Michael Zos DeWitt KIA AND CTHULHU Sketches for a non-dualistic model of the universe At first I would like to thank my friend Andrea Fogli for his invitation to take part in this symposium and to speak to you on this occasion. I also would like to thank Valentina Mushy from Rome who will support my speech with some music. We both are connected in our hearts by our musical projects, so I’m very happy and proud of this collaboration. Secondly I would like to bring forward an excuse: Being an Austrian my first language is German. In order to be understood I wrote this lecture in English. Then Andrea told me that it would be better if the lecture was held in Italian, so it was translated. Although I am not proficient in Italian I decided to read it by myself, so please regard any bad pronunciation as an integral part of the performance. My idea for this lecture is to give a short summary of my own philosophy and to present two models, or better two stages in the development of one model, describing our experience of reality, or in other words the relation between our individual mind (the ego) and the outer reality (the world). My own step into philosophy was a consequence that came from the practice of magic. When I was a young man, I experimented with the techniques of Austin Osman Spare, a British occult artist, who had developed simple techniques for wish fulfilment by symbolizing subconscious desires1. As these techniques obviously worked, at least in many cases, I asked myself: what is the mechanism that enables such an impact of the individual mind on the events of outer reality? This was my own step into philosophy, yet it is not necessary to connect that question with such obscure practices as magic. I’m sure that everybody will find cases in his or her life, in which there can be observed such a connection between the mind and the events of outer reality. An example is the phenomenon of coincidence that was described by Carl Gustav Jung2. Another one is the “return of the suppressed” which was described by Sigmund Freud in his theory of psychoanalysis. In his essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” Freud writes that this return of the suppressed can appear in form of 1 Austin Osman Spare, The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love). 2 Carl Gustav Jung, “Über Synchronizität” in Die Dynamik des Unbewußten, p. 555. repeatedly happening events in the life of a person.3 He called this form of repetition compulsion “the destiny compulsion” and this is exactly what I am talking about: The effect of unconscious concepts on the events of outer reality, which appear to be somehow connected although there can’t be a causal relation between them according to scientific and common sense assumptions. 1. The Kia-Model To explain how this process nevertheless could work I developed a first model, which I tried to visualize by the first letter of Austin Osman Spares “Sacred Alphabet”, by which he symbolized “Kia” or the “Death Posture”. It is not necessary to know what Spare meant with these ideas, important is only that the figure consists of two overlapping elliptic fields, which are arranged in a slightly rotated position, so that there are two ends on the top and one end in the bottom. Now in my model one of these fields represents the mind of the observing individual (the ego) and the other one what we experience as the observed reality (the world). These two can also be taken as the traditional concepts of the subject and the object. Then I assumed that the upper part of the figure represents our conscious experience, and the lower part, where outer and inner reality overlaps, the world of the unconscious. The crucial point of this arrangement is that what appears to be a twofold system on the level of conscious experience turns out to be something indifferent and unified on the level of the unconscious. In allusion to Albert Einstein’s “Raum-Zeit- Kontinuum” I called this unified field of inner and outer reality the “ego-world-continuum”. Thus I got a model that seemed to offer quite interesting possibilities and explanations: On a first level, which is represented by the upper, conscious part, it describes the experience of reality in a common sense way of thinking which is also reflected in a certain understanding of science: We have an observer (the subject) who receives data from an independently existing reality (the object). Between these two poles of experience the process of perception is constituted. Yet in the lower part we see, that these two are interconnected in a way that escapes our conscious experience. It is the realm of forgotten wishes, of unconscious concepts from the past, which predetermine the reality that we experience as destiny in our lives. 3 Sigmund Freud, „Jenseits des Lustprinzips“ in: Psychologie des Unbewussten, p. 213ff. When I say that the unconscious mind predetermines the outer reality, how should we imagine such a process? Well, to describe this process I assumed that the unconscious mind is – amongst others – a realm of concepts. I don’t understand this term as the meaning of an abstract idea or representation in language as in the German word “Begriff”, but rather a preliminary design of reality, which connects a certain need or desire with its realisation in reality. For example the concept of a table is based upon our desire to have an elevated surface for working, eating or whatever. This need is connected with the practical use of a material surface on legs to achieve that purpose. Such concepts are not so much like platonic ideas, but dynamic designs of reality that contain and sustain what has been achieved by evolution. This predetermination by unconscious concepts can be applied to every part of our perceivable reality. As a consequence we can see all material reality as an expression of such unconscious concepts. The underlying concepts that we share make up the reality that we experience in our society and the world. If we look at the figure we furthermore can realize that the process of perception as a passive reception of reality can be complemented by the unconscious creation of reality so that we get a closed circuit, in which perception and creation of reality are only different sections of the same movement: What we have perceived, what we have desired, will be forgotten and thus becomes a part of the unconscious, and this unconscious concept will inevitably return and constitute our new reality. This circuit can be regarded as the basic mechanism of all our experience and it is rooted in the assumption that – if they are not conflicting with each other – all our wishes must become reality, and in reverse, that all existing things are the manifestations of our forgotten wishes. This idea can be equalled with the eternal cycle of Samsara in eastern philosophies. From a different viewpoint it has also been formulated by Friedrich Nietzsche as “eternal recurrence”.4 In 20th century philosophy similar ideas had been put forward by Gilles Deleuze5 and Jacques Derrida6. This theory of the Ego-World-Continuum was developed around 1989 and I sometimes called it the “Kia-model”, named after Austin Osman Spares term Kia, which he had symbolized by the single twofold letter. I recently found that the phenomenologist Maurice Merlau-Ponty had described in his later philosophy quite a similar idea of interweavement between inner and outer reality, the ego and the world, which he called the “Chiasmus” 4 For example in his main work Also sprach Zarathustra. 5 Gilles Deleuze, Differenz und Wiederholung. 6 Jacques Derrida, “Die difference”. (after the Greek letter Chi, which is formed by two crossed lines).7 So we could name this model also the Chiasmus-Model. 2. The Cthulhu-Model I had been quite satisfied with this model for many years, but started to feel a little bit uncomfortable with it when I realized one weak point of it. This weak point was the status of other individuals. My model was the perfect representation of an egocentric one-person universe. I myself was the center of the world, and other living beings were just the manifestation of my desires, or at least agents to fulfil my desire. Actually this was not the way I wanted to see myself and my part amongst others in every day life! So I tried to reformulate my theory and to give also the other a valid representation in my model. I don’t know how it exactly came, but when thinking about this problem there appeared to my mind the vision of a giant deep sea kraken of cosmic size, with infinite many endless tentacles, which were covered with countless luminescent suckers that glowed into the night of the universe. As the flesh of the kraken was invisible like glass, there could only be seen these luminous suckers, which finally turned out to be eyes staring out into the darkness and observing the movements of the other suckers. Without being able to see the flesh of the tentacles that connected all suckers, each eye thought to be a separate individual entity, like all the other eyes that were watching it in reverse. No single eye was aware that it was just a part of a giant living being, and this for the simple reason that its whole body was not in the same way visible than the luminous sucker eyes of my cosmic kraken.