The three levels of knowledge

In terms of my own shamanic paradigm, and from what I have deduced from various positions, especially (of course) the great three, Nietzsche, Bataille & Marechera (although in a sense I have learned even more from their critics), the mammalian, middle level of the consciousness is concerned with making moral formulations about social situations.

 

Now, I think that sometimes, or perhaps always, a sign of having a problem with the middle level of human meaning is that one does not know how to make one’s moral formulations MATCH the conventional moral formulations about social situations.  One may have very advanced ideas about morality and ethics, and these may even be better thought through and more productive (producing many better relationships, for instance) than conventional herd morality.  But the herd still penalizes those who cannot read and register social situations according to its own conventional morality.  

 

It may also be that the three levels of the human mind (as I have posited them) are generally able to be associated with three levels of hierarchy within society.  You would have the very lower classes, the manual labor types, or poor and violently uneducated operating basically on instinct and emotional sensation (this is actually not a bad way to be in many respects, as one is untroubled by complex moral systems).

 

Then, at a higher level, which is the middle level of society, you have the predominance of the principle of herd morality and what might kindly be called bourgeois conformity.  One conforms as a matter of principle, in order to belong, and one takes pride in matching others in their conformity.  Thus one does all that one feels one needs to do to be a productive member of society.  This much relates to what we tend to call “middle class values”.

 

Beyond and above this, there is higher level morality, but it is the morality, as Nietzsche suggested, of risk takers.  You are free to do whatever you like, so long as you are willing to take the risk.  This pertains to the higher levels of society, which Nietzsche thought of as aristocratic.

 

So there are three spiritual classes which match the three levels of consciousness we all have in mental structure.

 

But I think the spiritual middle classes never forgive a lack of emotional attunement with their moral system.  They are prone to punishing that absence a great deal because they can SEE only a lack, but they cannot see what replaces that lack, which is a sense of morality and ethics that operates on a level that is even higher.

 

2.  More controversially perhaps, I will say that my own strange immigration experience, which ripped away my sense of moral coordination with the rest of my culture, actually NECESSITATED me to climb up higher to find a more individually suiting morality.  I eventually did – and the sign of my success is that I have good relationships – albeit not so much in the still damaged middle level.  I’m ok with the social lower rungs and the higher rungs, but still not the middle.