Second Stage of Alchemical Conjunction: Cogito and Anima

The unio mentalis is “only the first stage of conjunction or individuation,” says Jung.[1] We know that further distillations are required entailing a reunion of mind with body, and with the whole of nature. The present chapter focuses on the second stage of conjunction, that wherein the unified mind is brought into harmony with the realm of the body concerned with feeling. Granting that the Klein bottle, functioning as Hermetic vessel or subtle body, contains the unio mentalis in the opening stage, I submit that two conditions must be met for the containment of alchemical process in stage two: (1) the Kleinian vessel must be sealed a second time in a denser medium and (2) a new, more densely embodied vessel must make its appearance. Of course, these vessels are not just objects in space cast before detached subjects. They are spatio-sub-objective: they merge object, space, and subject. The vessels in question can therefore be grasped as topodimensional worlds unto themselves. Before going any further, let me attempt to clarify the dimension number of the Kleinian world.

In chapter 3, I noted that the Klein bottle brings into play a “fourth” dimension. I bracketed the word “fourth” to indicate that the extra dimension is not just another exterior space extending at right angles to the first three spatial dimensions; instead it is linked to the interior dimension of the psyche. Perhaps, rather than characterizing the Klein bottle as three-dimensional or four-dimensional, it would be best to describe this spatio-sub-objective vessel as “3 + 1-dimensional,” with the understanding that the objective three-dimensional spatial world and the unitary dimension of subjectivity are not just related to one another in an external, additive fashion, but fully interpenetrate each other.

Though Jung did not allude to the Klein bottle, it is interesting that he gave archetypal significance to 3 + 1-dimensional structure, regarding it as a “space-time quaternio” constituting “the organizing schema par excellence among the psychic quaternities.”[2] The 3-D spatial aspect of the Klein bottle can readily be associated with that of Jung’s quaternio; this feature clearly aligns with objectivity as well, given the role of space as the fundamental framework for objectification. Does the subjective aspect of the bottle align with time? Evidently, it does. Phenomenological philosophers such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty have probed deeply into the intimate relationship between temporal experience and core subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty, for example, begins a chapter on temporality by declaring: “In so far as…we have already met time on our way to subjectivity, this is primarily because all our experiences…arrange themselves in terms of before and after, because temporality…is the form taken by our inner sense, and because it is the most general characteristic of ‘psychic facts.’” The subject is essentially temporal “not by reason of some vagary of the human make-up, but by virtue of an inner necessity.”[3] On this basis, we may indeed conclude that the unitary subjective component of the 3 + 1-dimensional Klein bottle is temporal in nature, thereby linking it to the temporal aspect of Jung’s 3 + 1-dimensional space-time archetype. How does this relate to my claim that the second stage of alchemical conjunction requires a second sealing of the Kleinian vessel, now in a denser medium? What we are going to see is that the “denser medium” involves a more concrete order of space-time.

Mythic Dimensionality and Animal Emotion

Although the cogito reaches the high point of its development with the unio mentalis of stage one, its individuation is actually not complete without Proprioceptively revisiting its “low points” in subsequent stages of the coniunctio. We have seen that immature forms of thinking were pervasive in pre-Renaissance culture, modes of cognition lacking clarity and definition. In previous chapters, I alluded to mythic and magical types of thinking but made no attempt to differentiate them. Cultural philosopher Jean Gebser did lay out their differences and in the present chapter we will focus on the less primal of these, viz. mythic thinking, since this is the sort of cognitive activity that comes into play in the second stage of conjunction.

Gebser too viewed structures of consciousness in dimensional terms. Whereas post-Renaissance rational thinking is associated with three-dimensional space, the mythic structure of consciousness is “the expression of two-dimensional polarity.”[4] Gebser relates mythic consciousness to “the circle, the age-old symbol for the soul” and portrays it as “an encompassing ring on a two-dimensional surface”:

It encompasses, balances, and ties together all polarities, as the year, in the course of its perpetual polar cycle of summer and winter, turns back upon itself; as the course of the sun encloses midday and midnight, daylight and darkness; as the orbit of the planets, in their rising and setting, encompasses visible as well as invisible paths and returns unto itself.[5]

Yet, while mythic consciousness “encompasses, balances and ties together all the polarities,” the tension between poles is not simply resolved. No third element is introduced here to serve as a “synthesis of opposites” sublating the interplay of the two in a “higher-order oneness.” Mythic awareness therefore should not be confused with three-dimensional mental-rational consciousness. On the contrary, the mythic structure is an inherently ambivalent, “irrational” mode of experiencing; it flows to and fro, from one pole to its complement and back again, neither integrating the poles nor denying the validity of either. Gebser makes the observation that this two-dimensional wavelike rhythm of the soul is accompanied by an experience of time characterized by a retrospectiveness, a continual “harking back to what was,” a returning again and again to the “beginning,” as the ocean waves rise, crest, and fall back down into their troughs, only to rise again. So as to distinguish cyclical/mythic time from the linear “progression into the future” subsequently to develop along with the advent of mental/spatial consciousness, Gebser characterizes the former as “temporicity.”[6]

In addition to linking mythic consciousness to the realm of the soul, Gebser variously associates it with the dream state, the element of water, the astral and lunar worlds (stars and moon), movement and kinesis, and with the organ of the heart.[7] I propose that, in functional terms, all of these qualities are related to feeling or emotion.  The relationship between emotion and the heart is a commonplace that I will not elaborate on here, since my immediate purpose is only to note that there is a relationship.  For now, we can also take for granted the link between emotion and dreams; indeed, it is this that forms the basis of classical psychoanalysis.  Most of the other cognates of the mythic given above are touched on by Jung in Mysterium Coniunctionis, in a section where he examines the symbolism of the moon in alchemy.

First we have the tripartite connection between the moon, the soul, and water: “The relation of the moon to the soul, much stressed in antiquity, also occurs in alchemy, though with a different nuance. Usually it is said that from the moon comes the dew, but the moon is also the aqua mirifica … [the] ‘Mercurial water’ and ‘fount of the mother’.”[8] Continuing in a similar vein, Jung associates Luna with “moisture”[9] and with the “‘waters under the firmament’.”[10] He also intimates a connection between the moon and the stars: “The moon appears to be in a disadvantageous position compared with the sun. The sun is a concentrated luminary: ‘The day is lit by a single sun.’ The moon, on the other hand—‘as if less powerful’—needs the help of the stars.”[11] Thus the moon is linked to the astral domain. In the esoteric literature, much is made of the “astral plane,” and the “astral body.” And, typically, astrality is related here to the moon[12] and to the element of water.[13]

Now, a primary characteristic of the astral body is kinesis or motion; the literature is filled with references to “astral travel” and “astral projection.” And indeed, this is an essential feature of the soul, which Jung generally takes to be synonymous with the archetype of the anima. The anima is an aspect of the unconscious often symbolized by the snake, which bespeaks the “active, animal principle,” and is related to “emotionality and the possession of a soul”[14]; Jung links “animation of the body and materialization of the soul.”[15] So we have here the correlation of the soul or anima with animation or motion, and with e-motion.  Regarding the latter, Jung says elsewhere that, “Since the soul animates the body … she tends to favor the body and everything bodily, sensuous, and emotional.”[16] Also on the subject of emotions, Jung says, “The appetites … pertain to the sphere of the moon: they are anger (ira) and desire (libido) …. The passions are designated by animals because we have these things in common with them.”[17] For his part, Gebser relates “the emotive sphere symbolized and designated by the diaphragm and heart” to mythic consciousness.[18]

From the foregoing we can conclude that mythic thinking is an elemental form of cognition essentially colored by emotion. Sealing the Kleinian vessel a second time means moving awareness Proprioceptively backward into the feeling-toned mythic cognition that prevailed at an earlier time in human history—as I’ve already begun doing in a personal way by inserting my dreams and images into this text via hypolinks to the subtext. (In due course, we will see that more than this must happen for the full-fleshed coagulation of the mythic text.)

But if the mythic dimension is brought to consciousness with the second sealing of the Kleinian vessel, and if the dimension number of that vessel is 3 + 1, how could mythic cognition be two-dimensional as Gebser claims? It is here that we encounter the polymorphous complexity of the coagulatio noted in the previous chapter. We are going to see that while mythic cognition indeed is closely affiliated with a sphere of emotion possessing lower dimensionality, as a form of thinking it is itself in fact 3 + 1-dimensional, though only incipiently so. To get a handle on this, let us turn to the question of phylogeny.

Jung’s association of the soul or anima with the “animal principle” and his remark that the “passions” are what we have in common with animals[MSOffice1] point significantly to phylogenetic implications which, for the most part, are neglected by Gebser, whose focus is primarily on the evolution of human consciousness.  In this regard, the old idea of the “animal soul” is noteworthy.  Philosopher Antony Flew defines this as an “analogue in animals of the human soul or mind,”[19] one that suggests a principle of animation in the world existing independently of the human sphere of action. A more general expression of the “animal soul” is the “world soul” or anima mundi, a concept “founded on the view that the [nonhuman] world is productive of life and animation, and can therefore be regarded as itself animate.”[20] In fact, Jung makes frequent reference to the anima mundi, demonstrating that its liberation is a central goal of alchemy.[21] I venture to suggest that the imprisonment and subsequent freeing of the anima mundi portrayed in the alchemical literature metaphorically expresses the phylogenetic aspect of the developmental drama. The “Spirit” alluded to in the quintessential tale of the “Spirit in the Bottle” discussed in chapter 2 is none other than the anima mundi. Though we shall discover that this anima is not itself cognitive and is of lower dimension than the cogito, by Proprioceiving the 3 + 1-dimensional mythic cogito, the anima is invited to make its presence felt. (The present chapter deals chiefly with the animal aspect of the anima mundi. In succeeding chapters, other aspects will be explored.)

