Conversational Results as Specific Tension
“It rather looks as if the approach to consciousness has a “blotting-out” effect upon the subliminal contents of the psyche. The subliminal state retains ideas and images at a much lower level of tension than they possess in consciousness. In the subliminal condition they lose clarity of definition; the relations between them are less consequential and more vaguely analogous, less rational and therefore more “incomprehensible.” This can also be observed in all dreamlike conditions, whether due to fatigue, fever, or toxins. But if something happens to endow any of these images with greater tension, they become less subliminal and, as they come close to the threshold of consciousness, more sharply defined.
“It is from this fact that one may understand why dreams often express themselves as analogies, why one dream image slides into another, and why neither the logic nor the time scale of our waking life seems to apply. The form that dreams take is natural to the unconscious because the material from which they are produced is retained in the subliminal state in precisely this fashion.
“Thus, a dream cannot produce a definite thought. If it begins to do so, it ceases to be a dream because it crosses the threshold of consciousness. That is why dreams seem to skip the very points that are most important to the conscious mind, and seem rather to manifest the “fringe of consciousness,” like the faint gleam of stars during a total eclipse of the sun.
“We should understand that dream symbols are for the most part manifestations of a psyche that is beyond the control of the conscious mind. Meaning and purposefulness are not the prerogatives of the mind; they operate in the whole of living nature. There is no difference in principle between organic and psychic growth. As a plant produces its flower, so the psyche creates its symbols. Every dream is evidence of this process.”
C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols (pp. 51-52). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The “fringe of consciousness,” its vaguely analogous and less consequential relationships and significations, we think, is precisely a disembodied experience in the astral light, organized and held together by its parallel component. It is this condition immediately after death and, in a more developed state, the condition just prior to conception that the dreamer participates in when the body lies relaxed and unconscious. The tensions of consciousness, on the other hand, tend toward order and comprehensibility, and give consciousness its terrestrial meaning.
Ordinary meaning for consciousness is produced by semantic terms and connectives. Semantic terms may convey either extension or intension. Semantic extension is the set of external items or events the term denotes or refers to. Consciousness becomes causally bound to these items or events (tensed) by its grasp of the term. Semantic intension is the set of connotations or nuances the term has inwardly for the individual personality. Consciousness is bound to these nuances (again, tensed) by its degree of subjective development and subjective sensibility.
Formally initiating conversation in the way we mean it (tacitly, in good faith) functions to lower of the tensions of consciousness, thus permitting a concerted and ordered egress to its undefined fringe. This egress is or needs to be, by the definition of conversation, performed collectively. In initiation, the biological field (we think it is magnetic) communicated and even shared among the performers moves everyone in the same moment to the threshold of consciousness.
Following initiation, the first act of conversational speech will produce a specific tension everyone is forced to notice. The purpose of defining conversation as we have is to develop this initial, forced tension without losing control of it. A satisfactorily controlled conversation will result in a crystallized tension, a residue, in an iceberg or landform of some sort that everyone present will remain aware of, perhaps for days and weeks and perhaps quite tangibly.
What science will want to determine is what this kind of conversational result actually is. What sort of archetype of the primitive or pre-terrestrial mind, what sort of material with what physical dimensions do such conversational performances produce?
For a discussion of this Blog Post with Inflection AI’s Pi, click here.
