Autochthony

“ Plants have no self-consciousness because they have no power of locomotion; for of what use would self-consciousness be to them unless it enabled them to seek what was salutary and flee what was noxious to them ? And conversely, of what use could power of locomotion be to them, as they have no self-consciousness with which to guide it. The inseparable duality of Sensibility and Irritability does not yet appear therefore in the plant; they continue slumbering in the reproductive force which is their fundament, and in which alone the will here objectifies itself. ”

“ But he is not able to pity himself, nor to think about his personality as would the man, nor does he wonder whether such a life is worth living, after all. He "knows," but is not able to think of himself as knowing—he does not "know that he knows," as we do. He experiences the physical pain and discomfort, but is spared the mental discomfort and concern arising from the physical, which man so often experiences.
The animal cannot shift its consciousness from the sensations of the outer world to the inner states of being. It is not able to "know itself." ”

“ If there is any sort of legend or tradition or plausible probability which says that it is, he cannot call a thing impossible where he is not only ignorant but even unconscious. It comes back therefore to the same reality, that the old compact cosmos depended on a compact consciousness. If we are dealing with unknown quantities, we cannot deny their connection with other unknown quantities. If I have a self of which I can say nothing, how can I even say that it is my own self? ”

“ I have already repeatedly referred to the hypothesis that the psychic automatism in question may be only concomitant. That is, I am convinced from what I have seen myself and read that a foundation of intelligence, of logical reasoning and of self consciousness, must go to constitute in the animal the substratum on which the wonders of the "new zoopsychology" are built up. ”

“ But he who will not endure, but will deny himself, may expect the fate of which philosophers and metaphysicians generally dream. He will be united with the primum mobile, he will be dissolved in the essence of being together with the mass of individuals like himself. I am tempted to think that the metaphysical theories which preach self-renunciation for the sake of love, and love for the sake of self-renunciation, are by no means empty and idle, as the positivists affirm. In them lies a deep, mysterious, and mystical meaning: in them is hidden a great truth. ”

“ Hypochondria is a species of torment which not only makes us unreasonably cross with the things of the present; not only fills us with groundless anxiety on the score of future misfortunes entirely of our own manufacture, but also leads to unmerited self-reproach for what we have done in the past. ”

“ Verkan Vall told him. "And even without the autohypno, a lot of precognitive matter leaks out of the subconscious and into the conscious mind, usually in distorted forms, or else inspires 'instinctive' acts, the motivation for which is not brought to the level of consciousness. For instance, suppose, you're walking along North Promenade, in Dhergabar, and you come to the Martian Palace Café, and you go in for a drink, and meet some girl, and strike up an acquaintance with her. ”

“ For in waking life the soul replaces these models with its own images. When a person directs his senses upon his environment he thus creates in his ideas pictures which are copies of the world around him. In fact these copies at first disturb the prototypes which give the etheric body the impulse to preserve the physical body. Such disturbance could not be present if a man, by virtue of his own activity, could convey to his astral body those pictures which would give the right impulse to the etheric body. ”

“ The hypochondriac who obstinately and patiently watches the details of his organic life feels within himself the motion of the vital mechanism which escapes most men. It would be easy to give other examples, proving that we must distinguish between consciousness pure and simple and internal observation, and that it is the less allowable to argue from one to the other, since in practice the problem is reduced to a difference of intensity. ”

“ May we not conceive what this consciousness of existence is in animals, by reflecting on our own state when strongly occupied with some object, or violently agitated by some passion, which banishes every reflection upon self? This state we familiarly express by saying, the man is absent or beside himself; and people are in reality beside themselves, when they are occupied with sensations actually present to them, especially if those sensations are so violent and rapid as to allow the mind no time for reflection. When thus situated we feel pleasure and pain in all their varieties ”

“ By the automatism certain regions are merely made accessible to consciousness in an indirect way, which were formerly sealed against it. But the unconscious does not thereby accomplish any creation which exceeds the capacity of consciousness qualitatively or quantitatively. Cryptomnesia is only an apparent additional creation, in contrast to hypermnesia, which actually represents an increase of function. ”

“ When I receive a letter from my friend I regard the letter as having been written by a being who possesses consciousness, but when a similar letter is written by a friend in a hypnotic or post-hypnotic state, we regard it as the result of physiological automatism, with no conscious accompaniment. It is clear that the denial of consciousness to the hypnotic individuality is purely arbitrary. It is certainly arbitrary in the case of double or multiple personality to regard one personality as conscious and the other personalities as purely automatic, with no consciousness in them. ”

“ It is very certain that in every conscious volition—every act that is so characterized—the larger part of it is quite unconscious. It is equally certain that in every perception there are unconscious processes of reproduction and inference. There is a middle distance of sub-consciousness, and a background of unconsciousness. ”

“ Just as everything conscious has its preliminary step in the Unconscious, so every conscious thought passes down into the lower stratum and there becomes an element in our being, partaking of the Unconscious energy, and playing its part in supervising and determining our mental and bodily states. If it is a healthful thought we are so much the better; if it is a diseased one we are so much the worse. It is this transformation of a thought into an element of our life that we call Autosuggestion. ”