Enacting the second coniunctio means moving awareness backward into the pre-rational mythic past. To facilitate this, we go back to the writing of the Jungian anthropologist Erich Neuman. In the Origins and History of Consciousness, Neumann states that “primitive man experiences an ‘animated’ world, while modern man knows only an ‘abstract’ one. Pure existence in the unconscious, which primitive man shares with the animal, is indeed nonhuman and prehuman.”[22] Neumann asserts that, “The dawn man lives his affects and emotions to the full.”[23] The transpersonal philosopher Michael Washburn, taking his cue from Neumann, notes that these primordial emotions (today still experienced in human infancy) include a feeling of “exuberance, or overflowing well-being,”[24] “waves of bliss,”[25] and a sense of “delight” in a world that is enchanted with “an aura of the miraculous.”[26] However, Neumann points out that primal emotionality also includes “instinctive reaction[s]” involving “flight or attack . . . rage, paralysis, etc.”[27] He contends that human consciousness has evolved “from the primitive emotional man to the modern man” in a manner that “protects—or endeavors to protect—him from this access of primitive emotionality.”[28] The protection is needed because “primitive man . . . like the child . . . was forced into total reaction by any and every content that emerged, and, overpowered by his emotionality and the underlying images, acted as a totality, but without freedom.”[29] This “total reactivity of primitive man is no subject for romanticism.”[30] Nevertheless, given “the present crisis of modern man, whose overaccentuation of the conscious, cortical side of himself has led to excessive repression and dissociation of the unconscious . . . it has become necessary for him to ‘link back’ with the medullary region”[31] of the brain, or, what amounts to the same thing, with the “heart-soul which animates the body.”[32] I suggest that this “linking back” to primal feeling is what happens in the Proprioception attendant to alchemy’s second conjunction. Neumann’s alchemical rendering of the process is noteworthy:

As in alchemy the initial hermaphroditic state of the prima materia is sublimated through successive transformations until it reaches the final, and once more hermaphroditic, state of the philosopher’s stone, so the path of individuation leads through successive transformations to a higher synthesis of ego, consciousness and the unconscious. While in the beginning the ego germ lay in the embrace of the hermaphroditic uroboros, at the end the self proves to be the golden core of a sublimated uroboros, combining in itself masculine and feminine, conscious and unconscious elements, a unity in which the ego does not perish but experiences itself, in the self, as the uniting symbol.[33]

Now, Neumann places strong emphasis on the overriding importance of the animal in primordial human affairs. He notes that “the animal forms of the gods and ancestors originally symbolized and expressed man’s oneness with nature.”[34] In native bands of the Pacific Northwest, for example, the initiation rites crucial to the entire course of a person’s development centered on

induction into the spiritual world of the ancestral totem . . . [which] is very often an animal. . . . The totem is an ancestor, but more in the sense of a spiritual founder than a progenitor. Primarily he is a numinosum, a transpersonal, spiritual being. He is transpersonal because, although an animal, a plant, or whatever else, he is such not as an individual entity, not as a person, but as an idea, a species.[35

Through totemic initiation, the individual acquires a “guardian spirit”: “This spirit, who may be lodged in an animal or a thing, introduces into the life of the initiate who experiences him a whole sequence of ritual obligations and observances, and plays a decisive role among all shamans, priests, and prophetic figures in primitive societies.”[36] Later Neumann comments on how the expansion of human consciousness via “secondary personalization leads finally to the local deities becoming heroes and the totem animals domestic spirits. . . . In consequence, the human and personal sphere is enriched at the expense of the extrahuman and transpersonal.”[37] Taking the history of ancient Egypt as an example, Neumann documents “the increasing humanization of the gods.” He shows how, from the First Dynasty to the Third, the animal figures that predominated were gradually transmuted into human ones, so that, “from the Third Dynasty onwards the human form becomes the rule. The gods establish themselves in human form as lords of heaven, and the animals retire.”[38]

In Coming to Our Senses, Morris Berman makes clear the extent to which modern industrial society has lost touch with its animal heritage. According to Berman, the Paleolithic human being saw the animal as an Other, but one with whom s/he was intimately identified. In fact, the earliest humans were so deeply immersed in the animal world that it might be plausible to say that, in a sense, they were more animal-like than human. “Animal life was everywhere, even in the skies,” says Berman, and “animal movement, the animal body, was the model of human expression in hunter-gatherer society.”[39] It is not surprising then that “the first art, which can be seen in the caves of Altamira and Lascaux, is about animal subjects rather than human ones.”[40] Berman goes on to say of hunter-gatherer culture that “human life . . . had no special significance apart from the animal world.”[41] And even in the next historical epoch, with the advent of agriculture and the domestication of animals, their profound influence on the human psyche was maintained: “Animal cults and symbolism continue into the Neolithic period, still strongly coloring human processes of cognitive and psychological development.”[42]

However, the agricultural revolution also brought with it a momentous change: the animal realm was now divided into the “Wild” and the “Tame.” Animals in the latter category, pressed into the service of human needs, were stripped of their Otherness, whereas those in the former category presently tended to be regarded as merely what is Other, as alien beings to be hated and feared. According to Berman, this splitting of the human and animal worlds constituted the basis for all subsequent dualisms attendant to human affairs. In the earlier hunter-gatherer society, “If there was no sharp divide between Wild and Tame, or Self and Other, there was also no such divide between sacred and profane, or heaven and earth. . . . Domestication changed all this. The fundamental categories that presented themselves were now two—Wild and Tame—and eventually all forms of thought, down to the present day, came to be based on this model.”[43]

On Berman’s account, the transition to modern industrial society brought with it a further significant transformation of the relationship between animals and human beings. Now, the very awareness of the animal as an Other is eclipsed: “fear of the animal Other acquires a whole new dimension during the modern period; it becomes vague, unspecified, repressed, and all the more terrifying as a result.”[44] Thus, in modern culture, “Nonhuman Otherness is not merely degraded . . . but absent.”[45] Berman concludes that “Fear of organic life and the existence of the Tame/Wild distinction is so central and pervasive a feature of modern technological societies that it is, paradoxically, almost invisible. Like . . . the mind/body split [which derives from it], it is virtually everywhere, so it seems to be nowhere.”[46] Zoos, pets, and Disney characters certainly abound in today’s world, but all these give us are “humanized form[s] of ourselves, not a true Other.”[47]

Significant for our purposes is the emotionality of the animal Other repressed since Paleolithic times: “Paleolithic men and women took their cues from body feelings and the movements of animals. This was a life governed by shifting moods rather than the demands of the ego.”[48] The contemporary social phenomenon of psychotherapy alone makes it more than clear that modern emotional life tends to be “bottled up.” When the “cork” is in place, emotions are tame, well socialized, controlled by cognition. Of course, the cork does tend to “pop” from time to time, whereupon emotions rush out regressively and we are flooded by them, as the youth of Grimms’ fairly tale experienced. Only with the second sealing of the cognitive Kleinian container can the “Spirit Mercurius”—i.e. genuine animal emotion—emerge in a full-fledged and constructive fashion. In topodimensional terms, what emerges from imprisonment in the 3 + 1-dimensional Klein bottle and enters into harmony with it is a 2 + 1-dimensional body possessing a topology of its own, as we will soon see. While Berman says nothing on the matter of dimensionality, confirmation of the two-dimensional character of the animal’s emotional space comes from two independent sources.

Comparing human consciousness to that of animals, the nineteenth century philosopher Jules Lachelier concludes that animals “are provided with the same senses as we, but it is probable that these senses move them much more than they teach them and that these impressions themselves are entirely subordinated to their organic feelings.”[49] Lachelier associates animal being or the “animal self”[50] with “desire” and “purpose,”[51] with the “will to live,” which he views as the “fundamental emotional state.”[52] This emotional order of consciousness is seen as played out in “two-dimensional space or surface.”[53] By contrast, human consciousness involves a higher order of reflection in which “we project outside of ourselves solid objects by adding to the two dimensions of visible space that which is only the imaged affirmation of existence—depth. . . . Three-dimensional space, individual reflection and reason—these are the elements of a . . . consciousness which we have . . . called intellectual.”[54]

The other confirmation of the two-dimensionality of animal emotion comes from the Russian theosophical philosopher P. D. Ouspensky. Ouspensky also saw the animal world as a world of emotion: “In reality the animal does not reason its actions, but lives by its emotions, subject to that emotion which happens to be strongest. . . . Its actions are directed not by thoughts but principally by emotional memory and motor perceptions. . . . Any perception of an animal, any recollected image, is bound up with some emotional sensation or emotional remembrance—there are no non-emotional, cold thoughts in the animal soul.”[55] Ouspensky then asks: “How does the world appear to the animal?”[56] His answer:

The world appears to it as a series of complicated moving surfaces. The animal lives in a world of two dimensions. Its universe has for it the properties and appearance of a surface. And upon this surface transpire an enormous number of different movements of a most fantastic character.

Why should the world appear to the animal as a surface? First of all, because it appears as a surface to us. But we know that the world is not a surface, and the animal cannot know it. It accepts everything just as it appears. It is powerless to correct the testimony of its eyes—or it cannot do so to the extent that we do.

We are able to measure in three mutually independent directions. . . . The animal can measure simultaneously in two directions only—it can never measure in three directions at once. This is due to the fact that, not possessing concepts, it is unable to retain in the mind the idea of the first two directions, for measuring the third.[57]

What I would add to the idea that animals dwell in a two-dimensional space is that they also possess a sense of time, so that animal dimensionality is in fact 2 + 1. The temporality in question is certainly not the linear progression from the past into future characteristic of post-Renaissance human experience. The nature of animal temporality can be inferred from Gebser’s description of the temporal experience of the mythic human being who was so profoundly influenced by the animal. As noted above, Gebser referred to mythic time as “temporicity” — a continual harking back to what was, a returning again and again to the beginning, as the ocean waves rise, crest, and fall back down into their troughs, only to rise again. I suggest that this cyclical time sense, attuned as it is to the seasons and rhythms of nature, is closely akin to the animal’s sense of time. This is not to say that mythic humanity’s time sense was identical to the animal’s. The mythic person, as a 3 + 1-dimensional human being, possessed cognitive capabilities and the potential for linear temporal experience, even though these were weakly developed and largely overshadowed by 2 + 1-dimensional animal emotionality and temporicity.

We must of course go more deeply into mythic experience than we have. In order to seal the Kleinian vessel a second time, just writing about the mythic will not suffice. With the first sealing of the vessel enacted in chapter 4, mental individuation (the unio mentalis) reached its preliminary climax through an act of self-signification. Jung notes that “the second stage of conjunction, the re-uniting of the unio mentalis with the body, . . . consists in making a reality of the man who has acquired some [abstract] knowledge of his paradoxical wholeness.”[58] In the present chapter, this coagulatio is to be realized by an act of mythic self-signification. But before turning to that, we must take up a crucial topological question deferred until now. If the cognitive Self is a 3 + 1-dimensional being whose individuation is contained by the Klein bottle, how may we describe the topological vessel that contains the individuation of the 2 + 1-dimensional emotional Self of the animal?

Lower-Dimensional Topology

The topological investigation conducted in chapter 3 brought out the fact that the Klein bottle does not simply stand alone but is a member of a bisection series: Cutting the one-sided Klein bottle down the middle yields a pair of oppositely-oriented Moebius strips; dividing the one-sided Moebius strip in this manner produces a two-sided structure called a lemniscate. While the bisection series clearly constitutes a topological family of closely related structures, what is not at all evident from taking these structures as mere objects appearing before us in our familiar three-dimensional space is that each one actually comprises a spatio-sub-objective dimension unto itself.

