Cleric K wrote: ↑Thu Mar 18, 2021 10:57 am
You speak about the
"collective spirit of the tribe" and I take it that you use this in a real sense and not only as a figure of speech. So I'll use that as basis. This collective spirit is known by different names in different traditions. It's sometimes called Folk Spirit. In Christian esoterism it's called Archangel. The Finns, for example, have their Folk Spirit which acts as a common aura that brings the individual souls into certain harmony. The most important expression of that harmony is
language. (I'll be interested to know if there's a Finnish word for Folk Spirit)
Yes, the word is
väki. It means both people, in the animistic sense not limited in the human forms, and power/strength.
Väkevä means powerful/strong in distinct sense from
voimakas. There's väki of the forest, etc., but
voima is more closely associated with the physical concept of force.
Valta means authoritarian power/force.
The compound
väkivalta means violence. Perhaps the origin of the compound concept is that if väki is forced, instead of voluntarily accepted, the body preyed/prayed for an integrated shaman, it dies also spiritually, throws it's spirit elsewhere and stops breathing. There's a story preserved in academic literature about a highly spiritual theosophist who moved into a Sami village, perhaps as a school teacher. The old way had been disrupted by state religion, but some memory remained, and the väki of the village asked the theosophist to become their shaman. He refused, and died soon after. Väki didn't play that well, it was too blunt and direct and became violent.
Jordan Peterson observes well, only voluntary sacrifice has value, but here the complex dynamic of willful blindness come into play. For the offering to at least appear voluntary, it needs to be tricked, partially blinded. Blinded not only to the fear of the unknown and the (shh: promise of) deep suffering, but also to the concrete meaning of light, conditioning by the past. I've been wondering about the origin of a tribal custom of ours, playful compulsion to try to trick each other into doing chores in very complex games, a practice of continuous amusement and joking. Hmm. It could be that the best players in that game, who get to be the most laziest, get to be the most fooled ones, the most blinded... offerings to
väki.
So, animistic väki with it's various degrees and forms is already a very complex phenomenon, structurally connected with willful blindness that prevents theorizing (ie. seeing from the audience). Another layer of complexity is that integration process with väki is two-way dynamic holography, and violence of väkivalta can function also the other way around, from the individuated "container" part to the whole. The ethical conditioning, the taming of the väki without suffocating it, is a very delicate process of vital importance for the trickster forces that originate it. Thus, the liminal, the interval which also cares and channels. (
väli (interval) -
välittää (to care/to channel)).
Much of this is as new to me as to you, revealing the meanings preserved in Finnish language in this process of writing and first-reading,
listening to a very old language (
luku).
Let's stir our Imaginative abilities a little. If we imagine a spiritual condition, not yet reached the mineral stage, we can first imagine a hypothetical situation of only separate souls. In the soul realm these soul might not even recognize each other's presence - in this world every being perceives what it is attuned to. If they are not attuned to each other they may pass through each other, so to speak, without noticing. In ordinary life a boy and a girl may like each other but they are both shy to speak to the other. But if they have a common friend he or she may introduce them and then their souls begin to have exchanges. We can imagine in a similar way (one of) the roles of the Folk Spirit. It's like a common aura that introduces certain commonness to the souls within it, it helps them to be attuned to each other so that they can have exchanges. Now the souls can experience the presence of the others and reflect each other's inner states as Imaginations and Inspirations, as if by resonating with each other.
I don't find imagining separate soul-atoms especially interesting. Our concept of Anima Mundi is aspectual triad
Self Breathing Nature, and as such, the Anima Mundi is scale invariant.
Are you trying to build another version of combinatorical micropanpsychism? I thought BK bunked that hype-thesis already firmly enough. Or is your quest for some other purpose? No matter, let's keep reading forwards, I mean downwards, as the text rolls.
Let's now imagine how the spiritual condition gradually decoheres. As the souls become more and more entangled in their personal corporeality they become more rigid and can't reflect so easily the soul states of others. To be able to reflect the inner state of another we need to be very innerly mobile, much like the way the octopus (posted in another thread) resonates with the shapes and colors of its environment and imitates them. In this analogy, a fixed skin color and texture would correspond to the inability to break from our rigidness and take the 'shape' of another soul's inner state. If nothing else happened, the souls would lose contact with each other, they would experience only their own inner state and sense perceptions. They would be able to know something about the other souls only through the sensory perceptions - their movements, gestures, etc. But certain beings intervened and made it possible that the Imaginations and Inspirations of the soul life reflections could be preserved in some way. This is what became language. Through language, even though in a much more limited way, the incarnated souls could still reflect their inner states to each other, although through the intermediary of sensory sound. So in this sense language has its origin in the workings of the Folk Spirit and the way it attunes the souls so that they can reflect each other's states. The common character of the language and its specifics is directly related to the character of the Folk Spirit itself.
Hmm. I'm rather fond of Tolkien's theory of Song of the Valar, language before and as creation. Couple comments.
1) It doesn't sound either plausible or ethical to extend atom theory of souls to Valar. A very good dose of epistemic humility seems more coherent here.
2) A Finnish philosopher Tere Vaden analyzes language into three concentric spheres. In the middle, Language of House, next Language of Yard, outmost Language of Forest. Language of House is the orderly grammatics, strict definitions, etc. tidy keeping aspect of language. Language of Yard the interval mix in-between, and Language of the Forest the most rich in form and meaning. The point of his analysis is to show which way the dependence hierarchy goes. Language of the House depends from the Forest, but the singing, story-telling etc. of the Forest does not depend from a House.
