TheThe DoubleDouble
Here is my reading list, such as it is. Most of these will be re-reads, but with the focus on the double.
Freud, Jung, and Spiritual Psychology, lectures by Rudolf Steiner. In Lecture Three, "Subconscious and Supraconscious", Steiner explains how to develop an indispensable tool of discernment on the journey within (Steiner refers to his method as 'occult training').
We help create this tool, by way of an extended guided meditation. Using that tool, Steiner says, we can distinguish what is ourselves, as spirit/mind, from the objective spiritual reality. It was reading this lecture that planted a seed.
The Philosophy of Freedom by Rudolf Steiner. This is a phenomenological meditation and penetrating, extensive argument demonstrating the possibility of intentional, non-sensory mental-spiritual activity. That is: starting from phenomenological principles, you can develop your thinking awareness of non-sensual reality. You can, in full consciousness, transcend your body/sensory-bound point of view. You can perceive your automatic self, your bodily activity and intelligence, separate from immediate self-consciousness. As a bonus, Steiner discusses in phenomenological detail an encounter with another consciousness.
Scandal, a novel, by Shusaku Endo. Shusaku Endo was a Japanese writer, who acknowledged his Christianity publicly and portrayed Christianity's history in Japan in his many novels. In Scandal, a renowned and respected Japanese Christian author in Tokyo comes face to face with his doppelganger in the red light district of Tokyo. This fascinated me, because it portrayed in such stark, mysterious detail an encounter with the doppelganger, and it described a new conceptual constellation for me: denial, dissociation, and the double.
This Ever Diverse Pair, a novella, by Owen Barfield. Barfield, as the character Burgeon, encounters his double, which he identifies as his alter ego, at a crisis point in his life, and achieves some new degree of harmony with himself as a result.
Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, a Chautaqua, by Robert Pirsig. Robert Pirsig found his double by way of electric shock therapy. This was one of my first encounters, in print or otherwise, with a first-person account of before and after ECT, and it spooked me. An unspoken message, threat, fear, was that if you thought too deeply about things - especially about how things are done and why - then you'll end up abandoning your wife and kids and wandering the streets naked mumbling to yourself.
What Coleridge Thought, a study of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's philosophy of polarity, by Owen Barfield. The chapter titled "Outness" made intelligible for me the argument that self-consciousness, on the one hand, and the subjective experience of the world being external to us, on the other, are in fact polar opposite manifestations of a single moment of being. They come into being together as a trinity: interior/exterior/anterior.
Unancestral Voice, a novel, by Owen Barfield. The main character learns, from a higher being, the truth about the unconscious, unspoken threat to ourselves if we ever try to transcend the body, the taboo that says 'Do NOT step outside your body, especially in your imagination and intention, with your will. That way leads madness, shame, and suffering. You ARE the body, and your thoughts are contained inside that body.' The higher being reveals: the dividing line, the seam between 'me' and 'the world' isn't at the surface of my skin, with me and my body on this side, and the world - including all the other bodies - on that side. Instead, it's 'me' on this side, and on the other side is everything else: my body, all the other bodies, everything experienced with those bodies - all that is material and perishable - as well as the sensorium itself, the organs of sense, and the brain-based consciousness. One's own body is on the exterior, all the way down to our cells, membranes, fluids, cerebrum, nervous system, and the inherent intelligence and activity that directs it all. "I" am not that. By his own admission, Barfield is depicting not any actual personal encounters with spirits, but his own understanding of Rudolf Steiner's teachings.
Owen Barfield, a biography, by Simon Blaxland-de Lange. Substantive, essential background on Owen Barfield, the thinking and feeling person, whose writings have guided my inward journey, and whose mentor I've taken as well.
Some questions to punctuate the readings:
- What does 'double' mean? What qualifies, and by what criteria? This will be the deepest dive for me. My current understanding of 'the double' comes almost entirely, as a concept, from Rudolf Steiner's writings, but I've encountered it in Carl Jung's work, and through lots of journaling and meditation. I've been aware of my own double, and feel obligated to understand it, to befriend it. Him. What have others already learned, that I can check out for myself? How widespread is this idea? What do the literary theorists say? Psychologists? Religionists?
- Body knowledge and its absence: The body goes on without your thinking about it. It is rarely widely in your direct, conscious control, from cellular processses on up through chemical processes, tissue function, respiratory and vascular activity, electrical/nervous activity. Your body is a double, attached but autonomous (that's certainly the unconscious source of the horror subgenre of the alien growth/birth). I see other signs of just how deeply, and unconsciously, we feel this division between 'I' and 'my body' - so many of us groping for knowledge and mastery of our relationship with food, our measure against standards of beauty, our facility with musical instruments or the body directly in sports, manual labor, fine motor skills. Many of us report frustration with operating that part of external reality which we presumably already have the most direct, most intimate, and categorically inseparable relationship with: our own human body! This fact - our ignorance of our own bodies - fascinates me to no end. Fascination is shallow, and the double is deep, so there's work to do.
- Encounter with another's thinking: Another gift to my mind from Rudolf Steiner. This one is an appendix to his phenomenological treatise, The Philosophy of Freedom. He is replying to contemporary philosophical objections to the main arguments in his book, problems "which certain philosophers feel should be discussed as part of the subject matter of such a book, because, by their whole way of thinking, they have created certain diffculties which do not otherwise occur." One of those difficulties is founded on the notion common to most philosophy since Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: since you can't ever experience reality directly, only through your representations, then what do we make of all the encounters we've had with other persons? I'm not connecting directly to them any more than I'm connecting to any other aspect of reality - it's all representations. Steiner's answer - what he says his philosophy implies - is that we are constantly engaging directly with the consciousness of other human beings.
- How To Encounter Your Double: In Steiner, it is the negative you that you can't shake, and who holds the key to your passage to realization, it is your karma; In Unancestral Voice, it's encapsulated in the Meggid meditation ("I" v. Material/Phenomenal); listen to others (Schumacher's A Guide for the Perplexed, the Third Field of Knowledge).
- What about Jesus in the Gospels? The 'whitewashed Pharisees dead on the inside'? Jesus' own body - fasting, miracles, and resurrection?
This is all over the place, textually and subject matter wise, but there is a strong thread of feeling and recognition in all of these for me, which is why I selected them specifically. It's a feeling of something new, something revolutionary almost, but which is familiar, friendly, alive. Always with me, which is both comforting, and frightening.
Comments