We already know that this is true of the Klein bottle, when the bottle is understood alchemically rather than conventionally. The hole in the bottle, its necessary incompleteness as an object in three-dimensional space, proves to be the crucial factor. Conventional and alchemical mathematics alike conclude that an added dimension is needed to complete the Klein bottle, but while convention deems this extra dimension as just another exterior space in which the bottle is embedded as object, alchemy views it as an interior dimension, the dimension of psyche or subject that merges with object (see chapters 3 and 4). The self-penetrating, self-containing Klein bottle, in its blending of object and subject, space and time, thus constitutes the uroboric embodiment of the 3 + 1-dimensional Self.

Now, in considering the sub-Kleinian members of the bisection series, it seems clear that they can be properly completed as objects in three-dimensional space. It is for this reason that, although a paradoxical structure like the Moebius strip can well symbolize the integration of subject and object in the 3 + 1-dimensional sphere, it cannot effectively embody said integration. That is precisely why we saw the need for dimensional enhancement via the Klein bottle in the previous chapter. The proposition I now offer is that even though the sub-Kleinian members of our topological family indeed cannot embody the dialectic of the 3 + 1-dimensional Self, they do provide embodiments of lower-dimensional Selves.

Whereas the standard interpretation of the bisection series says that each of its members is a two-dimensional object (i.e., a surface) embedded in a higher-dimensional continuum (the Klein bottle is also regarded as a surface here, rather than as a solid), what I am proposing is that none of its members actually possess this status when considered alchemically. Since the necessary incompleteness of the Klein bottle in three-dimensional space is plain to us, it is relatively easy for us to see how this structure could defy conventional objectification. But the lower-dimensional counterparts of the bottle evidence no such incompleteness. Why can we not see Klein-bottle-like holes in the sub-Kleinian members of the series? It is because our seeing is three-dimensional. Within this frame of observation, lower-dimensional dialectics are imperceptible. The principle is implicit in the thought experiment suggested by Rudolf Rucker, discussed in chapter 3.

To reiterate Rucker’s operative point, a form that penetrates itself in a given number of dimensions can be produced without cutting a hole in it if an added dimension is available. Rucker illustrates by having us imagine a species of “flatlanders,” dwellers in a world of two spatial dimensions. If these creatures sought to assemble a Moebius strip in their dimensionally limited environment, they would be confronted with the same problem we three-dimensional beings face in constructing the Klein bottle: the “flatlanders” would have to cut a hole in the Moebius, for the Moebius would intersect itself in the two-dimensional world, just as the Klein bottle does in our world.

My proposition is that “flatland” is not merely hypothetical but that there really does exist a 2- or 2 + 1-dimensional world (though not one inhabited by mathematicians contemplating topological puzzles!). In this lower-dimensional realm, the Moebius plays a role similar to that of the Klein bottle in the 3 + 1-dimensional sphere. Alchemically grasped, the Moebius is a psychophysical body of paradox, a sub-objective, spatio-temporal dimension of the Self. The Moebial order of psyche or subjectivity is not one of human cognition but of animal emotion; in its individuated form, it is an “animal soul”[59] or animal Self of the kind that Neumann alluded to in speaking of the Pacific Northwest totem as a “transpersonal, spiritual being.”[MSOffice2] And Moebial dimensionality is not constituted by linear time externally adjoined to Cartesian space but by a denser, earthier, intertwined world of natural rhythm and circular temporal flow.

The historical accounts of Neumann and Berman previously cited make it clear that, in moving out of mythic culture and into the Greek and post-Renaissance epochs dominated by human rationality, the once-intimate connections with the animal realm have become obscured. Again, in topodimensional terms, the 2 + 1-dimensional Moebial world has been “bottled up,” repressively enclosed within the 3 + 1-dimensional container. For the Moebial anima to be liberated, its higher-dimensional container must first come to be recognized as Kleinian in nature. This Kleinian self-reflection takes place in the preliminary conjunction initiated in the last chapter: the Hermetic sealing of the Klein bottle via the unio mentalis. But while the unio mentalis is a necessary condition for freeing the anima, it is not sufficient. There must now be an unio emotionalis that seals the bottle a second time. As noted above, this more concrete closure of the vessel is to be carried out by moving awareness Proprioceptively backward into the feeling-laden cognition of that bygone mythic epoch when the “animal soul” had held sway. It is through resealing the paradoxical Klein bottle in this way that the Moebial anima can be freed from it—not simply to become detached from the Kleinian cogito but to enter into harmony with it, a harmony of dimensional spheres. In order to enact the required Proprioception in full concreteness right here in this text, an emotional self-signification is presently called for.

Mythic Self-Signification and the Proprioception of the Child

In the previous chapter, we explored what it would take to carry out a self-signification of the alchemical text. There I noted that, to reach alchemy’s goal of fashioning the subtle body for the Self’s containment, the body of the text must first be fleshed out by bringing into play the existential life of the one who writes. Steven Rosen, author of the text, thus had to drop his veil of authorial anonymity and make his presence explicitly felt. Following that, it was necessary to withdraw the Self’s projection of Steven’s particular self via a movement backward into the generic brain of humanity at large. With this Proprioception, the Kleinian Self as such assumes authorship of the text.

For the self-signification presently required, it is not enough for Steven alone to stand present. A long repressed aspect of his identity must also make its presence felt. As the emotive Moebial Self is repressively contained within the cognitive Kleinian Self, so too a more concretely functioning personage is concealed by the abstractions of Steven the adult. Whereas the adult is given to discursive thinking and rational discourse, the child is governed by mythic mentation and is strongly affected by the tug of the heart. It is as Neumann indicated in his restatement of the widely held idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: the mythic past of our species “is re-experienced in every early childhood, and the child’s personal experience of this pre-ego stage retraces the old track trodden by humanity.”[60] For the further coagulation of this text, it is incumbent on its author to Proprioceptively retrace the track he traveled in his own childhood. Let us call the child “Stevie” (the name my parents gave me in my early years). This youth must now step out of the shadows and stand present.

Dream of July 3, 2004

I’m with my Dad. We’re waiting for my mother[MSOffice3] to come home. I haven’t eaten yet and it’s late. Has my father already eaten? I think so, but I haven’t. I’m doing something, involved with something while I wait.

Finally, at around 11:30pm, a cab pulls up.

“Where have you been?” I ask.

“I’ve been quite busy with important things,” is her answer.

“Am I not important?”

“Yes, but there’s been so much to do. I’ve been out, doing what I need to do.”

“Okay…actually, I’ve been busy too. I was playing something and was able to occupy myself until you got back…”

I waited so long for her. Can I still have supper at 11:30pm? But it wasn’t as if I’d starved myself and was waiting with bated breath. I was busy with other things. But I was waiting nonetheless, and here she was.

Dream of October 9, 2004

My son David is a little boy, and he is very mad at me. He’s scraped his knee and he’s angry because I haven’t cared for it properly. I’m a little surprised to hear this. I didn’t realize that he thinks I’ve neglected him. He’d wanted me to put a band-aide on his knee. At one point, when he isn’t there, I look at a small tin box he has with his things in it. It’s a sad little box containing a few scraggly items, including some frayed band-aides.

David is really angry with me. (Did he realize I’d inspected his box? Did he think it was intrusive of me to do this?) His feelings are hurt because I’ve neglected him. Why didn’t I put a band-aide on his knee? I was careless and impatient in dealing with it. Maybe I quickly rinsed the knee with some water but hadn’t really cared for it; I’d just rushed on to other things. I was in a “big hurry” and hadn’t had time for him.

“You hurt my feelings,” he says accusingly. His lip is trembling. I’d been insensitive to a little child’s bruised feelings.

At some point it seems that David wants his own phone. To comply with his wishes, I’m having another phone set up but it is right next to an existing one. I hear the operator’s voice loud and clear, establishing that there is this new connection. And I’m thinking that we don’t need it, that it’s a terrible waste of money and a bad mistake. But I don’t want to further hurt David’s feelings.

Is this a “new connection” with Stevie?

Dream of March 17, 2005

I’m traveling with my son and we’re passing through a clearance area or check point (at an airport, I believe). It’s our turn on line. The woman in charge sends David through. I’m now at the front of the queue and the people behind me are surging forward a bit, so that the line is threatening to break, but I contain it. Yet the woman in charge blames me for this infraction. She singles me out to be left behind. She is chiding and dismissive. I plead with her, trying every which way to gain her approval for being allowed to go forward. She does not relent.

So I’m sitting near the counter, watching the woman as she permits everyone else to pass through. I wait and wait, with a deepening sense of sad resignation.

“Oh won’t you let me go through?” No, she won’t. So I wait some more, wait and wait.

The child is waiting to be forgiven. Powerless, he waits for her approval. She is taking her own sweet time about it. Busy with others and having put him in his place, she doesn’t even think about him. He got what he deserved and isn’t worth any more of her attention.

There’s a feeling of impotence, of being a helpless child.

Dream of March 8, 2006

I help a little boy get across a body of water, maybe from Staten Island to Brooklyn, or to Manhattan. I do this by deceiving the officials who must approve his passage. Though my motivation is good, what I’ve done is illegal.

I find myself dealing with a woman who reminds me of the matronly and amiable secretary of my old college department – except that this woman is not so amiable. And she is in charge of things, so I must answer to her.

At first she doesn’t know that I’ve done anything illegal on behalf of the boy. But then I’m again asked to help with someone else who is to make this crossing. Apparently, I’m the one who is putting himself forward (though others are involved in this illegal act), making myself vulnerable to discovery.

The woman in charge now begins to suspect me. She begins taking photographs of me with a strange camera (rectangular, long, and narrow). She believes I’ve committed bribery. That’s not true! Bribery was not involved. My motives were benevolent. But quite unjustly, she’s convinced that I’m guilty of the crime.

With each photo she takes, I feel a sense of being exposed, caught in a trap, unable to defend myself. It’s as if, each time she snaps the camera she is saying: “I’ve got you! You’re now in deep trouble, and I have complete power over you.”

I now start becoming emotional. I’m pleading with her and begin to weep: “You think I was involved in bribery? I would never do that, never.” I’m crying bitterly, and say again, “I would never do that.” And she’s laughing sadistically. Now she’s got me where she wants me, and is enjoying the sight of me squirming pathetically before her. I feel humiliated.

Through these dreamscapes, Stevie stands present in the text. The feelings of the child shine forth on the page: His longing; his anger and hurt; his sense of guilt, helplessness, and humiliation; his sad resignation. Still, the descriptive containment of these feelings given by the dream stories does not constitute a hermetic containment; the disclosure of the emotional subtext does not add up to a Proprioception of the text. For the latter, it will not be enough to gain cognizance of Stevie’s particular feelings. Stevie himself must be taken back in. The Projection of Stevie as a particular being whose particular emotions are contained in his particular body must be withdrawn. Thus moving backward, the feeling-saturated cognitions of the child at play beneath the surface of the text come to be recognized as the generic cognition of mythic humanity. This second sealing of the 3 + 1-dimensional Kleinian vessel will contain the immature cogito so as to bring a greater degree of maturity than had been achieved in the first sealing. Here further individuation will be realized by bringing the mythic cogito to light. But something more will happen with the Proprioception of Stevie. The “genie will be let out of the bottle.” The non-cognitive lower-dimensional anima will be released from cognitive containment to enact a Proprioception of its own, one that corresponds to the initial hermetic sealing of the 2 + 1-dimensional Moebial vessel. In Proprioceptive synchrony, Kleinian and Moebial Selves will then carry out their joint Self-significations.

