Attack of the Giant Mind Parasites

At last we enter the ninth and last circle of Hell. But if I've learned nothing else in this guided tour of the underworld, it's that you can't just tell someone to "go to hell" without specifying which part. This final circle is comprised of four rings, the first one being "the world of Giants or Titans."

That seems odd. San Francisco I can understand, but why Tennessee?

Upton says that these entities are what in Vedanta are called asuras. In this loose translation of the Bhagavad Gita, Sri Aurobindo writes that

"The Asuric nature has too its wealth, its plenitude of force, but it is of a very different, a powerful and evil kind. Asuric men have no true knowledge of the way of action or the way of abstention, the fulfilling or the holding in of the nature. Truth is not in them, nor clean doing, nor faithful observance. They see naturally in the world nothing but a huge play of the satisfaction of self; theirs is a world with Desire for its cause and seed and governing force and law....

"The Asuric man becomes the centre or instrument of a fierce, Titanic, violent action, a power of destruction in the world, a fount of injury and evil. Arrogant, full of self-esteem and the drunkenness of their pride, these misguided souls delude themselves, persist in false and obstinate aims and pursue the fixed impure resolution of their longings. They imagine that desire and enjoyment are all the aim of life and in their inordinate and insatiable pursuit of it they are the prey of a devouring, a measurelessly unceasing care and thought and endeavour and anxiety till the moment of their death."

Other than that, they're great to have around.

Upton says that the Giants are "the archetype of repressed passions," but I think I would express it differently, since "repression" is a somewhat outmoded psychoanalytic concept. It is too linear and mechanistic to describe what really goes on in the unconscious.

Again, since the mind is intersubjective and object-related, the content of "repression" is really a quasi-autonomous subject I call a mind parasite. Because it is parasitic -- i.e., it cannot live without attaching to an external source of energy and sustenance -- it is related to oneself, and because it is intersubjective, it is always attached to something external as well, either "real" or projected. In other words, the mind parasite always seeks some kind of relationship, however dysfunctional.

Upton is correct, however, in noting that the Giant (or mind parasite) represents "a falsity through which the quality of unique personhood is almost entirely destroyed."

Importantly, we are speaking here of extreme cases -- one might say cases in which the mind parasite has succeeded in displacing the central self. This can and does frequently happen, whereby the true self becomes a persecutory satellite in orbit around the mind parasite, rather than vice versa.

For example, a truly toxic narcissist has replaced his damaged true self with an inflated and imaginary false one. The true self is not so much "repressed" as split off, denied, and projected.

But unlike a mind parasite, the true self cannot be eliminated, since it is not only real, but the ground and locus of reality within the self. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the false self knows that it has no underlying reality, no ground of being. It is only as real as the ephemeral circumstances of the narcissist, whose life revolves around maintaining the illusion of superiority, entitlement, giftedness, etc.

In many ways, Christianity as such is an innoculation against such a malevolent psychic transmutation. A Christian knows full well what he is in the absence of God, which is to say, nothing (the bad kind). Don Colacho, in ascending severity:

--There are two kinds of men: those who believe in original sin and idiots.
--Nobody will ever induce me to absolve human nature, because I know myself.
--May he tremble who sees himself as innocent.
--Vulgarity consists in striving to be what we are not.
--In order to challenge God, man puffs up his emptiness.
--The Antichrist is, probably, man.

Now, paradoxically -- given what we just said above about the intersubjective nature of mind parasites -- "The Giants are impersonal falsity and oppression; Satan himself is both personal and impersonal."

What this means is that the ultimate mind parasite would not be a person per se, but in the shape of a person -- a giant facsimian or titan, so to spook. Boo!

Upton notes that they live in a realm that is less than night and less than day (XXXI: 10). What could this mean? Up here, what is "less than day" converges upon night (twilight), and what is less than night converges on the day. Psychologically these refer to the hypnogogic (the descent into sleep) and hypnopompic (the ascent out of sleep).

But the "less than night" is not the absence of Light, but what we might call "minus Light," a kind of counterfeit parody of illumination. It is a "chaotic murk," perhaps the state of the world prior to the Creator's first act of division and separation: The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. This darkness is very different from the night that only comes into being on the First Day, with the creation of Light.

In the case of the minus Light, "the cyclical form of night and day has broken down" (Upton). It is endless night, for the day never comes. As they say, it is always darkest right before it goes pitch black.

Night is also death, so the entities here are deprived of the mercy of death's transformation. Life and death share the rhythmicity of night and day, dissolution and rebirth, crucifixion and resurrection, so no growth is possible.

One of the Giants we encounter is none other than Nimrod, the architect of the Tower of Babel. In a comment on the previous post, I mentioned that Babel is the "minus Pentecost," in that "The former -- which is analogous to multiculturalism and deconstruction -- horizontalizes the One into numberless fragments of speech, while the latter projects the One into diverse tongues."

Upton is clearly on the same page, writing that "Nimrod, in his speech, is like a postmodern philosopher: one who, in an attempt to rise above all languages and escape the limits of meaning, has in fact sunk below them, into the incoherent." Furthermore, like a parasite, this perversion "saps the intelligence of whoever tries to understand it."

Conversely, "The Apostles' ability to speak in many tongues on Pentecost is thus the exact opposite of the confusion of tongues, and also its redemption." And "as the confusion of tongues divides, so Christ the Word unites" (ibid. you adieu).

It is One Cosmos Under God, and therefore, Word.

Giant fans in the right field bleachers, looking out over McCovey Cove.