What separates animal mind from human mind is that humans are aware of time as a dimension.  Humans not only remember the past, but also know that that there will be a tomorrow, a new season, a new year.  This foreknowledge gives humans an incentive to make their tomorrow better than today or yesterday.  In other words, the awareness of time as a dimension makes humans creative, while animals are content to live in an unchanging present.

The awareness of time as a dimension also is responsible for the development of human speech.  Animal speech deals only with present information, so a few sounds and gestures suffice.  Humans need to differentiate present information from that of the past and the future.  If a human wants to enlist the help of his fellow humans in some future project, present information is not sufficient.  He has to draw on past information to make his reasons clear for the need of future action, and for that simple sounds and gestures are insufficent.  Hence the need for differentiation among present, past and future information, and, presto, human speech is born.

I am convinced that what separates animal mind from human mind is a collective complex we all have. Unfortunately it is not something easily grasped and discussed - because by definition the content of a collective complex is ‘on the other side of the locked door’.  This matter is alluded to in the Myth of the Fall, in the form of a flaming sword in the garden of Eden, pointing in all directions to guard the way to the tree of life.

Gunars

Feeling that my previous post would have been clearer had it included an outline of the concept ‘collective complex’, this message is by way of an addendum:

The life process is teleological, but the exact nature of the goal is not known. Still, there are symbols of the goal, the earliest one of which was the outcome of the act of giving birth - the coming into the world of a new individual, another attempt to bring forth the telos.

In an aim-oriented process it is possible for the conclusion to arise that the path that is followed is unlikely to lead to the goal, in which case that particular path would be abandoned, and my thesis is that that is exactly what happened to the species immediately preceeding ours. Consequently the pre-human mother became disoriented and could not look after her offspring, which died in abandonment. This complication could have repeated itself a number of times until it affected a mother with adequate mental powers to repress the traumatic truth. That enabled the human species to come into existence and survive, although at the price of having a collective complex - having traumatic knowlege that could not be ventilated in the light of day - information that had become ‘locked out beyond the reach of the conscious ego’, or ‘placed on the other side of a locked door’. According to the Myth of the Fall, the human species began with Eve acquiring some potent knowledge, which is exactly what happened.

The above scenario is what could be expected on the basis that our (pre-human) ancestors would not have had adequate powers of reasoning calmly to appraise their predicament along the lines ‘we are imperfect relative to some mysterious goal, but should we despair? Rome was not built in a day, so perhaps we should try to improve ourselves in an appropriate way, thereby stlll living, although burdened by what at the time of the animal-to-human transition would have been devastating knowledge.

When Christianity is considered in the light of the above reflections, then much of it begins to make sense, like Christ’s perfection - a perfection that only a superhuman agency (the Holy Spirit) was good enough to father.

Gunars

All mothers, animal as well as human, look after their offspring!!!  Your argument is beyond my comprehension.

My argument is not that morthers don’t look after their offspring. It is that at the beginning of our species the first human mother perceived her offspring as in a teleological sense defective and became disoriented, but then recovered, the incompatible knowledge having become repressed.

I arrived at my thesis in the course of studying Jung’s psychology, more exactly when reading Jolande Jacobi’s book ‘The Psychology of C.G.Jung’. Most of Jung’s co-workers were women, some of them having taken up psychoanalysis after undergoing analysis, often at the beginning of middle age when children had grown up and the psyche began to try to make sense of what life is all about. Jacobi’s book includes a symbolic picture (plate 6) of what Jung termed ‘the Great Mother Archetype’, and it was when trying to understand that picture that the ‘imperfect birth’ thesis occurred to me.

It seemed likely that the picture was drawn by a female patient suffering from postpartum depression, or perhaps by a female student analyst in the course of her training analysis. But in any case, since Jacobi acknowledged help she had received from her colleagues when writing the book, which was also read and approved by Jung himself (he wrote the Foreword), it is reasonable to assume that Plate 6 expresses the collective opinion of the Jungian school concerning the foundations of the mother’s psyche. My conclusion is that the Jungian interpretation, although correct symbolically, was still expressed in a disguised form, and in my thesis I have tried to restate it more directly, in a ‘more down to earth’ way. 

Gunars

The transition from animal to human was very slow, the evolution took place in marginal increments.  In fact, the evolution is still in progress.  Consequently, there could not have been such an entity as “the first human mother.”

In terms of physical appearance, there was no immediate change from the species that preceeded ours, but internally there was a massive change.  It occurred in a single generation - the acquisition and repression of new knowledge concerning our teleological status, corresponding to Eve’s eating of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. In fact, the Myth of the Fall is an excellent symbolic account of the origin of our species.  Christ symbolizes the Telos, and in that sense is very real.