The Proprioception of Stevie begins with the distillation of Steven’s written text to the denser subtextual medium of Stevie’s concrete images and spoken words. The child’s images are not sharply circumscribed figures cast before the perspective of a Cartesian viewer who regards them with detachment. Philosopher David Lavery[61] helps us to appreciate the distinction. He draws the contrast between “focal vision” and “peripheral vision.”[62] The former gained supremacy in the aftermath of the Renaissance with the rise of perspective. It was because the Cartesian observer detached himself from the world that he was able to “put things in perspective.” Thus standing aloof, he could bring the objects under his visual scrutiny into sharp focus by the process of binocular convergence upon them. Lavery intimates that the eyes worked differently prior to the Renaissance. The preperspectival person, participating more fully in the world, being immersed in it, did not primarily focus upon objects held off at a distance. Rather, the sense of being encompassed by one’s environment led one to experience things and people in a “peripheral” fashion, i.e., as being all around one. In formulating his account of this earlier way of seeing, Lavery draws from the writings of Owen Barfield, who is subsequently quoted as follows: The “‘earlier kind of knowledge . . . was at once more universal and less clear. We still have something of this older relation to nature when we are asleep, and it throws up the suprarational wisdom which many psychoanalysts detect in dreams.’”[63] The old peripheral vision is oneiric in character: it possesses a dreamlike quality, as Gebser said of mythic imagination.[64] And the visual imagery of the contemporary child, recapitulating phylogeny as it does, possesses this same quality.

No doubt Steven’s dreamscapes are haunted by Stevie, and the dream texts can be distilled by transmuting the adult’s written words into the child’s mythic images and voicings. To begin, we can picture Steven’s son, as portrayed in the dream of October 9, 2004. David’s image is presently the text more than these words I am typing, and were Stevie to stand present to gaze upon the photo, he would view it diffusely. Since he would not bring David’s face into sharp relief, this visage could fluidly morph into that of another[MSOffice4] , much as in a dream. It is not a written word that accompanies such peripheral imaging but one that is spoken. When Steven’s dream character of March 8, 2006 protests the charge of bribery by tearfully declaring, “I would never do that, never,” and says again in plaintive anguish, “…[MSOffice5] ”—these are in fact Stevie’s words, and are best expressed not by inscription but with the child’s voice.

The transition from the child to the adult, or, phylogenetically, from mythic to rational culture, in fact is marked by the passage to the written word from a word that was spoken. The change is brought out in Gebser’s portrayal of how mythic consciousness, characterized by “utterance” and “voicing,” gave way to rational consciousness, where “seeing and measuring”[65] were more prominent (the written word is seen, of course, not voiced and heard). In Interfaces of the Word, communications theorist Walter Ong attributes great significance to this transformation of the means by which humans communicate. Ong hypothesizes that, over the past five thousand years, consciousness has evolved from being governed primarily by aural perception, sensitivity to sound, to being controlled by vision. The cultural concomitant of this has been the transition from orality to script, from social transactions based on the spoken word, to those dependent on writing.

Following the inception of script around 3500 B.C.E., says Ong, “the world of primary orality was torn to pieces by writing and print, which then created, agonizingly, a new kind of noetic and a new kind of culture based on analysis and self-conscious unification.”[66] What, specifically, was the primary experience like? Ong offers the following proposition:

The psyche in a culture innocent of writing knows by a kind of empathetic identification of knower and known, in which the object of knowledge and the total being of the knower enter into a kind of fusion, in a way which literate cultures would typically find unsatisfyingly vague and garbled and somehow too intense and participatory. To personalities shaped by literacy, oral folk often appear curiously unprogrammed, not set off against their physical environment, given simply to soaking up existence, unresponsive to abstract demands such as a “job” that entails commitment to routines organized in accordance with abstract clock time (as against human, or lived, “felt,” duration).[67]

And of the spoken word, Ong says:

[It] is of its very nature a sound, tied to the movement of life itself in the flow of time. Sound exists only when it is going out of existence: in uttering the word “existence[MSOffice6] ,” by the time I get to the “-tence,” the “exis-” is gone and has to be gone. A spoken word, even when it refers to a statically modeled “thing,” is itself never a thing. . . . No real word can be present all at once as the letters in a written “word” are. The real word, the spoken word, is always an event . . . an action, an ongoing part of ongoing existence.

Oral utterance thus encourages a sense of continuity with life, a sense of participation, because it is itself participatory. Writing and print, despite their intrinsic value, have obscured the nature of the word . . . for they have sequestered the essentially participatory word . . . from its natural habitat, sound, and assimilated it to a mark on a surface, where a real word cannot exist at all.[68]

Despite Ong’s overdrawn contrast between the “real word” and the written word, and his nostalgic preference for the former, he brings home some important distinctions between these modes of interaction. Of course, while the written word has gained supremacy over the spoken word, we still do speak to each other. Nevertheless, spoken language, though still being transmitted through the concrete medium of sound, has taken on, in its abstract pattern of organization, the character of written discourse. We have come to speak as though we were writing. The clue Ong provides as to the nature of original speech—that it is “tied to the movement of life itself in the flow of time”—is reminiscent of what Gebser says of mythic consciousness in general: it is “oceanic,” as exemplified in the circular rhythm of the fragment from Heraclitus: “‘For souls it is death to become water; for water it is death to become earth. But from the earth comes water and from water, soul’.” [69] How different this is from the prosaic linearity of rational expression later to gain sway. For the text of Heraclitus to be properly conveyed, it must be recited, voiced aloud in the rhythmic tempo of a song…[MSOffice7]

The Jungian analyst Mary Lynn Kittelson provides further insight into the nature of original hearing and speech in her essay, “The Acoustic Vessel.” She begins by taking note of the repression of the old sonority that has occurred in our society: “Mostly . . . we work visually. Our words are heard primarily as content. We pay scant heed (consciously, at any rate) to how things sound.”[70] Thus:

Through the [domination of the] eye, the vibratory and participatory aspects of experience fall into the shadows. To be ‘ear-minded’ is to be resonant, layered, slower, sensing things out before the light. . . . Unlike light, whose vibratory nature is a less immediate experience, sound and silence reverberate in a palpable way . . . .

Our collective experience in modern society has supported auditory inattentiveness and misuse of sound. . . . Chatter, complaint, jargon, interminable ‘how-to’s,’ and the hyped-up headline style of broadcast news are . . . incessant. . . . As adults we have lost our ear-minded center, which was vibrant in previous generations and remains so in much of infant and animal life. According to one neurolinguistic programming study, “Most people in the U.S. do not actually hear the sequence of words and the intonation patterns of what they, or other people, say. They are only aware of the pictures, feelings and internal dialogue that they have in response to what they hear.”[71]

Using terms like “song,” “melody,” “prelude,” “overture,” and “opera,”[72] Kittelson emphasizes, both metaphorically and literally, the rhythmic musicality of uninhibited sonance. Imagination surely plays a role in such soundings, as Gebser says of mythic “utterances” and “voicings.” The images may be concretely visual, or acoustical, “as in [the images of] a poem or song.”[73] Like Gebser, Kittelson relates primal sonority to myth in an explicit way. After observing that soundings of this kind are “noticeably present in many creation myths,”[74] she focuses on the Greek myth of Echo, which voices “longing, dreams, loneliness, pain, and poignant search.”[75] “The mythic image of Echo,” says Kittelson, “suggests a potential for resonance in a way that ‘neurosis’ or mindless ‘parroting’ does not.” In the passionate murmuring of Echo, there is a …[MSOffice8] that is “full of meaning” and “evokes the kind of listening that poignantly discovers the significance in Echo’s sounds.”[76]

When Kittelson goes on to describe echo experiences as “the singsong offerings of the psyche,”[77] Stevie comes to mind, echoing in his mournful cadence: …[MSOffice9] . For Stevie truly to stand present in the text, his words must echo here and now and his oneiric images gain presence. The words must sound forth beneath the mute graphic marks that Steven has printed on the page; the dream-glow of the images must radiate[MSOffice10] through the cold abstraction of these skeletal bodies of light.

It is clear though that, while such a distillation of the text is necessary for the coniunctio now required, it is not sufficient. More is needed than Stevie’s personal presence. His voiced words and preperspectival images must be Proprioceptively retracted in realization of the transpersonal. The Proprioception enacted in the first coniunctio is not simply left behind in thus passing to the second. Rather, the individuation process carried out in the previous chapter remains fully operative here, since the presence of the Proprioceptive adult is required to support the Proprioception of the child. Only by sustaining the light of mature cognitive self-comprehension can a mere regression to mythic cognition be averted. But exactly what is it that happens here beyond the personal presencing of Stevie? Just how is Stevie’s personal text rendered transpersonal?

Again, for the Proprioception that accompanies the first conjunction (the unio mentalis), Steven enters his body through his head to obtain a bodily sense of the head that directs his writing. In the process, he turns his awareness to the tensions in his eyes behind which lies the master word, the generic “I” constituting the innermost core of Steven’s particular “I.” For the Proprioception of Stevie, the head must be entered once more, but now on a different trajectory. We might even say that a “different head” must be entered.

Recall that the distinct anatomical locus of the rational “I” is the “cerebro-ocular” region, that is, the cerebral cortex of the brain and the organ of vision associated with it. The initial Proprioception entails drawing attention backward into this cerebral brain (Burrow’s practice of “cotention”). I suggest that, in the denser Proprioception now to be enacted, the “master signifier” is not the “I”/eye of the cerebral cortex that is linked to the written word, but a sub-cortical, “synaesthetic I,” that which lies behind Stevie’s voiced word and preperspectival image.

The brain research of Burrow was primarily concerned with activity in the cerebral cortex. Almost two decades after Burrow’s death, a theory emerged that brought greater emphasis to lower centers of the brain. The neurophysiologist Paul D. MacLean[78] proposed that the human brain is triune—that it actually consists of three brains[MSOffice11] , one arising from the other in the course of phylogeny. MacLean identified the cerebrum as the neomammalian brain, hypothesizing that it evolved out of an older, paleomammalian structure associated with animal functioning. Anatomically, the new brain formed around the older brain so that the latter came to be contained within it. The structural containment is also functional. Whereas the cerebrum is the layer of the brain in which cognitive activity is consciously processed, the old mammalian brain or limbic system is linked to operations of a subconscious nature. Recent research using sophisticated imaging techniques (PET studies) confirms that while neocortical activity prevails during waking consciousness, in dreaming the limbic system gains control.[79] The paleomammalian brain evolved out of and came to contain an even older structure: the reptilian brain. Lying inside the base of the skull, this primal core functions in a largely unconscious, vegetative fashion (the way reptiles appear to function).

