The Conscious Collage

[ Tradução em Português ] “And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” (Genesis 1:21-24) Should we interpret this as a literal story or does it carry a symbolic meaning?   We live in a materialistic culture, and it’s epistemological (the theory of knowledge) view is based on scientific evidence, observation, facts. This has been of great value to our society as a whole. Without it, much of what we know today would still be a mystery and we wouldn’t have electricity, penicillin, computers…   But, what have we traded, in order...

[ Tradução em Português ] It’s a good idea to look into different approaches to the problem of the Ego. For example, Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch was a manifestation of the will to power, and represented the perfection of the ego (by the ego) and its desires. It was the Ego’s drive to assert it’s own power and control over our lives and world around us.  (But the Ego cannot transcend itself) Jung on the other hand, envisioned his “Individuation” process which was based on the transcendence of the Ego by integrating the unconscious with the conscious mind, achieving a sense of wholeness and bringing a deeper sense of meaning and purpose into one’s life. But for Jung, unlike Freud, the unconscious was not just a reservoir of repressed thoughts, memories and traumas, but he also believed in a collective unconsciousness, which is a shared unconsciousness, with memories and experiences by all humans, and it was made up of archetypes ( which are universal symbols or themes tha...

[ Versão em Português ] “God is dead” declared Nietzsche, after the decline of religion in western society back in 1885. Much of it, influenced by the Modernist culture and the enlightenment era, which put reason in the place of faith and challenged traditional religious thought.   But if God is dead, then necessarily something else must take its place. We see this symbolism when Christ was sentenced to death, Barabas (the thief) was released. Barabas means “ son of the father ” in Hebrew. So, he was a son of a different father. It’s a new identity. But I’ll talk about that later, let's focus on practical terms of a culture and a thought shift. If we no longer believe in a transcendent God, then we lose quite a few things, such as: objective morals, values, meaning, purpose, a possible understanding/ transcendence from suffering and a shared commonality as we are created equal in the image of God. This is the whole foundation of our lives, and this will shape everything else that ...

[ Versão em Português ] One of the most inspiring and pleasurable things for me is to bring chaos into order. It is to organise different thoughts, ideas, philosophies together into a web of meaning and unity. Looking back I think that is part of my life since I can remember; even collage is related to this concept, where different images/symbols are woven together in order to create a meaningful message. It resembles me of a dream language that always attracted me much since my childhood; trying to make sense of what at first looks like a bunch of chaotic content. At a deeper level, it is also a way to organize the unconscious content of the mind into coherent, conscious thoughts and to not be controlled by it due to a lack of understanding. As I learn more about the world, I am increasingly seeing a fractal reality, where patterns repeat themselves in different theories and layers of reality. This can be seen in the Perennial Philosophy or Jung's archetypes; also reflected in th...