In the past week I've watched both Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris and Christopher Nolan's Inception. Both in very different ways try to grapple with the question: What is the human unconscious? First, a little riff on that question, and then maybe I'll get around to the movies.
We all heard when we were children that that the human brain is underutilized, that we humans are using only a minuscule percentage of its potential. I remember when I first heard that as a kid I thought that if I could just figure out how to increase capacity a little I could get my math homework done more quickly--I thought about it in terms of IQ and quickness. Later I wondered what it would mean to have !00% utilization, and I believe now that there is no 100%, that the brain has no content that can be measured in terms of whether it is being well or underused.
It is, rather, a mirror-like tool developed for human use so that Nature might become self-aware. But a mirror has no capacity of its own; it's empty and its value lies in its being in good working order: clear and clean rather than cracked, dirty, and distorting. Its content is completely dependent on what comes into view. And what comes into view is potentially limitless because it emerges out of the human unconscious, and the human unconscious is a fathomless, limitless sea of possibility.
So when people talk about how we humans use only a small capacity of our brains, I think they really mean to say that we humans are only conscious of a small percentage of reality, that most of reality is hidden from us--because it is unconscious. But the task is not to use more of the brain's capacity, but rather to find ways of bringing into view that which is now invisible because submerged in the limitless sea of unconsciousness. If we find ways to bring it out from where it is hidden, the brain as mirror will see it, remember it, and give the viewer something to think about.
Owen Barfield in Saving the Appearances says that all Nature is the human unconscious. In other words, it's wrong to think of the Unconscious as yours or mine--its ours; we are all swimming in it, and we are all connected in it. But in the same way that childhood memories are forgotten or repressed, in the same way we cannot bring those forgotten experiences into awareness at will, so too are we unable to bring into felt awareness our connection to the teeming life that is Natura.
We experience, if we are true moderns and postmoderns, mostly our being cut off from it. We think we are over here and that nature and other people are over there because we have forgotten how we all emerged out of this deep network of interconnection. Our embeddeness in that deep network is a repressed memory. And every once in a while we might have an experience, a moment of recall, so to speak, and we feel that we understand something we once took for granted, but because it is so out of tune with the way everyone thinks and behaves around us, we soon forget what we've remembered and become absorbed again into the world around us.
Holding on to the memory is the main discipline in what I think of as 'faith'. Having these moments of recall are moments of grace, and everything depends on whether they are taken seriously and remembered, whether they are seed moments that fall on fertile ground or fall on ground that is barren or where it is trampled under foot.
Of the two movies, Solaris interests me more. And there is more to be said about it than I have the energy to write about it right now--I think I need also to watch it again. But it was developed by Tarkovsky as a response to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. I think the biggest difference in their mythic imaginations lies in that for Tarkovsky reality, the part of it that we have "forgotten", is at its root interpersonal. The Kubrick vision of the Star Child and of Bowman's Odyssesy is suffocatingly disconnected and isolating. The film's mythic grandeur and ambitions are admirable, but it is still very much the product of an in-control Enlightenment rationalist. He was groping in the right direction, but was still suffering from what Barfield callled RUP--"residue of unresolved positivism". Tarkovsky was working in another, very different neighborhood. I'll leave it there for now, but someday I want to come back to that. Or in comments if anybody wants to explore that angle.
And Inception interests me more about what it has to say about our conscious world than what it says about our unconscious. This film isn't about exploring an unconscious dream world; it depicts more an imperial colonization of the unconscious by the conscious. It's not about discovering and entering into a relationship with what's there, but rather a pushing back, as the white man pushed back the Indian, and imposing its old-world structures and habits of thinking in this strange and unfamiliar new world.
And that's fine for the purposes of the movie. Because isn't the real point that what we think of as the real world is pretty much the same kind of construct as the dream worlds? Isn't the ending with the top spinning meant to suggest that it's not clear whether Cobb is still in a dream world even though he thinks he's in the real world? And isn't the point then that what we take for real, really isn't, that it's just as much a construct and just as much a prison as the so-called Limbos? This story tells us nothing about the unconscious and its mysteries, but about the ephemeral, fundamentally unstable nature of what we take to be conscious reality, or the so-called "real world".
But I find Nolan's fascination with he role of memory in this movie--as well in his earlier Memento--as interesting and important, and explored in ways that need more exposition than I can do now and here. But the takeaway for now is that remembering, correct memory, is one of the most important things we can do that connects us to the Real, and that improving our capacity for remembering is a critically important spiritual discipline. We are our memories, and the quality of who we are in large part depends on the quality of what we remember.
Postscript: Regarding the mirror metaphor: Is the mirror reflecting anything if there is no viewer to see the reflection? Think about it for a minute. This is different from Berkeley's tree falling in a forest, because even if no one was there to witness the moment of the tree's falling, we can come upon the fallen tree and deduce in our imaginations what happened. The tree's falling does not depend on whether someone was there to witness it, but there is nothing--ever--reflected in the mirror unless there is a sighted human witness to see the reflection. There is no reflection for a blind person, and if everyone were blind, the mirror would reflect nothing. So the mirror's capacity to reflect depends as much on there being a viewer as it depends on something to be in front of it whose existence it reflects.
And so the brain, as mirror, needs a viewer and it needs content to reflect, and that content is what we describe as conscious, but it emerges out of what we call the unconscious. So what is the Unconscious? It's everything that exists about which we have no capability to bring easily into consciousness. And whatever that terra incognita might be dwarfs the terra cognita already in consciousness. Our education is largely learning about the work done by others who have either brought new content into consciousness or who have explained the mechanics of what was already there in consciousness. We needs brains to do it, but the brain is not the content.
The genius is the one who brings new content into consciousness from the unconscious. And this is usually, but not always the work of artists and mystics. There is clever art and interesting art, but great art is always about the uncovering of something that was hidden, whether it is the discovery of something new or the "remembering" of something forgotten. The creativity is what he or she does with it.
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