I propose that while the opening Proprioception entails a movement into the neomammalian brain, presently it is the paleomammalian brain that is to be reentered. The schematic drawing[MSOffice12] provides us with a rough idea of the spatial relationship among the three brain centers, but a diagram like this is of course an objectification. Here we view the representation of the brain as appearing in front of us when what is required is a backward movement into the brain itself. Entering the paleomammalian brain in reverse via Proprioception brings a realization of the sub-objective, psychophysical, generic brain — the brain as the embodiment of mythic humanity at large.

To pave the way for the retrograde passage into the inner recesses of the old mammalian brain, Stevie begins with the image of himself. He then proceeds in reverse through this master signifier, working his way to the transpersonal core of his personal self-image. Whereas Steven reenters his head through the “I”/eye governing the written text and moves backward into the cerebrum, Stevie proceeds in relation to the coagulated text, retreating from his imaginal “I” (the bodily image of himself) into the “dream brain” constituted by the limbic system. When Stevie stands present, his softly focusing eyes move in the saccadic rhythm of a dream. The limbically based eye movements (R.E.M.s) thus generated are to be Proprioceived. Guided by the adult Proprioception of Steven that remains transparent for this denser coagulatio, Stevie’s dream becomes lucid; he awakens in it to obtain a consciously felt sense of the limbic eyes behind which lies the transpersonal “I” of the mythic cogito.

Mirrorings of the Text

With Stevie’s own image as his text, we may say that the self-signification at hand involves a special kind of mirroring. At the moment however, Stevie is not present, so let us explore this with Steven. The webcam of his computer is functioning as his mirror.

As I look at the image I see on the screen, I am strongly inclined to regard it simply as an object, whereupon the viewing subject is relegated to the background. Thus rendered invisible, the subject enjoys the comforts of anonymity. But then there are those moments when gazing in the virtual mirror can be disturbing (and not just because the “object” I see has too many wrinkles, an oversized nose, and the like; J). I look at myself and realize that it is I who am doing the looking. There is something unnerving about the experience, intimating as it does an odd commingling of viewer and viewed. Gazing at myself in this way, I am likely to be struck by a sense of alienating derealization. My natural inclination is to shake off the feeling and resume my normal way of looking in mirrors, that in which the comfortable split is upheld between the one I view—Steven as the object displayed—and he who does the viewing—the anonymous subject ensconced in the background.

But suppose I seek to sustain the uncanny perception of myself instead of brushing it aside or letting it go. I have tried to do this before and found it difficult. It is much like attempting to hold both perspectives of the one-dimensional (line-drawn) Necker cube without just blurring them. In the present case, however, the difficulty is compounded by the fact that it is the 3 + 1-dimensional object and subject that are to be held together. Still, it might seem that if I could somehow counteract the forward thrust of objectification and stay with the paradox for a long enough time, I could get a clearer glimpse of the uroboric blending of him who looks into the mirror and the one who is seen therein. On such an occasion, I would neither simply be inside my body looking out, nor be outside of it looking back upon it from a disembodied vantage point. Rather, I would align myself with the Kleinian circulation of inside and outside. In the process, “I” would literally be beside “myself,” ecstatically present to “myself.” On a moment like this the circle of Proprioception would be closed and Steven Rosen and his anonymous other would flow unbrokenly together, penetrating one another in mutual transformation. In such a moment of ecstasy, seer and seen would gain expression as the seeing process, the transitive gyration by which Self sees itself.

However, in the case of the concrete “text” constituted by the bodily mirror image, the fact is that Steven cannot consummate the ecstatic marriage to Self while operating on his own; the union can be achieved only in conjunction with Stevie. To be sure, Steven has already begun consummating the marriage in more abstract terms. Through the unio mentalis, he can close the paradoxical circle of Proprioception; the ecstasy of cerebral self-awareness can be realized insofar as the text comes to signify itself (see previous chapter). Yet this is an ecstasy of the written “I,” not of the image one sees in the mirror. Setting the written text aside, I may surely look into the webcam and gain a momentary sense that it is I who am looking. Generally, however, the abstract “I” that presides over the written text also holds sway in the world at large. I noted above that we have come to speak as if we were writing. It also seems true that we now tend to see as if we were reading. That is why the uncanny mirroring experience cannot be sustained—because Steven reads his mirror image (interprets it abstractly), rather than viewing it concretely. Steven is the “I” through whom mirror perception normally takes place, and he does not correspond literally to the bodily image he perceives; rather, Steven’s identity is centered in the more abstractly embodied, non-imaginal, linguistic “I.” Since the “master signifier” or “I” that lies at Steven’s core is the written word and not the image, as long as this “I” maintains its detached control in the sphere of concrete perception, it will objectify the image it sees in the mirror (the fleeting experience of being “beside myself” may indicate a momentary lapse in said control). It is true that, for the Proprioception of the image to take place, the Proprioception of the word is necessary. Yet it is not sufficient. For, while the circle of self-signification may close in the written text to encompass Steven’s cerebral identity, it cannot close with respect to the mirror image without the presence of him whose core identity corresponds to that image, viz. Stevie.

Now, whether perceiving the text-as-concrete-image or the written text, the “I”/eye is the source of perception, and it is to the “I”/eye that perception returns in realizing that I am the one who is regarding the text. In holding the paradox, the bodily source is made more explicit. Thus moving backward into the body, a felt sense is obtained of the optical activity by which the “I”/eye composes itself as object (image or written word). Going further with this self-reversal in which the “I”/eye draws back in upon itself, palpable contact is made with the sub-objective, generic brain. The proposition is that different brains are involved in the respective Proprioceptions of written and imaginal texts. Whereas the Proprioceptive pathway of the former leads us backward into the neomammalian cerebrum, it is the paleomammalian limbic brain that is Proprioceived in the case of the latter. To better focus on just what is entailed in entering these distinctive spheres of generic flesh, let us return to Burrow.

For Burrow, experiencing the “phyloörganism as a whole”[80] requires the practice of cotention:

Our aim was to maintain a steadfast internal sense of the balance and tension connected with the eyes. . . . Through the kinesthetic balance of the ocular muscles it became possible, following long-continued practice, to maintain the eyes in a state of equilibrium for increasingly longer periods. In thus holding to an internal awareness of the tensional balance of the muscles controlling the eyes, there was . . . the coincident occurrence of a sensation of stress or tension in the region of the eyes and in the anterior part of the head. With the maintenance of this more steadfast and centralized position of the eyes, it was disclosed that the sense of physiological strain or tension was due to the opposition of the affecto-symbolic pattern (ditentive thinking) to the primary pattern of cotention.[81]

In other words, by “bringing about a kinesthetic awareness of the eyes through the consistent maintenance of a steadfast balance in oculomotor tensions,”[82] eventually a sense was cultivated of the “solidarity of the species”[83] that lies beyond the delusion of the isolated individual (e.g., Steven Rosen) (see previous chapter).

A detail of Burrow’s method is relevant to our purposes: “The first step in the method . . . consisted in closing the eyes. While in one’s attempt to restore cotention the eyes need not necessarily be closed, it seemed helpful . . . to employ this procedure.”[84] Naturally, I cannot close my eyes if I am to engage in an actual mirroring of the text. In cotentively mirroring the written text, my eyes do not light upon an image of myself but upon a word—the “I” that governs all these particular words. Here I do not merely view the sign but read it. My cotentive oculo-cerebral processing of this sign supports the conceptual reading of it that transforms it into a 3 + 1-dimensional Kleinian sign, thus making the word into flesh. In this way, the neomammalian brain uroborically thinks itSelf. What about the transpersonal mirroring of the more concrete text? Suppose I attempt to steady my eyes in Burrowian fashion while I look at my image in the glass. What would be the result?

Around 1980, when I first began describing to my students the perspectival integration of the Necker cube, one fellow said it reminded him of an eye exercise he had read about and had later come to practice. He and his partner would gaze at each other pupil to pupil, with pairs of corresponding pupils operating synchronously but separately. This mirroring procedure evidently counteracts the natural tendency either for one participant simply to focus on both of the other participant’s eyes at once so that they appear simultaneously, or for one participant’s eyes to come into focus on but a single eye of the other participant at a time. The effect of the special technique is that participants view each other’s eyes both together and separately! When I tried the procedure myself with several partners, on some occasions we momentarily experienced an eerie sense of penetration, as if we were moving through each other. I understood why my student associated this exercise with the Necker cube. In viewing the cube in the integrative way, we neither bring our eyes into focus on but a single perspective at a time nor view the perspectives in juxtapositional simultaneity. Instead the perspectives are grasped as flowing through each other in a manner that thoroughly blends succession and simultaneity. Thus we experience the paradoxical interpenetration of perspectives[MSOffice13] . After hearing from my student about the eye exercise and seeing its relationship to the Necker cube, I incorporated it into a novel[MSOffice14] , referring to it here as the “Moebius gaze”: the eyes of the participants interact as do the separate sides of the Moebius strip that nonetheless twist into each other as one.

It should be clear that when we look at each other in the Moebius way, though our eyes are not focusing as they normally do, neither is the binocular convergence of our eyes simply being prevented, since that would only result in a loss of focus. In such a case, we would look at each other and see naught but a blur. In the “Moebius gaze,” rather than merely obstructing the focusing process, we are counter–acting it, moving backward against the action of its habitual forward thrust. Such a retrograde movement can be illustrated through the example of handling a piece of fabric whose fibers are arranged in a certain direction. By running one’s fingers against the grain of the material, its direction becomes more clearly discernible. Similarly, in moving against the objectifying impetus of binocular convergence, awareness is no longer limited to the resultant object that is focused upon, but encompasses the entire focusing process. So, in practicing the Moebius gaze, participants do not just desist from perceptually objectifying each other; evidently, they obtain a felt sense of the whole course of objectification, including the pre-objective phase from which the objectification first arises. In a word, the Moebius gaze is proprioceptive.

I propose that the so-called Moebius gaze—which, in fact, is more accurately described here as Kleinian—is, in effect, a form of cotention practiced with the eyes open. Its counteractive gesture brings an awareness of the eyes that involves “a steadfast . . . sense” of their “tensional balance”[85]—i.e., a sense of the dynamic process by which the eyes converge to create their objects. Suppose then that, gazing into the mirror, I view myself in the cotentive Kleinian way. Counteracting the tendency for my eyes to focus either upon both mirror counterparts at once or upon a single one at a time, these modes of focusing are blended dialectically so as to disclose the focusing process. Mirroring my eyes in this fashion, would I not see my own seeing rather than merely see a pair of objects in the glass? There is a way to facilitate such special seeing.

