REBIRTH

REBIRTH

It’s all coming back to me now… an early experience of what it was all about… (childhood, religion, life, philosophy, psychohistory, psychosemiotics, religion => being here, now) … it’s like “I” had forgot the central thing of all.

A philosophical dream-thought, essential to life’s completing totality.

Three elaborations. Christian, Psychoanalsis, Gurdjieff.

The experience was imprinted (as a Mem1 loop “place of Re-Birth”) by conscious symbolic repetition of birth process in church. As if the original process were returned-to, in order to re-establish the neuro-psychic Victory! of Coming To Be. This  the individual’s first experience of themselves being alive: own lungs breathing first air, eyes seeing first light – FREEDOM TO MOVE AT WILL.

The drive, or impulsion, toward re-birth, is to attain the state of “before-ness”. For this reason it can be theoretically derived from the pleasure-principle, as early Freud did. It becomes the motivating factor to avoid pain, which, emotionally, spreads out in the future. This stage will later be recalled as ‘innocence’, because the complications brought by sexual awareness are remembered to be still in the future. The
material of later dream-thoughts is retained from
this pre-genital stage of psychosexual development. Group-fantasies, with “I” as “one of them (us)”, become shared when self-reference in a containing population becomes a political issue. In a system of democracy under identity politics this becomes necessary, participant or not.

The dream-thought of the Common Collective Unconscious is this: There is a logos for the completing totality. Once arrived at, this containing conceptual content for the inner life, is reflected (projected) in visual sense perception by the Sky, or “Heavens”. Enclosing the atmosphere of the planet, as well as the individual, containing first light, breath, space. Since The Father, as gendered psychological opposite of The Mother , also emerges into awareness at this stage of development (in the normal aggragate), this logos in the Heavens, illustrated most vividly in the night sky by the movements of the planets and stars, as ‘bodies’, is attributed to Him. Awakening to the inner freedom of directed, “why?” connected thought processes, as well as “father” and “mother” as distinct but mysteriously related “parents”, supplies The Father In Heaven thus becomes perceptually identified with the Source of Logos, or Intellect.

To derive the Christian Trinity from this background conceptual Archetype, it is necessary to add only this male factor: the Son’s First Love of Father. Unity of Father and Son, achieved by returning to that place, is The Spirit.

According to this reconstruction, the Christian Trinity is not ‘just an alternate super-ego’ concept, in Freudian terms. It is a self-defined “I-“ use as referential --an alternate way of predicating conscious unity, other than by the public “I” accessible to what appears to others (appearances). Freud’s notion of ‘super-ego’ (‘ego-ideal’) is, indeed, built into The figure of Father in Heaven manifest as Logos in the spheres, as the Greeks already conceived Ors (earth’s planetary system in G.’s All and Everything).

Re-Birth, or “second birth”-based Christianity thus follows an ‘innate idea’, a repetition-compulsion to return the womb, then re-renter life again cleansed of all sense of wrong-doing. What can be seen as evident, now, is the identity in form of this behavior pattern, and what is otherwise and alternately represented by The Christian Trinity through the male psyche. This developmental psychodynamic narrative represents the Unity of the historical process under consciousness – for groups as well as individuals, through shared group-fantasy.

A key element in ritual enactments of re-birth as a process is renewal associated with inner cleansing of all sense of guilt, even to self-quelling wrong attitudes. From a moral point of view, this is a critical moment of development. Three major viewpoints converge here: 1. The Christian Trinity (see above); 2. Freud’s Oedipal-repression theory (the Son’s self-sacrifice of external body achieves Unity with The Holy Father through The Spirit (Love); 3. Gurdjieff’s teaching regarding remorse of conscience. Taking the Christian and Freudian points of view

(confession of sin: Christian – conviction of wrong attitude toward The Good (<=Mother <= womb <= placenta  pleasure <= pre-pleasure)
 Freud: cathexis of unconscious sense of guilt awakened at the time of first feelings of pleasure, with mental processes

 Gurdjieff: experience of remorse of conscience
--impossible without total sincerity. Hence the darkness now: ‘information’ cannot be communicated in total, honest, literal seriousness, because the very technology involved in the process of doing so (producing audibles, punching in words according to identity politics, narrative history, situational atmospherics) intervenes, on the tokenside, to defeat any objective intentions to this effect. Sincerity itself will sound insincere (=> “I mean it!”) Any such stuff can be dismissed by the LOLin' lutzers as sarcasm, by simply repeating it sotto voce.


Note: The “Waking up” of a person by a teacher in Gurdjieff work is a one-time-for-all attainment BY their combined work, hence not the same as the once-for-all experience (some) Christians teach as rebirth in Christ.