Monday, September 15, 2008

Consciousness: A human franchise?

Consciousness: A human franchise?

by Brother Harmonius

An estranged friend thought my future should lie in the social services. She, knowing what is best for me, said I should get a Master’s degree in Social Work, and pursue a career at a community center.

Notwithstanding that I have no visceral interest in such a course of education or occupation, I said that what I really wanted to do was to study psychology, especially the psychology of religion, in the form of something I had just heard about called Transpersonal Psychology. From all its descriptions, this was what I really had a passion for, and perhaps I can now name that passion that has driven me all along, especially since my earliest teens.

This might have been more than her Marxist-Socialist bent could stand, because it wasn’t long after that this friend stopped calling me, and no longer responded to my phone messages. I don’t know for sure that is the reason, there might have been other contributing factors, but I think she was disappointed with my impractical frivolity.

Why am I interested in the psychology of religion, and why shouldn’t I, in turn, play the anger card against my friend for not being interested in the same subject? Of course, I would not really be angry at anybody for not sharing my interests, and I don’t have the expectation that others should drop their present careers and become what I expect them to become.

More importantly, what redeeming worth is there in studying the Psychology of Religion, and why would it be anything less selfish than stamp collecting or lion taming?

I could not answer this question straight off, but I think I have stumbled upon the answer in Carl Jung’s first chapter of Volume 11 in his Collections series, titled appropriately enough, “Psychology and Religion”:

“My first lecture will be a sort of introduction to the problem of practical psychology and religion. The second is concerned with facts which demonstrate the existence of an authentic religious function in the unconscious. The third deals with the religious symbolism of unconscious processes.”1

There you have it, according to Jung, that what I am interested in is a legitimate and genetically quality of the human experience, an authentic function in the unconscious. I interpret this to mean that our innate religious function is no less vital and real than the need to eat or procreate. Perhaps it is unique to the human animal, and constitutes a much higher order of formal cognitive operations than survival functions, but then the human brain and psyche are fundamentally predisposed to activity other animals don’t manifest at all, or only at the most rudimentary levels.

I needn’t even provide references to skyscrapers, jet, or any contrivance of the industrial era as proof that humans put their conscious activity to the test. With regard to animals, you have chimps that coax termites out of their burrows with a twig; you have whales that sing or herd through sub-sonic vocalizations; and with elephants you have that, plus they can be taught to stroke a canvas with a paintbrush or beat a drum with a stick.

Yet, for all of that, these creatures have had plenty of evolutionary time to adapt further into more complicated behaviors, but they have not. Does this mean the animal cannot, or chooses not to really makes little difference to the repeatable hypothesis that human behavior is not static, but develops into more sophisticated operations upon its environment.

In no way am I diminishing the potential for animals to be conscious, and emotional creatures. I am certain that they are. There were two incidents of a young boy falling into a gorilla’s pen at a zoo. One incident took place in London, and another well documented incident happened in Chicago a few years ago. In the Chicago Zoo, incident, a four-year old boy fell quite a distance over the wall of the gorilla’s living space, and landed unconscious on the ground. A female gorilla stood by him, as if protectively, and even fended off some menacing male gorillas.

At one point the female reached with her backhand and gently touched the boy, and then sniffed her hand. Eventually zookeepers rescued the boy, who lived.

In another case, a film of some elephants walking a dusty African road, possibly at a preservation park, happened to cross paths with a tortoise. The poor tortoise retracted into its shell. An elephant put one foot on the tortoise’s back, as if to step, then amazingly stepped over the tortoise. After the herd’s passing, the tortoise “pulled itself together” and escaped. It would have had quite a tale to communicate to its own kin, if such a thing were possible.

Then there was the case of two female elephants kept apart for thirty years. One had the better fortune to be taken to an elephant sanctuary. Her friend was sold into a circus. But after the second elephant’s indenture, the woman who managed the sanctuary procured her. At first, there was concern about whether the two elephants would remember the other. Separate, adjoining pen spaces were provided.

It became immediately clear that the two remembered one another. Their trunks wrapped and groped, they bellowed, and the new arrival began pummeling the large steel gate that separated them. The sanctuary attendants had to open the gate, to prevent certain damage to the gate and possible damage to the elephants. Since their reunion, the two females never again separated.

The experimental chimp

The gray whales of baja



1 C.G. Jung, Psychology and Religion, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969) p.6:3.

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