In the field of visual research a technique has been developed known as stereoscopic viewing. Perceiving a figure by this method, disparate images of it are fused to create a heightened experience of depth.⁶ As with the perspectival integration of the Necker cube, stereoviewing requires the percipient to counteract the habit of binocular convergence. We can in fact construct the cube stereoscopically, and this can help us with its integration.

The above figure parses the cube into its component perspectives. Instead of focusing on either perspective alone, direct your view to the X marked halfway between the perspectives and defocus your eyes, allowing them to cross. After a while, a third image should appear between the ones printed on the page. The new image fuses original perspectives, a fact you will be able to confirm by observing that the labels “a” and “b” have become superimposed. The image you have created stereoscopically is of course the Necker cube. Working with the cube in this manner should make it easier to work against the habitual tendency to fixate on but one of its perspectives, since the viewer is now able to gain a more tangible sense of how both perspectives are integrally involved in the dynamic process by which the cube is produced.

In much the same way, stereoviewing my mirror-reflected eyes should feed back to me the very process of my viewing them. Facing the webcam and regarding my image on the screen, I direct my view to the bridge of my nose and allow a loss of focus. A “third eye” will soon appear between the other two. Continuing to peer at myself in this manner, flanking eyes disappear and the third eye constitutes itself as a “cyclopean” eye. But the cyclops thus evinced is not simply a transcendent unity. For, I am able to see in the third eye the ongoing interplay and interpenetration of opposing eyes. In this autostereopsis, I can therefore obtain a sense of the way my two eyes, entailing disparate visual perspectives, converge to form a single perception in depth. In so stereoviewing my eyes, what I am seeing in the glass is no mere object upon which my eyes converge but a reflection of the binocular convergence process. At the same time, I can sense this optical process from within via Burrowian kinesthesia (“muscle sense”).

The critical question, however, concerns what it will take for this proprioception to become Proprioception. It all depends on which “I” does the viewing, Steven or Stevie. When Steven stereoscopically views his eyes in the mirror, he can surely gain cognizance of the viewing process as it occurs on the optical surface of his body. But we know that he can do no more than this. Though Steven’s surface visual proprioception does overcome the simple objectification of his mirror image, the thinking subject housed in his cerebrum, remaining aloof, objectifies said proprioception. Because Steven’s core identity is rooted in the written word and not the image, the autostereopsis of his image succeeds in Proprioceiving neither word nor image, for it can encompass neither cerebral nor limbic subjectivity. Stereoviewing his image in the glass, Steven cannot help but turn the viewing process into a product, an object that is cast before his non-imaginal subjectivity. Proceeding in this manner, Steven stereoviews his mirror-reflected eyes in a detached and clinical way, being unable to realize the ecstasy by which his own subjectivity blends with the object that he views. What is required for imaginal Proprioception is backward entry into the paleomammalian, limbically lived brain. Steven cannot do this alone, since he is essentially a cerebral creature. Only with the assistance of Stevie can the second Proprioception of the text be enacted. Thus, for the Self-mirroring of the text-as-image, Stevie must participate in the autostereopsis. Waking up within his dream and standing present in the imaginal text, Stevie is to regard himself autostereoscopically. Unlike Steven, Stevie’s core identity is rooted in the image. Therefore, rather than remaining aloof from the image of himself that he encounters in his stereoscopic mirroring, he can enter into an ecstatic exchange with that cyclopean image[MSOffice15] that effects the Self-lighting of the limbic brain.

Dual Proprioception

Having focused exclusively on the imaginal aspect of Stevie’s text for the last little while, the dual character of the text must now be reconsidered. The child’s sub-cerebral lifeworld does not just involve the oneiric visual image but also the voice; it includes sound as well as light. Evidently then, a dual Proprioception is called for.

Though Stevie’s manner of functioning may be simpler than that of Steven, the structure of Stevie’s identity is actually more complex. Whereas the ego of Steven is centered in a unitary core, Stevie possesses an alter ego: the presence of “another” is found in his midst. Such a dimorphic feature is to be expected of the young child, since, at this early stage of development, identity has not yet crystallized into the singular form it will later assume (the structure of the child’s identity reflects the polymorphous complexity of mythic identity noted the outset of the previous chapter[MSOffice16] ). Young children often have “imaginary” playmates or companions, a “departure from reality” that adults tend to discourage, or tolerate condescendingly. Quite frequently, the companion takes the form of an animal, whether a creature that is invisible, or an inanimate object that is personified, such as the proverbial teddy bear. The undeniable importance of animals to children recapitulates their great significance in ancient mythic culture, as discussed above. In the dual Proprioception presently required, the mirroring of Stevie’s imaginal “I” is to be coupled with a Proprioceptive mirroring of his derepressed animal familiar, his alter-“I.” Speaking the language of topological alchemy, I have already intimated that the second stage of the coniunctio brings a Kleinian movement backward to the transpersonal core of the mythic human cogito that is synchronized with the Moebial backflow of the liberated anima (the “genie has been let out of the bottle”). I now suggest that, whereas the Kleinian aspect of the dual Proprioception follows a pathway from eye to limbic brain and culminates in thinking light,[86] the trajectory of the Moebial anima is from ear to heart and climaxes in feeling sound.

The world of primary feeling that “primitive man shares with the animal”[87] is “resonant, layered, slower” [88] than the vibratory world of light; it is “‘ear-minded’”[89]; i.e., it is a world of sound. And the pervasive influence of animals upon the mythic human being evidently occurs through this sonorous channel. Recall Neumann’s observation that the gods that presided in the earliest Egyptian dynasties were animals. According to the psychologist Julian Jaynes, the Egyptian deities controlled mortal human beings through the power of the voice.

In his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Jaynes hypothesizes that mythic awareness was radically different from the rational consciousness later to emerge. Mythic individuals “do not sit down and think out what they do. They have no conscious minds such as we say we have, and certainly no introspections.”[90] Jaynes contends that, for the mythic person, “the gods take the place of consciousness. . . . The beginnings of action are not in conscious plans, reasons, and motives; they are in the actions and speeches of gods.”[91] The early human being thus found himself or herself in a largely passive position, at the disposal of external forces personified by the deities: the divinities spoke and mortals listened, acting accordingly. Jaynes goes on to ask:

Who . . . were these gods that pushed men about like robots and sang epics through their lips? They were voices whose speech and directions could be as distinctly heard . . . as voices are heard by certain epileptic and schizophrenic patients. . . . The gods were organizations of the central nervous system. . . . The gods are what we now call hallucinations. . . .

[In antiquity,] volition, planning, initiative is organized with no consciousness whatever and then ‘told’ to the individual in his familiar language, sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar friend or authority figure or ‘god,’ or sometimes as a voice alone.[92]

Later, in a section on the “Authority of Sound,” Jaynes raises the “profound question of why such voices are believed, why obeyed.”[93] It is because they possess for the listener an overpowering sense of reality. The listener is “somehow face to face with elemental auditory powers, more real than wind or rain or fire, powers that deride and threaten and console, powers that he cannot step back from and see objectively.”[94] Viewing the mythic experience of sound as closely akin to the auditory hallucinations of schizophrenics, Jaynes quotes one schizophrenic as reacting to an invisible voice “‘as though all parts of me had become ears, with my fingers hearing the words, and my legs, and my head too’.”[95] Toward the end of his book,[96] Jaynes notes that the “phenomenon of imaginary companions in childhood . . . can be regarded as another vestige” of the primal state of affairs. As with the schizophrenic, the unseen companion exerts a highly potent influence on the child through the medium of sound.

To confirm the animal origins of the “elemental auditory powers,” we turn to the historian of religion Mircea Eliade. In Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, Eliade underscores the significance of animals in early human culture: “animals are charged with a symbolism and a mythology of great importance for the religious life. . . . The prestige of animals in the eyes of the ‘primitive’ is very considerable; they know the secrets of Life and Nature, they even know the secrets of longevity and immortality.”[97] Eliade goes so far as to hypothesize that, in the earliest form of religion, “the Supreme Being may very well [have] manifested himself in the shape of an Animal.”[98]

According to Eliade, archaic mythology is often characterized by nostalgia for a bygone “paradisiac epoch” in which people “understood the language of animals and lived at peace with them.”[99] If the original intimacy with the animals and their language could be recovered, this would be tantamount to “ascension into Heaven,” to meeting “with the gods.”[100] We learn from Eliade that the essential role of the shaman in mythic societies is precisely to reestablish contact with the “paradisiac” sphere of the animal divinities. Eliade observes that, “during his initiation, the shaman is supposed to meet with an animal who reveals to him certain secrets of the craft, or teaches him the language of the animals, or who becomes his familiar spirit”[101] (note the similarity of this ritual to totemic initiation rites in the Pacific Northwest, as described earlier). Once initiated, the shaman can practice his craft by using the “secret language”:

The shaman imitates, on the one hand, the behaviour of the animals and, on the other, he endeavors to copy their cries. . . . The shaman produces mysterious sounds. . . . You think you are hearing the plaintive cry of the peewit, mingled with the croaking of a hawk, interrupted by the whistle of a woodcock: it is the shaman who is making these noises by varying the intonation of his voice. . . . A good many of the words used in a shamanic session have their origin in the imitation of the cries of birds and other animals.[102]

So it is sound that is the means by which the shaman taps into the realm of animal potency, and this suggests that sound was indeed a primary channel—if not the primary channel, through which mythic humanity felt the impact of the animal lifeworld. That world, I propose, is the world of “elemental auditory powers.” Speaking archetypally, we may say that the sound wave plays a role for the anima similar to that which the light wave plays for cogito. Sound is thus the archetypal waveform of animal action. Furthermore, while the luminosity of the cogito is centered in the brain, the anima’s sonority finds its rightful place in the heart, for this is where the world of animal feeling has its roots. Therefore, if the second Proprioceptive conjunction entails a backward movement from the oneiric eyes in which the mythic cogito sees/thinks the light of the limbic brain thereby resealing the Kleinian vessel more concretely than in the first coniunctio, the accompanying Proprioception involves a retrograde circulation from the ears in which the anima hears/feels the sound of the heart and thus seals the Moebius vessel in hermetic fashion. With these archetypal vessels spinning synchronously backward, human and animal lifeworlds now pulsate in an ecological harmony of topodimensional Selves.

The question for the now-requisite coagulatio is whether this abstractly allusive account of dual Proprioception can be tangibly distilled via the self-signification of the text. For that, Stevie must stand present. Given the dual nature of his identity, he will be accompanied by his alter ego, his animal counterpart. Whereas the Proprioception of Stevie per se deals with tracing his particular visual image back into the generic limbic system of the human brain, the concomitant Proprioception of Stevie’s “double” is essentially auditory: it is concerned with moving through the plaintively voiced “I” back into the sonorous animal heart.

