Believing is not to be reduced to thinking that such-and-such might be the case. It is not a weaker form of thinking, laced with doubt. Sometimes we speak like this: ‘I believe that the train leaves at 6.13’, where ‘I believe that’ simply means that ‘I think (but am not certain) that’. Since the left hemisphere is concerned with what is certain, with knowledge of the facts, its version of belief is that it is just absence of certainty. If the facts were certain, according to its view, I should be able to say ‘I know that’ instead. This view of belief comes from the left hemisphere's disposition towards the world: interest in what is useful, therefore fixed and certain (the train timetable is no good if one can't rely on it). So belief is just a feeble form of knowing, as far as it is concerned.
In Frankenstein’s Castle Wilson remarked that although Freud was right that the unconscious is much more powerful than the conscious mind, he was wrong to believe that therefore it was in control. This scenario, of the unconscious lording it over the puppet-like ego, became very popular in the twentieth century, and contributed significantly to the feeling of helplessness and the ‘worm’s eye view’. (Wilson has even taken Jung to task for this; see C. G. Jung: Lord of the Underworld (1984))
Whereas in the archaic and magical structures silence reigns—consciousness remaining in an “autistic” uroboric state before the rise of language—in the mythical structure language emerges as a form of sacred power, creating both a “self” and a “world” outside and other than that self.25 Language then is a medium for polarities.
A conception is fixed and held only when it has been embodied in a symbol. So the study of symbolic forms offers a key to the forms of human conception. The genesis of symbolic forms—verbal, religious, artistic, mathematical, or whatever modes of expression there be—is the odyssey of the mind.
As your waist circumference expands, your risk of heart disease goes up. As your blood pressure elevates, so does your risk for heart disease, and stroke as well. The worse your blood sugar control (glucose intolerance), the more likely you are to be diabetic, and the more plaque deposition you’re likely to have in your arteries.
And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.
If we drop the “-ology” and just stick with “telos,” we can get back to its first and original meaning (formulated by Aristotle): “that for the sake of which.”