“ Moreover, the connection of the three principles, and especially the mode by which the third of them was attained, shows clearly what must be the method of evolution. The very essence of self-consciousness, in its double moments of self-position and reflection, is the union of contradictory aspects. Thesis and antithesis are the formal expressions of the activity lying at the root of consciousness. But contradictions can only be for a self-conscious subject when united or contained in some more concrete synthesis. Limitation has manifested itself as the first synthesis ”

“ The nature of this motility we have elsewhere explained and we have called it self-activity, which must not be confounded with self-motion, for self-motion is inherent in every particle, while self-activity is self-directed motion in a body.
Only animate bodies have this self-activity. But according to our hypothesis the ultimate particles of inanimate bodies have self-activity in so far as they manifest choice or affinity, while plant bodies seem to have self-activity in their cells. Neglecting this hypothesis, animate bodies certainly have consciousness and choice in their cells. ”

“ The Automaton-theory in its present state contents itself with a purely negative deliverance. There is a chasm, it says, between feeling and act. Consciousness is impotent. It exists, to be sure, but all those manners of existence which make it seem relevant to our outward life are mere meaningless coincidences, inexplicable parts of the general and intimate irrationality of this disjointed world. What little continuity and reason there seems to be, it says, lies wholly in the field of molecular physics. ”

“ III. The Ego and False Autonomy It is reasonable to ask how the mind could ever have made the ego. In fact, it is the best question you could ask. There is, however, no point in giving an answer in terms of the past because the past does not matter, and history would not exist if the same errors were not being repeated in the present. Abstract thought applies to knowledge because knowledge is completely impersonal, and examples are irrelevant to its understanding. Perception, however, is always specific, and therefore quite concrete. ”

“ Of all hypochondriacs, to me the unbeliever seems the most absurd. For can matter think? can it reason, can it doubt? Is it not the thing that doubts which distrusts its own being? Often when he so wandered, the last words of his father—"Seek, and ye shall find"—were whispered in his heart, as though the spirit of the departed breathed them over him. Then would he raise his hands in agony, and his prayer rose from the solitude of the woods.
After acting about two years as tutor, he returned to Edinburgh and completed his studies. ”

“ This holds specially true of the higher representative elements, A moment-consciousness that has a varied content of many different sensory-elements synthetized in one compound, accompanied on the motor side with a complex of motor reactions may be termed compound synthetic moment-consciousness.
The compound synthetic moment-consciousness is characterized in its series of accumulations in the same way as is the simple synthetic moment, the only difference being the complexity of the lines of accumulations. ”

“ Each creature that has ever lived, from the spider to Shakespeare, has spun for itself its own cosmos. Microcosm we cannot call this cosmos, since that implies the macrocosm drawn to smaller scale, and this—like all creations—is a mere selection from the universe, excluding and including after its own idiosyncrasy. Autocosm is the word we need for it—a new word, but a phenomenon as old as the first created consciousness, and a phenomenon that has never perfectly repeated itself since that day. ”

“ He soon distinguishes between mind and matter, the former of which he recognizes as the 'only and proper self,' and by watching closely the procedure of the mind, actually reaches some notion of the doctrine of the association of ideas. Sleep, with its phenomenon of unconsciousness and dreams, also engages his attention, and while he is occupied with these mysterious matters, it happens that his dog is killed by a beaver. This was Autonous's first introduction to death. ”

“ The important question whether reflex actions are insentient, and therefore mechanical, will occupy us in the next problem. The question of Automatism which has been argued in the preceding chapters, may, I think, be summarily disposed of by a reference to the irresistible evidence each man carries in his own consciousness that his actions are frequently—even if not always—determined by feelings. He is quite certain that he is not an automaton, and that his feelings are not simply collateral products of his actions, without the power of modifying and originating them. ”

“ The two aspects are always found in combination. There may be living creatures who occupy bodies of so fine a form of Substance as to be invisible to the human senses—but their bodies would be "Substance" just as much as is the "body" of the granite rock. And, in order to "think," these beings would need to have a material something corresponding to the brain, though it be finer in quality than the rarest gas, vapor, of electric wave. No body, without Mentation; no Mentation without a body. ”

“ Now then, I want to take one of those clauses, and try to see what Chwangtse really meant by it. "Your individuality is not your own, but the delegated adaptability of God."—There is a certain position in the Scheme of Things Entire,—a point, with a relation of its own to the rest of the Scheme, to the Universe;— as the red line has a relation of its own to the rest of the spectrum and the ray of light as a whole..... From that point, from that position, there is a work to be done, which can be done from no other. The Lonely Eternal looks out through these eyes, because it must see all things ”

“ The principle of concentration and mental picturing would be invoked very strongly in such a case, and the astral counterpart of the organ should respond to such treatment quickly and effectively. It is an occult fact that there is mind in every organ and cell of the body, and if the same is awakened in the astral counterpart, it will respond to the command, suggestion, or direction. ”

“ In too many cases, only the power of auto-hypnotism is manifested, and we have obsession, fraud and folly as the result. There is one sure method of detecting the auto-hypnotic trance, and showing the difference between that and the genuine spirit trance. Any competent magnetist or hypnotiser can throw off the spell in all cases of self-induced trance, unless it has reached the condition of complete catalepsy. But if a spirit has induced the trance and controls the medium, it will laugh at the hypnotist's efforts to restore him to the ordinary condition. ”