The “I” plays the same role in the written text as does the mirror image in visual perception: it reproduces the identity of the subject in an externalized form, establishing the possibility of the uncanny realization that I am the one who regards myself. In the case of the spoken “I,” the mirroring becomes an echoing allowing awareness that I am the one who hears myself. To sustain the ecstatic blending of subject and object in this Moebial Proprioception, the body must be entered through the system of speech. Voicing his plaintive “I,” Stevie’s vocal cords vibrate to produce that word of himself whose sound echoes in his ears. The echo is surely not to be heard in a simply objective way, as if the sound were merely emanating from an external source. What is required instead is what philosopher David Applebaum calls “hearing-immediately.”[103] Whereas the “direction of ordinary listening is toward the object, a word-sound . . . hearing-immediately is directed exclusively toward itself, the activity of audition. It thus occupies itself with the inner relations of audition.”[104] Emphasizing the processual nature of hearing-immediately (it “pertains to activity, unfolding, doing”[105]), Applebaum relates it to phenomenological philosophy:

[The] attributes of immediate-hearing . . . remind one of Marcel’s analysis of the ‘body-as-mine.’ Their commonality allows us to conclude without the shadow of a doubt that it is the management of the lived-body experience, through the means of immediate-hearing, that produces its special ontologizing possibilities. Immediate-hearing converges with the general field of sensation underlying all organic movement, willed or no. The experience of this general field Marcel calls sentir; Husserl derives his notion of kinaesthesia from it; others have spoken of it as proprioception.[106]

So, with immediate-hearing, we redirect “sensate perceptivity back to the naked bodily whole.”[107] In so doing, rather than listening with the “expectation of a result external to our listening . . . we listen to our own listening.”[108]

Now, just as Stevie’s visual Proprioception is facilitated by autostereopsis, his auditory Proprioception may be aided by what might be called autostereophony. This sonorous self-signification can be related to shamanic practice.

Consider Eliade’s account of the primary steps in the shaman’s journey:

A shamanic session generally consists of the following items: first, an appeal to the auxiliary spirits, which, more often than not, are those of animals, and a dialogue with them in a secret language; secondly, drum-playing and a dance, preparatory to the mystic journey; and thirdly, the trance . . . during which the shaman’s soul is believed to have left his body. The objective of every shamanic session is to obtain . . . ecstasy.[109]

To be sure, the Stevie of my childhood did not function as a shaman. Though accompanied by an animal counterpart, he did not intentionally speak the language of animals. He voiced the word “I,” not an animal sound. By so articulating the “I,” the child asserted the human side of his identity that had been developing from birth, and this kept his animal companion on its “leash.” To the extent that Stevie was socialized into the world of human signification, his animal double was “domesticated.” Of course, in bouts of emotional regression, the child’s “I” could quickly dissolve into an animal howl. But the Stevie of old must not be confused with the one who stands present in the text for the purpose of Proprioception. With Steven standing behind him to lend support, Stevie has now come of age and can function not merely with the innocence of the child but with the wisdom reminiscent of the shaman. And the self-signification of his “neo-shamanic text” unleashes the “elemental auditory powers” of animal vocalization in a non-regressive fashion.

In ritual practices, drumming[MSOffice17] is often accompanied by repetitive chanting. Our neo-shamanic self-signification operates here as an auditory mirroring that commences with a chanting of the “I.”[MSOffice18] This is not just an echoing of human identity but involves an appeal to the “alter-I.” Rather than attempting to “tame” the animal double by imposing the human word upon it as happens in childhood, in the second stage of Proprioceptive conjunction the other is invited to express itself fully in its own language, which is the quintessential language of sound. It is in transforming the spoken human word into a primary animal vocalization that the Proprioception of sound is enacted.

We have found that visual Proprioception entails experiencing the underlying process by which opposing perspectives converge to form a perception of oneself as an object in space. The auditory counterpart of this autostereopsis is autostereophony. The drumming practice so central to shamanic ritual can play a key role here. For example, repeated chanting of the “I” can be accompanied by a synchronized drumbeat in which the drummer moves his instrument (or his head) rhythmically from side to side so that left and right ears alternate[MSOffice19] in receiving primary exposure to sound. In effect, this establishes mirror opposed auditory standpoints, creating the impression of listening stereophonically to the “I” that is intoned. After awhile, as the player beats the drum faster and faster and moves the instrument accordingly, opposing auditory aspects converge and interpenetrate to form a Moebial body of sound that is “ecstatic,” since the echoing standpoints are both distinct from one another and merged (i.e., they are outside and inside of each other). And the neo-shamanic practitioner—when caught up in the sonorous transpermeation of “I” as object and “I” as subject—can herself become ecstatic, be beside herself, both out of her body and within. Thus Eliade can say that the drum is a “specifically shamanic instrument [that] plays an important part in the preparation for the trance: the shamans both of Siberia and Central Asia say they travel through the air seated upon their drums. We find the same ecstatic technique again among the Bon-po priests of Tibet.”[110] Where do these shamans travel in their ecstatic voyages? They pass into the world of primary sound, the realm of echoing animal spirit that they have unleashed. The animals that reside here are hardly docile companions subservient to the human word; they are god-like numinous presences to the shaman of old. Similarly, with the neo-shamanic transformation of the voiced “I” into the basic animal vocalization[MSOffice20] , the “genie” is unfettered. The sonorous animal into which the chanting author can be transmuted upon striking the animal hide that covers the drum is a “transpersonal, spiritual being. He is transpersonal because, although an animal . . . he is such not as an individual entity, not as a person, but as an idea, a species.”[111] In other words, the animal invoked by the neo-shaman’s drum-attuned self-chanting is a topodimensional being; it is the 2 + 1-dimensional Moebius anima that signifies itself in the auditory Proprioception of the text-as-sound.

Moreover, the self-signification of sound reverberates in the heart[MSOffice21] . In many a shamanic practice, the fundamental link between the drumbeat and the heartbeat is acknowledged and accentuated.[112] As Lisa Sloan puts it in recounting the experience she had with drumming while writing her doctoral thesis on shamanism, “the drum beat simulated the rhythm of a heart beat. . . . The sound of this beating drum stimulated and resonated with my own heart, suggesting to me that it is indeed through the heart that the shaman sees into the other world.”[113]

Summing up the requirements for the self-significations of synchronized Kleinian and Moebial texts, Stevie must stand present, and, with the support of Steven, he must engage in autostereopsis and autostereophony (respectively). For the Proprioception of the text-as-visual-image, he must gaze into the mirror in the cyclopean manner that allows him to see his own seeing in an act of cotention finding its way back into the limbic brain. For the accompanying Proprioception of the text-as-sound, Stevie’s animal double must be invoked as Stevie-become-shaman chants the “I” to the stereophonic drumbeat by which he can hear his own hearing, feel his own heart. Let us take stock of just how far we have gone with all of this.

In the midst of the written text, Stevie has indeed stood present with his more concrete text, his image and his spoken words[MSOffice22] . Nevertheless, it is the written word of Steven that has tended to dominate. This is hardly surprising when we consider how long the abstract “I” has reigned in our culture, and the profundity of its influence. In order for the denser self-significations of the second coniunctio to be enacted in earnest, the supremacy of Steven’s word must continue to be challenged so as to permit Stevie’s presence to be felt more consistently and fully. For this it will be necessary for Steven to go further with the work begun in the last chapter: he must accept and consciously endure his “decapitation,” his demise as a simply autonomous cerebral being detached from others and from nature.

The coagulated self-significations require that, once Stevie can appear here more reliably to perform these mirrorings, this young person must be rendered transpersonal. It helps that the autostereopsis apparently entailed in this is something that Steven, for his part, seems able to do, at least in Stevie’s absence. Steven can more or less stereoview his mirror image so as to view his own viewing process. Of course, when Steven alone performs the autostereopsis, at the most basic level he still engages in objectification. To carry out the Proprioception that ecstatically blends object and subject and brings about the Self-lighting of the old mammalian brain, it is Stevie who must be present for autostereopsis (an intimation of this is given in above[MSOffice23] ).

What of the autostereophony that seems necessary for the Moebial co-Proprioception? Can Steven do with sound what he more or less can do with sight? Can he “listen to his own listening”? Does he possess enough proficiency in the techniques of chanting and drumming (or equivalent procedures) that he can hear himself stereophonically? More work on this is needed. And when he becomes adept at these practices, Steven, functioning as neo-shamanic author of the sonorous text, will need to subdue his own voice in favor of Stevie’s and transpersonalize that voice, inviting Stevie’s powerful animal companion to assume authorship, to voice its “elemental auditory powers,”[114] to speak its “secret language”[115] of the heart.

Death and Resurrection

Let me close this chapter by returning to a theme of great significance for shamanism and alchemy alike[116]: death and resurrection. [117] Each Proprioceptive conjunction entails an alchemical ordeal eventuating in the demise of a finite being and its rebirth as infinite Self. So—just as Steven faces “decapitation” in the first coniunctio—a new alchemical ordeal must be endured in carrying out the second. Let us call it “death by drowning.”

When Steven’s abstract rule over this text can be set aside and Stevie can stand present, the images and sounds associated with the coniunctio bear intense feeling. Stevie is, after all, more a creature of passion than intellect, and the dual Proprioception of the second conjunction carries him and his animal “double” backward into the Kleinian emotional brain and the Moebial heart (respectively). The child cannot survive this process in his familiar form despite the support he receives from his adult counterpart; confronting the awesome anima, Stevie will be swept away by a torrent of unbridled feeling. The example that comes back to me is my dream of the cyclopean woman. The fear I experienced in encountering this stunning creature was so intense that I immediately woke up screaming. (Was this not the dream of Steven, an adult? The feeling in the dream was more the experience of the child that lies within.) How can such emotion possibly be contained?

A very special vessel must be fashioned, as we know. The “turbulent waters” are not simply held inside this container but are allowed to freely pour out so that the soul is drawn down into the whirlpool and its erstwhile sense of itself as an independent being is lost in the undertow. “For souls it is death to become water,” says Heraclitus. Yet, at the same time, the floodwaters are in fact fully contained within the subtle vessel, hermetically sealed into it through the power of Proprioceptive awareness, permitting Heraclitus to add, “from water, [comes] soul.” Only a body of paradox can provide such extraordinary containment. Recall Schwartz-Salant’s description of the “paradoxical geometry of…the subtle body” in which “‘outer’ and ‘inner’ are alternatingly both distinct and the same” (see chapter 3). By virtue of the sameness of “outer” and “inner,” boundaries dissolve and the individual is swept into the primal sea where it meets its end. By virtue of the distinctness of “outer” and “inner” (which is upheld by Proprioceptive consciousness), the soul at once survives its encounter with extinction, though not simply in its previous form. The resurrected soul both is the being it was, and it is not. No longer merely set off from what lies outside it by well-defined boundaries, the soul is now itself a body of paradox, a subtle body that is simultaneously bounded and unbounded, finite and infinite, particular and universal.

