirit-possession. The complex gradually fell in love with itself to form ego, and it soon assumed fantastic proportions. This was unavoidable.
Time-awareness combined intuition and a compensating, inflated sense of self to foster and protect the new ego-consciousness. Without their bolstering effects, the species could never have overcome the animal instincts which so long slept in the spiritual devotion to nature demanded by all creation of every living thing but itself. This rude condition but slowly advanced over the next million years or so.
With the comparatively recent development of written records, ego came to describe its instinct-possession as if ordained from “above.” Ancient perception identified with the intuitions of forward development, interpreting them as god-like attributes drawing it “upward” — into the head: the body-symbol of psychological recognition beyond the crotch and belly of instinctual desire. Unlike today, this basic characteristic of conscious life was invisible to that early stage of development.
The “Word” as a symbolic denial of instinctual compulsion gained momentum with further intellectual development, though the general backward thought ensuring earlier survival now translated its own evolving psychic image into upside-down religious ideas, veiling the subversive effects of the inflated ego.
Still fused in unconsciousness, the dual images meant to guide mankind toward its evolution instead found it identifying with whatever its backward thought deemed beneficial to unadorned self-interest — though in flat contradiction to the feeling-beliefs unconsciously compensating the instincts for development. The puffed-up ego reflected in early religious ideas had yet to be fully distinguished by self-observation as we appreciate it today.
As a result, the tasks embedded in the images were perceived as having already been accomplished. Actual conditions remained obstinate to change or improvement beyond bodily comfort. Spiritual demands intended to push men toward a psychic reality petrified as a result of ego-inflation and an inherent indolence consumed only with reducing physical effort. The mental output expended remained largely in the service of biological need. Opposed psychological urges gained in proportion to unconscious fears of them, and these instinctively goaded them forward. Developmental urges thus came to be seen as bad things to be avoided at all cost.
Aside from the ruling religionists which imagined themselves as having been ordained by divine heritage, there was another, opposed group known as philosophers. Though the mind of that era still clung to raw ego-desire and eschewed any real progress, philosophers began to question inconsistencies in religious ideas. They argued over the perception of images for centuries, not knowing the psychic realities of subject and object indissolubly interpenetrated to form a total experience divided by however many subjective minds perceived it.
The unstated opposition between the two sects was that the philosophers never came to agreement as to what should or could be done about anything. Though not lacking the intense power-drive of the religionists, their quirky sense of self resulted in an inability to organize a cohesive counter-attack. This snail-paced conflict grudgingly abetted self-awareness and proceeded for centuries until the dogged persistence of a few honest individuals happened to hit on observation and experiment to test humanity’s presumptions. This lifted the curtain of perception — but only in the external world.
Fueled by flattering visions of objectivity, the new science inspected everything but the self-awe which had plagued the alienated species for so many thousands of years. The advantages for those who exploited it commercially, however, had unforeseen effects. They eventually fostered a fascination with worldly existence which dissolved the old holographic sky-deities — only then to reinterpret them unconsciously as innate proofs of their own fantastic self-perceptions: the only thing left unexamined. The new outer form of the old inner perspective was seen as a great advancement.
Perhaps it was, though with one exception: the hidden mysteries of dreams, which inexplicably embodied all the concrete reality accorded to waking sense perception, had so long been refuted as meaningless that even the new science could not reconcile the two perceived worlds of fantasy and reality. In its own counter-attack to the old religious view which saw an upside-down reality, the backward thought process now turned its perception inside-out.
Contemporary fascination with the outer world and the still-unrecognized fusion with projected mental functions could not acknowledge dreams as the compensatory building blocks of a one-sided development. The strange symbols of the reality of psychic life and their profound reflection of the world remained mere fantasies as undifferentiated as the earlier projected deities; though now possessions of all and not just the few of divine patronage. Was the new science unwittingly drawing mankind into a psychic regression?
