In a recent post (Celebrating “Ragnarök” & the “Coming Guest"), I conjectured that "The psyche may not be just a human attribute." Paco Mitchell sent me a thought-provoking commentary entitled, "Crocodile Dreams: Thoughts on the Possible Extinction of the Psyche." I want to share this with all subscribers to the blog. What follows is the full text of Paco's commentary.

CROCODILE DREAMS

Thoughts on the Possible Extinction of the Psyche

Q: If humans become extinct, is it possible for the psyche to become extinct as well?

A: I don’t know, of course; but a few thoughts, observations, reflections and questions do occur to me:

INSTINCTS—MATERNAL AND OTHERWISE

Many years ago I watched a nature program on TV that demonstrated, to my mind, the presence of maternal instincts among scorpions and crocodiles (or were they alligators?).

1. A mother scorpion gives live birth to hundreds of baby scorpions per brood. In the documentary, I watched the mother scorpion carrying a multitude of the tiny, freshly-born babies on her back, her tail arched above them, the poison stinger in a position to protect them from harm.
2. A mother crocodile buries her clutch of eggs—as many as eighty—in a sandbank near the river where she lives. When it comes time for the eggs to hatch, the mother croc gathers the babies, up to fifteen at a time, in her long mouth, where they are surrounded by her razor-like teeth and fangs, her powerful jaws. It looks like she is going to eat them. Instead, she carries them gently to the river and deposits them in the water.

I was impressed by these demonstrations of such profound solicitude, which seem to provide evidence of a maternal instinct extending far back into evolutionary time. According to fossil records, reptilian crocodiles have been on the earth, in some form, for around 200 million years (cf. the Jurassic Period); scorpions, having 8 legs, are arachnids, related to spiders, and have been on earth for around 430 million years (cf. the Silurian Era). To me, these archaic manifestations of instinctual life-forms, with all the implications of maternal solicitude so visible on the TV program, suggest the existence of psychic patterns from the most archaic of times (see comment #2 below on Jung’s view of instinct and archetype).

Human beings, in their recent homo sapiens form, may have speciated a couple of hundred thousand years ago. Though the exact details of our “origins” are still in dispute, there is no question that we are late arrivals on the evolutionary, instinctual scene of life on earth—we are carryovers from long ago.

Therefore, it seems most likely that psychic life among animals far preceded psychic life among humans. In other words, instinct did not begin with us; archetypes did not begin with us; psyche did not begin with us. These manifestations of psyche were well developed by the time we stopped dragging our knuckles on the ground and took up our bipedal stance.

ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

In Jung’s many writings on the nature of archetypes and the collective unconscious, he emphasizes the virtual identity between archetype and instinct, the one being a reflection of the other. (When the “later Freud” described the “heavenly Eros,” he was describing something profoundly instinctual and therefore, effectively, “eternal.”)

ANIMAL DREAMS

The widespread evidence of REM sleep among mammals (dogs, cats, bears, etc.) and other animals, possibly even birds, all of whose presence on earth predates humans by millions and millions of years, suggests that the dreaming psyche of animals predates the dreaming psyche of humans by millions of years. It is this tremendous fund of time and experience that Jung posits as the basis for archetypal images, the virtually limitless scope of the collective unconscious, and, I would add, the super-intelligence to be regularly found in dreams and in the form of “animal wisdom.”

If we accept Jung’s hypothesis that archetypes are inherently expressive of instincts—and we accept his generalization that there is an archetype at the core of each complex and an instinct at the core of each archetype—then this is one more reason why we do well to imagine the archetypal psyche of the collective unconscious as derived from the archaic regions of life on the planet. We cannot say how far back in time the phenomenon of what we call “psychic life” goes—especially psychic life as reflected in the form of archetypal images—but if bears, for example, have been hibernating and presumably dreaming for several million years, I would have no trouble assigning the likely existence of archetypal images in animal dreams—in bear dreams—to an equal period of several million years, at least.

LIFE AFTER A GREAT EXTINCTION

“Our very knowledge will slay us.”

—Lewis Mumford, The Condition of Man

A small but increasing number of well-informed and concerned individuals have reached the conclusion that humans are generating the conditions for a thorough-going self-extinction. This is being heralded by the widespread, human-generated extinction of animal species that is already well under way (an estimated 150-200 species per day are disappearing from the earth).

