Sunday 9 February 2003

Pic of the day: Picture from the anime Hikaru no Go. Seeing is believing ... but just because you don't see your spirits don't mean they don't influence your life. Take me, for example ...

Spirits of prowess

As seen recently, I am currently watching a Japanese animated series called Hikaru no Go. It starts with a young boy (6th grade at the beginning) who finds a Go board in his grandfather's attic. Hikaru alone can see the bloodstains on it, and when he comments on the stains, he hears a voice. "You can see it?" "Of course I can see ..." "You can hear my voice?" And then, in a blinding light, a ghost arises from the Go board ... Sai, a Go master from the distant past. Only Hikaru can see him, and the ghost helps him with the history lessons in exchange for being allowed to play Go again through the boy's hands. Hikaru becomes involved in the world of Go, and starts to take an interest himself. Soon rumors of his unnatural strength in the game starts to ripple through the Go community. But whenever he tries to play as himself, he fails. Yet, he keeps growing stronger through his experience as the hand of a ghost ... at present I am at episode 18 of 60-something, so obviously I don't know how it ends. Or even whether it stays as good. It's a lot more exciting than it sounds, because lots of people really throw their heart at the game and the status it brings.

To me, it all seems eerily familiar. No, I don't see translucent ghosts; thank the Light for that. Still, it seems familiar both on a personal level and in terms of Jungian psychology.

***

C.G. Jung developed the theory of complexes, a word that is still used decades after his death. In everyday speech, complexes are bad. But the way Jung used the word, it referred to any structure in the subconscious, for good or bad. Some of these structures were shared by a culture or by all humans; others were personal. Some of them were developed to the point of personalities; others were just loose collections of memories and emotions. Spirits, he believed, were complexes from the collective subconscious.

I had the privilege of being still quite young when first learning superficially about these things; my brother is a psychologist. He always had more ambition than I, which doesn't say much, and he wanted to help people who were less able to handle the problems of their soul than most of us. And thanks to this, I got an early interest in psychology as well ... I was a very curious boy. It has served me well, I think. I hear it is common to learn some basic psychology in school these days. If done well, I approve of this. But there is also much babble in this field. I guess some branches of psychology are better suited for introverts such as me, and others for the outgoing and social extroverts.

***

Fast forward to Trade School, a high school specializing in economic disciplines. I spent two years on one of the country's top trade schools. I enjoyed the classes, though I ignored the social life there as best I could. (Sometimes it was too loud to ignore.) But above all, I loved the computer. They had a real computer with a floppy disk. This was really high-tech back in the late 1970es. I quickly learned Basic, and started to expand on my knowledge.

Then the revelations began. I would get an idea for some project, start on it, and then go on with my life. And when I was doing other things – taking a walk, or sitting at a meeting perhaps – I would suddenly know with intense clarity how to solve some programming problem. It was not as if I thought it through and logically arrived at a conclusion. No. It came to me, like a revelation. As if someone projected it fully formed into my mind. I guess it could have been creepy, but I was interested in programming, and besides I was lazy. So I just took these revelations and ran with them. I depended on them, as I took on projects that were too large for me to understand. In the years to follow, I would delve into many different programming languages, and even built a small assembler for the Z80 processor. Eventually I kind of burned out on programming, with the debt collection suite. Even that was fun originally, and creating something so complex from scratch was beautiful. But it was killed by the tedium of welding on new reports and new interfaces to other programs. I wanted to create, not to run errands for people without a spirit of their own, puppets of Mammon. In disgust, I turned away from programming, seared by the pain in my spirit.

But while it lasted, it was eerily like some invisible spirit following me wherever I went, and intruding on me when I looked idle, to bring up its own passion. Very much like the Go spirit of the anime, except I'm not the type to actually see ghosts. I was happy with it just being a complex dedicated to programming; I did not need or want the human handle on it. Otherwise I might too have given it a face and a name, the way some people do. What this could have done to my already dubious sanity is anyone's guess...

Yes, I believe that the handle of a human form is given by our own subconscious. When people meet ghosts or remember their earlier lives, stuff like that, it is simply a way to interface with pieces of personality from within. These things live within our brains. Possibly not just in one brain, but in the shared subconscious of a culture or subculture. In the past, ghosts and spirits were commonly expressed. Today they are better integrated. As the newspaper Firda once asked: "What happened to all the spirits that were exorcised? Perhaps they went into politics?"

I believe there has developed a symbiosis, where spirits integrate better as our personality has grown stronger than that of our ancestors. They were less in control, having much less knowledge than we have. Years of relentless schooling builds a knowledge base tied to our individual ego. It is I who go to school, I who learn, I who am tested. The process of schooling is focused on the ego, unlike in the older trades where the farm or the shop or the furnace was the central entity and the humans around it came and went. The stronger and more widely informed personality will usually rule over the smaller pieces of personality inside, though they may appear as dreams, or earlier lives, or inspirations, or characters in fiction.

Or ghost in the machine.