The Self as Problematic Construct: An Excursion into Magical Cultural Traditions 1 Eveline Lang Shippensburg University In Native American ceremonies, the holy man acts as a channel for the spirits (universal mind). . . . I was working on 'The Flowering Tree' for this book. One day the idea just came to me that the entire universe was a giant brain, and that half of it was left–brain energy and the other half was right–brain energy. . . . Being a left–brain person, I needed to know if this was really true (Ross, 146, 147). I wanted to compare Jungian psychology with the traditional D/Lakota philosophy and thought. What Jung called the conscious mind or ego, D/Lakota people would call the senses. Native Americans would call the conscious portion of the mind the spirit level (. . .). Jung also said that when dreams are analyzed properly, they can be used as a means to guide a person's life. My studies in D/Lakota history pointed to a similar concept. Two hundred years ago we had dream societies with such names as the Buffalo, Elk, Bear, Wolf, Thunder, and Winkte Societies. It was determined which society the person belonged to by the type of dream he had (Ross, 28–29). Jung said that modern man is looking outside for salvation when he should be looking inside. I wondered if this purification that so many cultures address is actually inside rather than outside. Cayce remarked in one of his psychic readings that Armageddon will be fought in the spirit world. The spirit world, to me, is the collective unconscious (Ross, 177).
The passages quoted above were selected from a book entitled Mitakuye Oyasin. "We Are All Related" whose author attempts to grasp Native American traditions from a mental– rational as well a psychological perspective. References to right and left brain research, brain wave studies, findings in parapsychology as well as to research in psychology (mainly Jungian) are interspersed throughout the chapters to yield a kaleidoscope of answers to the questions raised. Concepts from a host of different traditions are brought together in analogies, explanations and comparisons, leaving the reader with the notion that the magical, mythical as well as mental–rational traditions are basically identical in their insights and teachings and that ultimately the cosmos can be understood in its entirety as a system of rational interconnections, as the giant–brain metaphor above suggests. With this conclusion, the author performed the kind of reductionism which has invaded uncountable scholarly endeavors of today in the different disciplines; indeed many of the sources used in the second part of this book employ terms from psychology and brain research. The reductionism operative here can be seen as indicative of the trend to justify cultural traditions whose cosmology has no place or legitimacy in the Western (mental– rational) tradition, i.e. magical traditions. Phenomena which defy measurement/quantification and prediction and which do not follow a linear logic obtain their validity only when forced into rational schemata. Rational accounts of phenomena, moreover, are laden with abstractions and thick with jargon through which they acquire an air of sophistication and objectivity and through which the observer is distanced. It is through this supposed neutral stance that scientific discourse The paper was adapted from a presentation at the first Interdisciplinary Symposium on Dissociation and the Self on "Explorations in Unity and Multiplicity," organized by the Pittsburgh Multiple Personality and Dissociation Study Group, Pittsburgh, September 9–10, 1993. 1
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