Aliens: The Bastard Child of Repressed Sexual Fantasies and Delusions
Whether or not anal probing is your thing, the concept of an extraterrestrial entity taking you from your cozy bed and performing experiments on you with total disregard of personal space is terrifying. The good news is that you may discover that aliens may not exist, and if they do they’re not currently doing these malicious acts. The bad news is that you may discover something odd that gets your rocks off.
Inspired and mentored by the only person in history allowed to tastefully use a “your mom” joke, Jung took many of Freud’s teachings and ideas and applied it to a much broader, collective sense. Jung divided the psyche into the conscious, personal unconscious, and collective unconscious, all playing a part in and influencing each other.
The conscious needs no explanation as we are most familiar with it – it is our every waking moment.
The personal unconscious holds complexes, which are sub-personalities that exert force to thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. A well-known complex is the Oedipus complex, coined by Freud. Jung took this idea of complexes but disapproved of Freud’s explanation of childhood trauma giving birth to a complex, and said that complexes arose from the collective unconscious.
The collective unconscious is the unconscious held by everyone that is human. This is the kind of thing that may interest biologists more, as it lurks deep within our genetics and primal survival instincts.
So, considering all these different consciousnesses, where do aliens and UFOs come into this?
Jung explained the mass hysteria of the UFO phenomenon as a collective thought of what ancient peoples would describe as their gods. UFOs visiting our planet became a symbol that marked a change of eras, a transition from the past to the future. This is the collective thought of the need to be a part of something greater.
The basic idea of being a part of something greater is then transformed into the complex, or the personal unconscious, shaped by the current events at the time. At that time, great works of science fiction swept the nation and invaded everyone’s imagination, including George Orwell’s War of the Worlds, a story of Martian invaders. Explosively combined with tensions of war and espionage, governments constantly hiding operations and censoring projects, these complexes, or the personal unconscious, sway the conscious to truly believe that there might be little green men somewhere close by.
BUT I DID SEE AN ALIEN! one might say, fully and honestly believing they did. We humans have something wonderful called pareidolia, which is the inherent drive to find faces, meaning, and sounds in seemingly mundane things. Shadows, strange noises, and even day dreams can lead one to wholeheartedly believe they saw something that wasn't there. Jung believed these interpretations of the world is the personal unconscious striving to change the conscious, manifesting from the collective unconscious of recognizing patterns and faces in objects and events that don’t usually have a pattern or meaning.
This might be fairly disheartening for those that believe, however it is necessary to bring up the fact that the human mind is not a video camera, a computer, or a typewriter. It does not record, calculate, and permanently write things down. It is simply an experiential learner that interprets events and information, usually to suit its deeply rooted beliefs brought about by our upbringing and inherent biology. This shouldn’t make people stray from believing, but rather encourage them to find the facts and truth amongst the myriad of false belief and information that inundates and clouds credibility. Keep searching.
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"The conscious needs no explanation as we are most familiar with it" - familiarity doesn't always breed recognition or deep comprehension. Consciousness is at once the most familiar and most mysterious of phenomena. Think about it (and think about yourself thinking about it...), a clump of tissue between your ears gives rise to every conceivable thought. What is it, really, for matter to know itself?
ReplyDeleteSo, as you say, we must keep searching.
As for aliens, I think that Calvin & Hobbes cartoon pretty much nailed it: the best sign of intelligence elsewhere in the universe is its refusal to engage with us. So far.
Wow that is one heck of a hook. So are you saying that aliens may be completely created by our imagination and reports of probing are actually Freudian slips?
ReplyDeleteI was quite amazed by this installment. For aliens to be some type of mind-created figure does not surprise me as there are still mixed feelings and evidence for this claim. I find it hard to believe in aliens as I need proof, like the legit proof.
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