I agree with Wittgenstein that the language game of meta-languages is a game of wrong-playing. Projecting Language of the House over the whole of language, a claim of a meta-language able to contain and explain from the very origin what it subjects and casts down into subject language not only leads to meta-meta-meta regress, but also unconstructibility of empirical, phenomenal language in its full variety. Such meta-view of language, which echoes in the above, sounds to me like väkivalta in the sense of domestication of language. The ecological, animistic view of language considers natural languages living beings expressing and evolving characters of particular ecosystems. How the language of Relop relates to all these aspects, interesting question. The process of developing it did involve also conscious rejection of the notion of metalanguage, guided by Wittgenstein and his commentary on philosophy of mathematics.
The Finnish language is pretty unique (doesn't fit in any of the large language groups) and so is the Folk Spirit. I'm writing all the above to bring the conversation into context, to get the living feeling for the collective spirit, the Archangel of the Finns.
Fenno-Ugric language group is considered part of the Uralic language group, and some linguists, like Joseph Greenberg, father of typological linguistics, speculated about a larger language group with also Altaic languages and many if not most North American languages included... IIRC: Any case, not exactly small language group. Finnish is very conservative language, in the sense that it's relative rate of diachronic change has been very slow compared to many others, but the language contacts with Indo-European languages are also very ancient
1. The first thing is your inner relation to the Folk Spirit. As you said, the shamans of old could become inspired by the collective spirit. This could precipitate into the shaman's soul as vision, sound, sensation, anything, as long as the shaman is capable of grasping the meaning and how it relates to the sensory realm. In this mode it's clear that the shaman's soul experiences the Folk Spirit as something spiritually spread out, interpenetrating the individual bodies and supporting the harmony in the group.
Well, for example the emotional sphere or mood of a community - or as new age hippies etc. say "vibe" - is what is sensed very naturally, with various degrees of awareness and metacognitive analysis, which can both grow and diminish with age. Very young children can be very sensitive to emotional fields and often instinctively heal emotional disturbances.
For the regular members of the tribe all this is completely instinctive, only the shaman can receive more concentrated messages of the collective.
Not only the shaman. A term sometimes used in Sami cultures is 'strong-bloodied', which is a gliding scale. If we think of väki as incoming waving, the waves also reflect back to their origin. There's no strict separation in the spiritual phenomenology, only in the definitions of social roles.
My question is do you envision this collective as something self-conscious? Do you see the Folk Spirit as a spiritual being that has the clear understanding for its own existence and finds itself, for example, in relation to the Folk Spirits of other tribes, similarly to the way how human souls find themselves in relations between each other?
Hard to say, really, due to the complexity of the phenomenon. We have an other word,
emuu, for what you appear to be inquiring. We can speculate that in perspectival multinatures of animism, each emuu is it's own väki, and for e.g. for wolves their own wäki is what we perceive as their emuu, and vice versa. Either way, there's no separation between self-conscious and social consciousness with the polarity of self-other and it's reverse perspectives. Situation is not really different even in the case of "dualism" of internal dialogue.
The situation gets even more complicated with various inter-species mixtures of väki and emuu. Non-human ancestors of various clans and tribes are not in this sense metaphorical, but concrete social phenomena. The species concept of scientism does not apply, as we are speaking complex network of relations, relatives and kinships.
2. If the answer is yes, do you envision a way for human consciousness to be able to experience something of the direct perspective of the Folk Spirit and not only inspired visions?
A friend of mine, a horse-whisperer, told that in a vision the emuu of horses (he's not native Finn and used different term, so this is my interpretation) appeared to him, asking to take care of her children. Direct perspective enough? Perhaps so, perhaps not, in terms of your inquiry. I don't have full grasp what you mean by direct perspective.
Assuming we are non dualists, this should be possible at least in principle. If we imagine that every being's consciousness is an opaque sphere, which every being sees only from the inside, then there's not much place for non duality.
Why
only from the inside, like a bird before hatching? After hatching, you can see your skin illuminated by light, from the outside. Without light, there is still touch and bodily awareness. How does inside-outside function with those senses?
True monism suggests that all conscious experience is on the 'same side' of the sphere of consciousness.
I can't speak for true monism, as my game is not substance philosophy, but process philosophical animism. I'm inclined to suggest that egg states, including Plato's cave, are various parts of the process, not the the whole of it.
So if we imagine the Folk Spirit's and our human "I" experience as spheres, obviously ours much 'smaller', if we are able to make these spheres concentric it should be possible, as far as our cognitive toolset allows it, to experience something of the perspective of the Folk Spirit as if overlaid, merged with our perspective. Do you envision such a possibility?
3. If no, do you envision such a possibility after crossing the gate of death?
It's hard to imagine that something like that would be impossible, but somehow the whole idea associated now with Hitler style relation with a Volk Geist. This helps to comprehend better, what the other direction of väkivalta can mean.
There are better ways to cross the gate of death and integrate that polarity, far better than sacrificing the many for the lunacy of one.
I thought that with the Folk Spirit we would be able to do that but it seems it only obfuscated things. My questions were much more simpler. I'll try in another way.
I thought that in your view the colonial disaster of today resulted precisely because white man explored the realm of willful (goal oriented) choices in contrast to choiceless-choices, which supposedly should issue from the unconscious pan-harmony. In this sense I said that the willful choices (like these leading to colonialism) are to be subdued, and we are left only with impulses without rational explanations/goals.