The Pueblo Indians told me that all Americans are crazy, and of course I was somewhat astonished and asked them why.
Consciousness is very much the product of perception and orientation in the external world.
It is probably localized in the cerebrum, which is of ectodermic origin and was probably a sense organ of the skin at the time of our remote ancestors.
The consciousness derived from that localization in the brain therefore probably retains these qualities of sensation and orientation.
Peculiarly enough, the French and English psychologists of the early seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tried to derive consciousness from the senses as if it consisted solely of sense data.
That is expressed by the famous formula Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu}
You can observe something similar in modern psychological theories.
Freud, for instance, does not derive the conscious from sense data, but he derives the unconscious from the conscious, which is along the same rational line.
I would put it the reverse way: I would say the thing that comes first is obviously the unconscious and that consciousness really arises from an unconscious condition.
In early childhood we are unconscious; the most important functions of an instinctive nature are unconscious, and consciousness is rather the product of the unconscious.
It is a condition which demands a violent effort.
You get tired from being conscious. You get exhausted by consciousness. It is an almost unnatural effort.
When you observe primitives, for instance, you will see that on the slightest provocation or with no provocation whatever they doze off, they disappear.
They sit for hours on end, and when you ask them, ‘What are you doing? What are you thinking?’ they are offended, because they say, ‘Only a man that is crazy thinks – he has thoughts in his head.
We do not think’. If they think at all, it is rather in the belly or in the heart.
Certain Negro tribes assure you that thoughts are in the belly because they only realize those thoughts which actually disturb the liver, intestines, or stomach.
In other words, they are conscious only ofemotional thoughts.
Emotions and affects are always accompanied by obvious physiological innervations.
The Pueblo Indians told me that all Americans are crazy, and of course I was somewhat astonished and asked them why.
They said, ‘Well, they say they think in their heads.
No sound man thinks in the head. We think in the heart’.
They are just about in the Homeric age, when the diaphragm {phren=vc{md, soul)
was the seat of psychic activity.
That means a psychic localization of a different nature.
Our concept of consciousness supposes thought to be in our most dignified head.
But the Pueblo Indians derive consciousness from the intensity of feeling. Abstract thought does not exist for them.
As the Pueblo Indians are sun-worshippers, I tried the argument of St Augustine on them.
I told them that God is not the sun but the one who made the sun.
They could not accept this because they cannot go beyond the perceptions oftheir senses and their feelings.
Therefore consciousness and thought to them are localized in the heart.
To us, on the other hand, psychic activities are nothing.
We hold that dreams and fantasies are localized ‘down below,’ therefore there are people who speak of the conscious mind, ofthe things that are below consciousness.
These peculiar localizations play a great role in so-called primitive psychology, which is by no means primitive.
For instance if you study Tantric Yoga and Hindu psychology you will find the most elaborate system of psychic layers, of localizations ofconsciousness up from the region ofthe perineum to the top of the head.
These ‘centres’ are the so-called chakras and you not only find them in the teachings ofyoga but can discover the same idea in old German alchemical books, which surely do not derive from a knowledge of yoga.
The important fact about consciousness is that nothing can be conscious without an ego to which it refers.
If something is not related to the ego then it is not conscious.
Therefore you can define consciousness as a relation of psychic facts to the ego.
What is that ego?
The ego is a complex datum which is constituted first of all by a general awareness of your body, of your existence, and secondly by your memory data; you have a certain idea of having been, a long series of memories.
Those two are the main constituents ofwhat we call the ego.
Therefore you can call the ego a complex of psychic facts.
This complex has a great power of attraction, like a magnet; it attracts contents from the unconscious, from that dark realm of which we know nothing; it also attracts impressions from the outside, and when they enter into association with the ego they are conscious.
If they do not, they are not conscious.
My idea of the ego is that it is a sort of complex.
Of course, the nearest and dearest complex which we cherish is our ego.
It is always in the centre of our attention and of our desires, and it is the absolutely indispensable centre of consciousness.
If the ego becomes split up, as in schizophrenia, all sense of values is gone, and also things become inaccessible for voluntary reproduction because the centre has split and certain parts of the psyche refer to one fragment of the ego and certain other contents to another fragment of the ego.
Therefore, with a schizophrenic, you often see a rapid change from one personality into another.
You can distinguish a number of functions in consciousness. They enable consciousness to become oriented in the field of ectopsychic facts and endopsychic facts.
What I understand by the ectopsyche is a system of relationship between the contents ofconsciousness and facts and data coming in from the environment.
It is a system of orientation which concerns my dealing with the external facts given to me by the function ofmy senses.
The endopsyche on the other hand, is a system of relationship between the contents of consciousness and postulated processes in the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Analytical Psychology – Its Theory and Practice, Page 8-11
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