This is my take on “God”- it is your own subconscious. I think that your subconscious has a much higher knowledge of who you are and what you need to learn in life than you consciously have. I think that a lot of decisions come from that knowledge, and it needn’t even be consciously realized that you know this is what you need, and that these are the lessons that you need to learn. It sounds kind of new-agey, but different in that I don’t feel that this knowledge comes from an outside source- no god, no “one consciousness”, but rather each person has their own unique and separate all-knowing “god” inside of them. It’s kind of hazy, because I don’t consider myself religious, so I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about it, and these are just general musings- it’s not like I’ve written a manifesto or anything, just thinking.
Are there any religions that believe this as well, or something like it?
Some New Age churches (such as Unity- not to be confused with the Unitarians) have something like this. The Unitarians (which can be confused with the Unitarians) have a non-supernatural based church with a generally Judeo-Christian morality and this would not conflict with their teachings (which are admittedly rather broad- you can be an atheist or a polytheist and still be Unitarian in good standing).
I’m not an expert at all on Carl Jung, but didn’t he seem to theorize something like this? He considered us conductors of a sort to the Collective Unconscious.
I don’t know, but it is good to know that I’m not the only one that finds Jung’s writings to be dense and technical- I tried to get into him several years back.
Hmm, nothing comes to mind (my god has clearly forsaken me)
Several religions have ascribed special significance to dreams, which is kinda in your direction?
I like the concept, though I am not religious myself.
I’m studying neurology at the moment, and when you look at what the subconscious mind does every moment, let alone what it’s capable of, it makes the conscious mind seem like the idiot CEO put in charge of a company bursting with genuises. The kind of person that sends out a company-wide email in comic sans saying “Our competitor’s have launched there product!!”.
Obviously I’m not implying that consciousness is unnecessary…just making a point about the relationship.
this is a common “exoteric” explanation for occult phenomena. It is popular because people like it a lot more than the more obvious, “esoteric” explanation of the person being in contact with an outside intelligence (“familiar spirit”).
The idea of a superior intelligence resting in various forms of the “unconscious” originates from Carl Jung who was in contact with at least one such “intelligence” called Philemon (google Carl Jung Philemon). Jung clearly recognized that he was dealing with something that was not part of his own mind, so he invented the whole theory to explain it away in “materialistic” terms. Or, maybe these same spirits he was in contact with taught him the theory…
Incidentally, “unconscious” also figured in teachings of other contemporary psychologists who did not follow Jung, such as Freud, but others did not assign to it any notion of special powers. To Freud unconscious/subconscious was a source of the raw impulses such as violent or sexual, not a superior intelligence.
OP: I’ve heard this before from property dualists. Everything “spiritual” is ultimately reducible to a property of one’s mind, and the mind is merely the software side of the brain.
code_grey: While I’d heard of the collective unconscious, I thought it related more to evolutionary instincts, a type of hereditary knowledge. I had no idea Jung believed in some sort of quasi-spiritual phenomenon. All the more reason I’m happy I dumped my Jungian therapist.
It’s not a religion, but Julian Jaynes wrote a book back in 1976 with the daunting title the Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind that actually became a bestseller, in which he claimed that all the way into historic times people experienced “the gods” as auditory hallucinations that “talked” to them. It was really, he claimed, one half of the brain sending signals to the other side via connections across the main fissure, and so the gods were literally in our heads. Writer Neal Stephenson acknowledged Jaynes’ influence in his book the Big U, but it arguably made a much bigger impact on his later Snow Crash.
There’s still a Julian Jaynes Society supporting this, but it’s not a faith
Some forms of humanism, and teachings of Socrates (know yourself) and Plato come to mind, along with the sayings ‘your divinity lies within’ by somebody that I can’t remember.
My favorite t-shirt has Buddha on it and says simply Inquire Within. I don’t think that you have to be particularly religious to benefit from Buddhist teachings about the self. You might find things that are written about “mindfulness” to be particularly helpful.
I agree regarding Buddhism: in the case of Tibetan Buddhism, anyway, I know quite a number of practitioners who chose to view it more as applied psychology than a religion. Of course, it CAN be practiced as a religion, and I know lots of people who do just that. I just don’t think it needs to be, and that meditation and a lot of the basic practices can bring enormous benefit to anybody who wants to study and practice with a qualified teacher.
So, an atheistic philosophy with no supernatural elements? That seems counter to the definition of religion to me.
Even an an atheistic Buddhism still has karma and rebirth, both supernatural things. Not to mention the pantheon of Devas, other realms, the ability to visit them like the Buddha did, etc.