What then becomes of Stevie as the dual Proprioception of the second coniunctio is carried out? The particular child—supported by the adult’s Self-signification of the neomammalian brain enacted in the first coniunctio—moves backward through his mirror image[MSOffice24] to the old mammalian brain. In so doing, he suffers the tempest of feeling, succumbs to it, and is reborn as mythic Self. And in this process, the child’s animal companion is unleashed for the co-Proprioception that leads back into the felt depths of the animal heart.

At the moment, I, Steven, sit here at my computer experiencing no deluge of feeling – just these lines of text and the cursor blinking back at me. Then let me once again invite the child to stand present for the requisite self-significations. The invitation comes in the form of a dream…[MSOffice25]

Postscript on Nonhuman Individuation

I have intimated that the animal undergoes an individuation process of its own, in parallel to human individuation. A full-blown analysis of this is offered in Topologies of the Flesh. It was there that I first proposed that—since human and nonhuman evolution are interwoven aspects of natural evolution as a whole, a distinct pattern can be identified in which the nonhuman world too has its stages of topodimensional individuation. The stages in question are synchronized with those of human development in a close harmony of dimensional spheres reflecting the intimate relationship among the topodimensional bodies of paradox (Klein bottle, Moebius strip, etc.). Therefore—just as human individuation involves several alchemical conjunctions; several hermetic closures of the Kleinian vessel entailing Proprioceptions of different areas of the human brain and different modes of thinking (rational, mythic, magical, etc.); several ordeals, deaths, and resurrections—so too the animal in its own right undergoes correlated processes entailing conjunctions, closures (of the Moebial vessel), Proprioceptions (of the heart and of feeling), and ordeals. What is more, two other orders of individuation are implicated beyond the human and animal. However, the developmental concerns of the present work are more focused on the alchemical processes of the human sphere, so I do not repeat the detailed analyses of the stages of nonhuman individuation provided in Topologies. To be sure, I do presently deal with the nonhuman realms, but largely limit myself to (1) describing the unique psycho-functional quality that governs each such lifeworld (e.g., feeling, in the animal domain), (2) identifying the particular topodimensional vessel that contains its individuation, and (3) offering a general picture of its harmonious interplay with the human world.

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[1] Jung 1970, p. 474

[2] Jung 1959, p. 253

[3] Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 410. Note also philosopher Herbert Spiegelberg’s comment that “Merleau-Ponty finally characterizes ‘time as the subject and the subject as time.’ By this he means that the subject is not simply in time, for it assumes and lives time and is involved in time: it is permeated with time” (1982, p. 567). Spiegelberg additionally portrays Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of time and subjectivity as “an attempt to combine Husserl’s phenomenology of time with that of Heidegger” (pp. 566-67).

[4] Gebser 1985, p. 66

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., pp. 165-73

[7] Ibid., see pp. 61-73 and 165-173.

[8] Ibid., p. 132

[9] Ibid., p. 140

[10] Ibid., p. 143

[11] Ibid.

[12] For example, see Rudolf Steiner 1972

[13] For example, see Metzner 1971, p. 89

[14] Jung 1967, p. 257

[15] Ibid.

[16] 1970, p. 472

[17] Ibid. pp. 143-44

[18] Gebser 1985, p. 271. Note, however, that Gebser is not entirely consistent in associating emotion with the mythic structure; see Topologies of the Flesh, pp. 167-68.

[19] Flew 1979, p. 14

[20] Ibid. p. 377

[21] Jung 1967, p. 307

[22] Neumann 1954, p. 329

[23] Ibid., p. 331

[24] Washburn 1988, p. 45

[25] Ibid., p. 47

[26] Ibid., p. 48

[27] Neumann 1954, p. 332

[28] Ibid., p. 331

[29] Ibid., p. 332

[30] Ibid.

[31] Ibid., p. 331

[32] Ibid., p. 237

[33] Ibid., pp. 414-15

[34] Ibid., p. 338

[35] Ibid., pp. 144-45

[36] Ibid., p. 145

[37] Ibid., p. 337

[38] Ibid., p. 338

[39] Berman 1989, p. 68

[40] Ibid., p. 66

[41] Ibid., p. 69

[42] Ibid., p. 70

[43] Ibid., p. 71

[44] Ibid., p. 73

[45] Ibid., p. 85

[46] Ibid., p. 97

[47] Ibid., p. 91

[48] Ibid., p. 69

[49] 1962, p. 155; emphasis added

[50] Ibid., p. 172

[51] Ibid., p. 168

[52] Ibid., p. 172

[53] Ibid., p. 168

[54] Ibid., p. 169

[55] 1970, pp. 79-80

[56] Ibid., p. 89

[57] Ibid.

[58] 1970, p. 476

[59] Flew 1979, p. 14

[60] 1954, p. 12.

[61] Revision 1983

[62] Ibid., pp. 27-28

[63] Barfield 1988, p. 24

[64] Gebser 1985, p. 72

[65] Ibid., p. 146

[66] 1977, p. 10

[67] Ibid., p. 18

[68] Ibid., pp. 20-21

[69] 1985, p. 252

[70] 1995, p. 89

[71] Ibid. pp. 90-91

[72] Ibid., p. 96

[73] Ibid., p. 103

[74] Ibid., p. 91

[75] Ibid., p. 101

[76] Ibid., p. 102

[77] Ibid.

[78] 1968

[79] Braun et al., 1997, 1998; Maquet et al., 1996

[80] 1953, p. 445

[81] Ibid., pp. 372-73

[82] Ibid., p. 444

[83] Ibid., p. 71

[84] Ibid., p. 372

[85] Burrow 1953, p. 372

[86] In Dimensions of Apeiron, I explored the special role of light in the human lifeworld: light is no mere object that is seen but is that by which we see. In discussing the implications of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment on light that gave impetus to Einstein’s theory of relativity, I demonstrated that the phenomenon of light—instead of lending itself to being treated as an object open to the scrutiny of a subject that merely stands apart from it—must be understood as entailing the inseparable blending of subject and object, of seer and seen. For his part, phenomenological philosopher Martin Heidegger adumbrated an intimate linkage among lighting, thinking, and Being: to think Being is to think light (1964/1977, pp. 370-392).

[87] Neumann 1954, p. 329

[88] Kittelson 1995, p. 90

[89] Ibid.

[90] 1976, p. 72

[91] Ibid.

[92] Ibid., pp. 73-75

[93] Ibid., pp. 94-95

[94] Ibid., p. 95

[95] Ibid., p. 96

[96] Ibid., p. 396

[97] 1960, p. 63

[98] Ibid., p. 177

[99] Ibid., p. 59

[100] Ibid., p. 60

[101] Ibid., p. 62

[102] Ibid., pp. 61-62

[103] 1983, p. 117

[104] Ibid.

[105] Ibid., p. 118

[106] Ibid., p. 119; emphasis added

[107] Ibid., p. 120

[108] Ibid., p. 121

[109] 1960, p. 61

[110] Ibid., p. 102

[111] Neumann 1954, p. 145

[112] see Braine 1995

[113] Sloan 1999, p. 83

[114] Jaynes 1976, p. 95

[115] Eliade 1960, p. 61

[116] Note that both Eliade (1960, 1962, 1964) and Jung (1967) acknowledge the parallels between shamanism and alchemy.

[117] Eliade described the initiation of the shaman as involving “a quite complex ecstatic experience, during which the candidate is believed to be tortured, cut to pieces, put to death, and then to return to life. It is only this initiatory death and resurrection that consecrates a shaman” (1964, p. 76).

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[MSOffice1]In conjunction with my material on animality, I might look to insert dreams I’ve had of animals.

[MSOffice2]Link to images of animal totems, hopefully with paradoxical Moebius-like forms; Sistyutl?

[MSOffice3]Might insert pictures of my dad and my mom.

[MSOffice4]Link to image of myself as a child.

[MSOffice5]link to child’s voicing of same phrase: “I would never do that.”

[MSOffice6]a click will bring the spoken version.

[MSOffice7]clicking brings recitation of the Heraclitus fragment

[MSOffice8]“calling back, and calling back, and calling back” [voiced]

[MSOffice9]“I would never do that, never” [voiced]

[MSOffice10]relink to Stevie’s image

[MSOffice11]Bring in fig. 8.3 of Topologies

[MSOffice12]Relink to fig. 8.3 of Topologies

[MSOffice13]click brings Fig. 3.2

[MSOffice14]Link to Moebius Seed

[MSOffice15]When Steven has practiced autostereopsis, the cyclopean face he has seen in the mirror has occasionally taken on an eerie, otherworldly cast, as if he were witnessing a mythic creature from an alien world. But such experiences have been fleeting and faint, as one might expect from the fact that waking Steven had them and not Stevie, his oneiric counterpart. And yet, not long before this writing, the cyclopean phantom did make its presence felt in a dream. [[Link to dream of 4/23/10, and its accompanying image.]]

[MSOffice16]Consider linking this to first big paragraph of ch. 4.

[MSOffice17]Commence background drumming. This can be deactivated by clicking again.

[MSOffice18]Clicking begins drumming and rhythmic background chanting: “I”-“I”-“I”, “I”-“I”-“I”…etc. This can be deactivated by clicking again.

[MSOffice19]At this point, the background sounds of drumming and chanting the “I” change such that the drumming sound alternates from one computer speaker to the other. The effect needed is of a transition from monaural to stereophonic sound. But not every electronic device on which the book will be read will be equipped with stereophonic potential.

[MSOffice20]Here I’ll have to have the chanted “I” transformed into a shamanic vocalization of an animal sound. The sound should be eerie and resonant. This initiation of this sound can terminate the drumming sequence.

[MSOffice21]Commence sound of beating heart.

[MSOffice22]link to audio of child saying, “I would never do that, never.”

[MSOffice23]Link this to the link given for the term “cyclopean image.”

[MSOffice24]Here I might insert the sequence in Orpheus showing backward movement through a mirror.

[MSOffice25]End chapter with audio recording of 9/24/85 dream: “I’m traveling home with my father. We’re walking through an area of greenery or a park, and I notice up ahead a flooded tunnel; this tells me we’re going in the right direction. It feels good walking with my Dad, natural and familiar.

“Then, up the road, I see the silhouette of what looks like a young cyclist sitting on a darkened bench. There’s something ominous about him. I’m terrified because I feel he wants to destroy us. And now, my father has turned into my child, and I take him in my arms. My father has become my child.”