184 - The Unspeakable Shadow of the Individual

FROM KRIS SAKNUSSEMM'S NOTES 1/23/24

 

Hidden Terrain…

What appears to be mythic exhaustion—the Jungian Collective Unconsciousness turned to Dustbowl—may be a socially engineered fiction.

Our psychological / mental health apparatus is dysfunctional and overwhelmed. All our approaches center on social-public behaviors. As several noted sex researchers lament, what incentive do people have to share their private psychic experiences honestly? Is it necessarily obvious that they can do this even they desired to do so? Meanwhile, imagination on almost every day-to-day level is discouraged.

We find ourselves fixated on an aspect of Mind that is fundamentally limited, and in denial of one that must be at least provisionally viewed as unlimited. The result is a crisis-level imbalance between Logos and Mythos on the scale of Culture, where Logos has degenerated into a hyperspecialized (autistic) focus on Numeros: pure computational processing, and Mythos is cut off from Hypnos at the intimate personal level. Kerouac’s “unspeakable visions of the individual” are now entirely in shadow. Outlawed. What we value is the visible-physical and performative. (Covid masks as iconic expression of our time).

Imbalance + Corruption / Degeneration. Solution? The whole Lost Xplorers program celebrates a resurgence of Hypnos as a means to nourish and reinforce Mythos and to rehabilitate Logos by alchemizing Numeros back into its original position within the Family of Mind. I think it could be helpful to view the angst, distress, polarity, and violence of our age as a Family Problem writ large.