Do You See What I Mean?

In an experiment conducted in the 70’s by Roger Lewin, two groups of kittens are trained in separate carefully controlled environments. One group being only able to perceive horizontal lines, the other group only vertical. The result of this being that the first group was discovered to be blind to vertical objects and the other group blind to horizontal. Something which lead another scientist by the name of Albert Rosenfield to ask: "How much of our reality is imprinted on us by our culture? And how much is denied us? Like the horizontally deprived cats do we blunder around the world never seeing the beautiful places where we might stretch out and ease our souls? Like the missing verticals, do we keep knocking ourselves silly against obstacles we can’t even see are there?".

Source: Annual Editions: Readings in Psychology 75/76. Dushkin Publishing Group Inc. Guilford. Connecticut.

This essay explores the idea of psychotic experience as being the result of accidently opening doorways to realms of the consciousness in which like those horizontally deprived cats we are blind. That because of our western scientific and thus sceptical natures we cannot perceive of what we find there nor have the language to begin to try and explain it.

To begin then I look at a notion put forward by Carl Jung in his work entitled ‘Synchronicity’ that:

Furthermore that:

Modern scientific research operates on a principle such that the questions asked reside in the testing of hypotheses. This method most often involving calculations are made regarding the action of one variable on another. Say for example in the asking if a certain behaviour is a predominant feature of gender or educational level. Something which while it can be demonstrated graphically as a correlation does not answer the question why this is so. Furthermore that even if the experimenter delves into this realm does not answer the question as to why the reason why this is so, is so and so on. The infinite nature thus of such conscious action being narrowly and finitely defined in the question being asked.

In the move of ‘Logical Positivism’ that has seen the nature of acquisition of knowledge become more and more biased towards those things which can tested through objective inquiry, I feel one has to ask: Did we in the act of doing this, ‘throw out the baby with the bath water’ so to speak? For up until this time, the forefathers of Psychology such as William James, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to name but those most well known would never have discounted the value of metaphysics as such in any of their research of the consciousness per se.

To further understand why this was so however, one has to look even further back in time to where all knowledge studied at university was collectively known as ‘The Philosophies’. There in centuries not so long gone now, where art could be studied alongside science, physics alongside metaphysics etc. Where to study the mechanisms of thought, the works of the great thinkers themselves were part and participle of that and the logic of Aristotle was not abandoned yet almost purely to the field of mathematics.

I find it an intriguing thing that for all the delusional thinking described as being of a psychotic or ‘out of touch with reality’ type nature, of the recurring themes to be found there. Of the number of proclaimed Christs and Marys and those having alien abduction experiences and screaming of government conspiracy and invasive surveillance of themselves. Who proclaim that God has spoken to them, or the Devil or aliens as such and who see that which to all accounts and purposes no-one else apparently can. That such similarity exists at all and is not unique and different for each and every individual surely this would defy such a notion that all such experience is constructed of the individual consciousness.

It is true in argument and cannot be denied however that those coming from the same culture will have had similar and equal opportunity of exposure to the source of such thinking and this may well be the cause. Yet that I feel one has to ask that is it somehow excessive that such ordinary people that experience these things should have such a profound creativity and any kind of mens rea as such as regards the creation of such stories?

Perhaps it is that as Aldous Huxley states in ‘The Doors to Perception’ that:

It is of Kabbalistic teaching that to open the mind to the hidden realms of consciousness requires such journeys into meditations of thought into what lies beyond everyday living and yet remains within it. That Shamans purposefully seek out these realms through meditation and use of hallucinogenics is it not all that unusual that some ordinary Joe or Jane in the need to escape the mundane nature of existence might also find themselves there? I know it happened to me.

That lost in a psychic nightmare that belied description through any such knowledge I had gained to that point, the best advice that modern psychiatry could offer me was to take a drug and deny that such things were real altogether. The occult on the other hand told me to stop taking drugs and work on the premise that what I was experiencing was real and seek understanding there.

It has not been an easy task. All my western education and strivings in science causing me the most severe sceptic contempt of all that lay before me. Yet that I persisted, I find myself now in agreement with a reason for taking up such studies in an Introductory text to the works of Crowley by Tim Maroney thus:

That even if for me the ‘magick’ as such is nothing more than the wonder of understanding, that had I been one of those horizontally deprived cats, I have found a way of seeing those vertical objects to which I was previously blind. That to induce a state of chaos with which to conclude this escapade and end with a quote from Zero Wing might I say:

Cats: all your base are belong to us.