Gunars

gunars.berziņs et al.,

“In terms of physical appearance, there was no immediate change from the species that preceeded ours,................”

What species preceeded ours ?

Visu labu,

Our ancestors departed from the ancestors of the nearest branch of present day non-human primates around two million years ago, but it appears that our species acquired its ‘collective complex’ much later - about two hundred thousand years ago. I outlined the situation in my ‘Origin and Evolution of Culture’ paper (mentioned in the first message in this thread), in the section ‘The primal event: time and place’.

It is conceivable that our ancestors departed from their primate relatives because of some purely practical reason, of which a number of scenarios have been put forward, and the collective complex arose only later, after the pre-human brain had developed adequate powers of abstract thought to perceive relative imperfection, projected upon the baby in the form of the baby’s imperfection.

Although the above may well sound rather speculative, it certanly makes sense in the context of religious ideas when seen as ways of giving symbolic expression to deeply repressed matters, such as the Myth of the Fall.

A much later example is the Renaissance (‘rebirth’) period in the development of Christian culture. The ‘pop painting’ in those days was on the theme ‘Virgin and Child’, artists sometimes painting their wives and girlfriends as Mary. A few years ago, in the Renaissance section of the National Gallery in London, there were about one hundred such paintings on display, all expressing Mary’s deep contentment, also, sometimes, envy on the faces of ordinary people painted alongside Mary. Times have changed, and we no longer pay much attention to such direct ‘expessions from the deep’, but in the Ranaissance period the symbolism would have meant much.

Anyway, returning to the question of what I meant by ‘the species that preceeded ours’, I meant there our direct ancestors just before their existence was shaken by the recognition of our teleological imperfection and its repression.

Gunars

There was a real event in the evolution of modern humans:  the acquisition of religion.  Since animals show no evidence of religious activity, first humans must also have been without a religion.  Religion was either invented or revealed at some point in the evolution of mankind.  Thus, at least for a time, there were religious and irreligious humans living side by side.  The possession of a religion apparently increased the the fitness of its practicioners, because anthropologists have not found any tribes lacking a religion in modern times.

The advantage imparted by religion must be substantial because the practice of religious activities consumes time, resources and manpower.  This amounts to a burden, an onerous handicap.  If everything else were equal, the irreligious tribes would have a competitive edge, and an advantage in the struggle for survival.  Since only the religious tribes survived, religion must have played a very important positive role in interpersonal relations.

Can such religious revelation be reconciled in any way with the postulated “teleological imperfection?”

In the theological perspective, there are many ruminations that require understanding. Some that transcend reality itself, so much so that comprehension becomes refuse. Refuse that overcomes the intelligent understanding of the pigments that make up the general DNA of life. But the wonders of life, and the hope of all people supercedes this crisis in understanding. Eventually we confuse the words of life with the words of truth and finally get it, we finally get it and life is good. Better than it could ever be. Jung, the great philosopher was a pedophile, but no no one knew. Who knew? Portraits of intelligent thoutht so destroyed the world by the simple meaninglessness of their wordiness brought civilization to it’s knees. Succumbed to idiocy, nepotism, favoritism and here we are… a civilization on the brink. Talking wordy thought, wordy conversations as if our knowldege of big words makes us impervious to the world outside. Yara, Yara, Yara.

This discussion is no more than wordy nonsense, similiar to what I just wrote above.

Seskis, you wrote that ‘there was a real event in the evolution of humans: the acquisition ot religion’. Yes, agreed, there was a real event related to the rise of religion, and it consisted of the perception that life has a goal, a telos, and also that in some way we are not the perfection that was intended. It must have been a traumatic event, something the primitives experiencing it had no way of coming to terms with, and so the unpalatable truth became repressed - kept out of the reach of the ego. But anything repressed has a tendency to return to consciousness (in terms of psychoanalytic thought, ‘the return of the repressed’), even if only in symbolically disguised form, which is what gave rise to religions.

Gunars

Ikabod, you wrote that Jung was a paedophile although no one knew it. How, in that case, did you learn about it - what supporting evidence do you have?

Gunars

What survival benefit would the repression of of an idea impart to the individual or the group?

What survival benefit would the repression of an idea impart to the individual or the group? The benefit would be long-term, arising from the striving of repressed material to return to consciousness.Deeply repressed material, unable to return to consciousness, would give rise to all kinds of symbolic likenesses to itself, in this way promping useful inventions and the rise of culture generally. Primates other than members of our species can be trained to perform a wide range of activities given appropriate inducements, such a lumps of sugar, but are not inclined towards innovation without some such inducement. But we go on inventing and innovating often without a reward at the end of it except for inner satisfaction.

Gunars