Because we have entered the phase of irreversible, “runaway feedback loops in nature” that Gregory Bateson warned against in the mid-1960s (and others far earlier), these runaway feedback loops reflect a profound disturbance of the planet’s ability to maintain the homeostasis (the balance) necessary for life, and therefore the “loops” threaten us with many forms of inevitability.

[NOTE. Dr. Guy McPherson has estimated that there may now be as many as 46 different climate and environmental feedback loops that have reached the irreversible “runaway” mode.]

Even if human extinction per se does not consummate itself in the near future, the necessary pre-conditions for it are already in place, and are accelerating with shocking speed.

The causes of the five previous “great extinction” periods on earth have been due to cold, heat, prolonged volcanism and a great asteroid impact. Today we are witnessing the only massive extinction process caused by human interference in natural cycles, due largely to technology and its consequences. [Bateson expands this causation factor by adding the element of “conscious purposiveness.”)

The dogged, obtuse commitment of humans to their ego-consciousness, its “progress” and the dominion of its works seems like a natural imperative to most of us. We even wrote the Book of Genesis around this notion of “dominion.” We tend not to see how demonic—even evil—are our claims to supremacy over every other form of life and existence on the planet.

[NOTE: cf. Walter Wink’s trilogy, The Powers That Be, in which he redefines the nature of Satanic evil as “the spirit of malignant narcissism” to which individuals unconsciously contribute their own “anxious narcissism.” As far back as biblical times, “Satan” was regarded as “the ruler of this world.” According to Wink, we must now look in the mirror of self-awareness, recognizing the evil that we contain, and that we are imposing on the world itself in every direction.]

Whether we regard a human fate of “self-extinction” to be justified or not, if we want to form a picture of what the planet would look like afterwards—after we’re “gone”—we can gather a few clues by looking back at the five previous “great extinctions” that Elizabeth Kolbert has detailed in her recent book, The Sixth Great Extinction.

In one great extinction, 250 million years ago, about 96 percent of marine life went extinct, along with about 70 percent of land species. The dinosaur asteroid-extinction 65 million years ago cleared the planet of the great lizards, and paved the way for little mammalian lemur-like creatures—who surely had a maternal instinct, and who most likely dreamed—to evolve in the direction of primates and, eventually, into humans.

SPECULATIVE CONCLUSION.

The sixth, great (human-driven) extinction, may end up exceeding the five previous global extinctions, in terms of the sheer percentage of species-loss—on land, in the air and in the sea. Conceivably, conditions could even reach an irreversible point where the entire biosphere could be destroyed. But short of a total destruction of all forms of life, if there remained even as many as, say, ten, twenty or thirty per cent of extant species, I would assume that the “maternal instinct” that we saw above among the scorpions and crocodiles, backed by two to four hundred million years of instinctual evolutionary patterning, would still exist. Therefore, to my way of thinking, the “psyche” would still exist, even though all of our human-reptile brain stems would have passed from the scene.

In other words, I assume that a considerable range of archetypal images and patterns, impulses and behaviors, would still condition the imagining and dreaming life-forms that remained, however “primitive” they might be.

What kind of “psyche” would that be? Primitive, to be sure. What kind of dreams would it manifest? Archetypal images of some sort, I would guess.

Does that mean there would be crocodile dreams on an earth without humans? Scorpion dreams? Worm dreams? Cockroach dreams? Collective ant colony dreams of numinous queen-figures laying eggs? Who knows?

But if, for example, the scorpions survived the Fourth, Fifth and now the Sixth Great Extinctions, why wouldn’t the same stream of imaginal patterns and instinctual energies that flowed from the scorpions of 430 million years ago to the scorpions of today, have a chance of enduring long after humans had quit the scene?

I recall a young man in his early thirties, telling me a dream of his that featured a scorpion-woman or scorpion–queen of some sort, who lived deep beneath the sea. Was she the embodiment of some sort of psychic energy several hundred million years old, surging through the deepest reaches of the human dreamer’s reptilian brain?

We don’t know yet if there can be any evolutionary recovery from a Sixth Extinction, but if scorpions and crocodiles survive, I wouldn’t count out the old maternal instincts—those extraordinary solicitudes—and therefore the psychic patterns, and perhaps the dreams, that belong to them.