Incoming Links

• March 10th, 2021

  This is an ancient idea with many variations. The book 📙 Your Symphony of Selves affirms the healthiness of being many contra the "Single Self Assumption" they see as prevalent in Western culture as an influence of Monotheism.

• March 24th, 2021

  Most psychologists assume that, no matter how many subpersonalities we find, ultimately all has to be reduced to one. This is the most general conception of mental health. But Watkins, and her mentor James Hillman, ask the question ‘Why?’ Would it not make more sense to live with multiplicity, to recognize more than one centre within ourselves? Hillman suggests that this quarrel is rather like the quarrel between Monotheism and Polytheism. Psychology, he says, is secretly monotheistic, and wants everything to be neatly hierarchical or bureaucratic. But could we not envisage a polytheistic psychology, which admitted that there could be many gods and goddesses, many egos, many identities, many selves. *

  It is necessary to lift your eyes above the horizon, to establish a transcendent goal, if you wish to cease being a puppet, under the control of things you do not understand and perhaps do not want to understand. Then all the subsystems or subpersonalities that might otherwise be pursing their own limited fulfillment will join together under the aegis of the truly ideal, and the consequence of that will be an engagement that approximates the ultimate or total. Under such conditions, all the parts of you are going to be on board. That is the psychological equivalent of Monotheism. That is the emergence of the higher self that might be the true servant of God, in whatever metaphysical reality potentially underlies what is obvious to our blind and limited mortal selves. *

• 📙 All Things Shining

  To lure back these Homeric gods is a saving possibility after the death of God: it would allow us to survive the breakdown of Monotheism while resisting the descent into a nihilistic existence.

  Melville’s genuine wickedness, in other words, consists in his portrayal of Ahab’s monomaniacal Monotheism as itself the incarnation of what the universe most abhors.

• 📙 Beyond Order

  It is necessary to lift your eyes above the horizon, to establish a transcendent goal, if you wish to cease being a puppet, under the control of things you do not understand and perhaps do not want to understand. Then all the subsystems or subpersonalities that might otherwise be pursing their own limited fulfillment will join together under the aegis of the truly ideal, and the consequence of that will be an engagement that approximates the ultimate or total. Under such conditions, all the parts of you are going to be on board. That is the psychological equivalent of Monotheism. That is the emergence of the higher self that might be the true servant of God, in whatever metaphysical reality potentially underlies what is obvious to our blind and limited mortal selves.

• 📙 Your Symphony of Selves

  As Monotheism is the religious and cultural water in which we are all swimming, it strongly predisposes us toward the Single Self Assumption. If when looking outside of ourselves for religious authority we believe in a unitary God, then when we look inside of ourselves we will likely search for a single self.

  John A. Powell has given us a clear notion of just how deep this essentialist view runs in Western philosophy: “The dominant narrative of Western society . . . denies that we are or can be multiple and fractured and still remain ‘normal’ . . . its individualistic focus is one of the deeply rooted ideologies of Western society . . . [and] the individualistic norm . . . pervades our society.”38 Combined with and reinforced by the dominance of Monotheism, the essentialist view provides a powerful philosophical foundation for the Single Self Assumption.