Freud and Sri Aurobindo

Now back to the topic at hand: language, God, and the trans-logic of supersensible domains. In order to begin this discussion, we probably need to go back to Freud's discovery of the unconscious, especially as elaborated by the psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte Blanco, because the unconscious shares much in common with the higher realms of consciousness where God is encountered. In fact, it is my belief that the vertical dimension extends above and below, so to speak.

While Freud ably addressed the "underworld" of the lower unconscious, he mistakenly consigned all religion to that realm as well (some religion most certainly emanates from there, such as most of Islam). But his genius notwithstanding, Freud had no understanding of real religion. Coincidentally, he also had no feel whatsoever for music--it didn't do anything for him. I can't help thinking that these two disabilities were related.

In any event, we can certainly be thankful to Freud for being the first psychic cartographer to map the world of the unconscious. Moreover, he discovered the mode of logic whereby the unrepressed unconscious mind operates. In other words, the unconscious is not only the realm where repressed psychological content resides. There is also an unrepressed unconscious which is by far the larger part of our being. No matter how "conscious" you are, it will be only a fraction of the unrepressed unconscious, in the same way that your dream life is literally infinite and inexhaustible...

As in the recent discoveries of chaos and complexity theories, Freud's discovery was that apparent irrationality is not arbitrary but ordered: it is patterned irrationality. That is, according to Freud, unconscious logic obeys five main principles: timelessness, placelessness, non-contradiction, displacement and condensation, and inability to distinguish between imagination and reality. However, Freud had no idea that these same principles also applied to the higher vertical realm of consciousness, what Sri Aurobindo calls the supramental overmind.

Rather than spending time explaining how these five principles apply to the unconscious, I'll skip that and explain how they apply to the higher vertical as well. Religion offers a language through which we may speak of the eternal, or timeless. Remember, eternity is not time everlasting, but timelessness. posted by Gagdad Bob Saturday, February 18, 2006 at 5:25 AM One Cosmos