Blood & Thunder - Consciousness as an Epiphenomenon

Blood & Thunder is a newsletter I am building as a mode of redirecting my iconoclasm into an intentional thought process. This essay is part of my multifaceted assault on consciousness as an inferior form of awareness.

To set a limit on my iconoclastic tendencies here: what I mean by consciousness is the ego-self—the mediatory phenomenon involved in tool handling, generalization, and the abstraction of reality.

To the metaphysicians: I am not defining consciousness in the idealistic sense of pure awareness itself. For reasons known and unknown, I don't want to meddle with metaphysical speculation here. My critique is directed at the superfluous, self-referential conscious thought; its obsession with claiming ownership, whether through post-hoc rationalization, claiming itself superior to the unconscious drives of the body, and/or the unconscious drives and forces of Nature herself.

Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 3, Text 27:

prakrteh kriyamanani gunaih karmani sarvasah Ahankara-vimudhatma kartaham iti manyate.

All actions are carried out by the natural physical and mental forces of material nature (the Gunas), yet a person whose mind is clouded by pride and false ego foolishly believes, "I am the doer."

The conscious experience of a thought occurs at the tail end of the decision-making process. By this I mean that any thought we take ownership of has already passed through a long, thorough process, a web of interrelations among complex modalities, before it reaches the threshold of consciousness.

This becomes visible when we examine the roots of a conscious thought; each thought arrives rooted to its modality of desire, and every desire carries a charge, positive and/or negative. The thought itself also accompanies with it a karmic intentionality, which is independent of the desire but nevertheless closely accompanies it. When thought surfaces as a conscious thought, it is usually a tangle of competing drives resolving into intentionalities set in motion by prior, non-linear causes beyond our conscious control. And when we trace it with attention, the causality behind a conscious thought is never self-originating; it never runs in a straight-linear line back to whatever actually transported either, since each of the competing unconscious instincts had a say in it. The historical root of a conscious thought gets caught up in a complex web of inter-relationality; the question then becomes, who then can untangle this tangle?

As a rite of passage, let me summon the Moustachio man here.

"This ridiculous overestimation and misunderstanding of consciousness has the very useful consequence that it prevents an all-too-fast development of consciousness. Believing that they possess consciousness, men have not exerted themselves very much to acquire it, and things haven't changed much in this respect. To this day the task of incorporating knowledge and making it instinctive is only beginning to dawn on the human eye and is not yet clearly discernible; it is a task that is seen only by those who have comprehended that so far we have incorporated only our errors and that our consciousness relates to the errors."

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Adding on to Nietzsche here: the mind and body are never truly silent, even when conscious thought itself is largely absent. Multiple unconscious forces are always in conflict within you, fighting to determine which will take a stand on whatever phenomenon reaches the conscious mind. The scars of that battle are always visible; the body never lies.

This tendency of the ego to claim ownership extends even to the realm of pure abstraction. Even a thought that seems, at a cursory glance, to arise independently of consciousness—the idea of a "perfect circle" or a "straight line" in nature, say—isn't free of unconscious roots. Plato's theory of forms would have us believe such ideas emerge from a place of metaphysical purity, but they arise instead from an interaction between the animate unconscious mind and an inanimate, material relation within it. Plato's theory of forms belongs, in fact, to the category of fantasy, a product of the very superfluous ego-consciousness under critique here. The conscious ego is uncomfortable with animate reality, and so it invents the "perfect circle" as a kind of neurotic sanitization.

Since ego-consciousness is, from an evolutionary standpoint, the last faculty to develop, largely for socialization, generalizing, and creating sameness, it is also subordinate to the body's older, active forces and unconscious instincts. And because this form of consciousness is prone to excitation and overstimulation, blind to opposing views, uncomfortable with uncertainty, and quick to judge, it should be engaged with constant friction; decentered by slowing down, revitalizing the senses, and learning to sit uncomfortably with boredom.

Why did evolution retain such an error-prone emissary? A task master that prefers linear causality values simplistic answers that largely go against the survival of the species and are largely self-destructive in their obsession with optimization, generalization, and abstraction. Only time will tell. We, who see through this veil, of the higher spiritual kind, should water this garden of unconscious instincts through blood and thunder of slow-yet-decisive actions.

Nebuchadnezzar¹ by William Blake