Holographic Gods
by Iona Miller, 2013
pre-print
Scientific God Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2013
Holographic Godforms, I and II
http://scigod.com/index.php/sgj/article/view/243/281
http://scigod.com/index.php/sgj/article/view/244/283
http://scigod.com/index.php/sgj/article/view/244/283
"[M]an has no choice but to live by 'fictions'; as if the illusory world of the senses represented ultimate Reality; as if he had a free will which made him responsible for his actions; as if there was a God to reward virtuous conduct and so on. Similarly the individual must live as if he were not under sentence of death, and humanity must plan for its future as if its days were not counted. It is only by virtue of these fictions that the mind of man fabricated a habitable universe, and endowed it with meaning. ...the simple fact is that our species is now living on borrowed time, from decade to decade as it were, and the signs indicate that it is drifting towards the final catastrophe, yet we are still dealing in probabilities and not in certainties. There is always a hope of the unexpected and the unforeseen. Since the year zero of the new calendar, man has carried a time bomb fastened around his neck, and will have to listen to its ticking - now louder, now softer, now louder again - until it blows up, or he succeeds in de-fusing it." -Arthur Koestler, p.4 Janus, A Summing Up
ABSTRACT:
Part I: Spirit of the Times - Archetypes are immense latent power, the archaic blueprints only one holographic domain removed from the undifferentiated source field. These ancient "gods and goddesses" are fountains of inspiration that characterize the emergence of forms and forces, including healing potential.
We can take a transdisciplinary approach to understanding godforms as symbols and powerful dynamics in our lives. We can use transpersonal techniques to take up conscious relationships with them, distinguishing ourselves from them, unbinding our identities and actualizing our negentropic potential. The heresy of the past becomes the health of our future.
The collective nature of archetypes is revealed in myth and dreams and our imaginal stream of consciousness. Jung described their energy-charged psychic aspect as systems of readiness for action, images, and emotions. Their magnetic autonomous expressions include our complexes, subpersonalities, shadows, and wisdom figures -- patterns of perception, behavior, motivation, and attitude. They characterize our personal experience as potentials of motivation, action and reaction in challenge, adaptation, and synthesis of emergent aspects of the self as they manifest.
Part II: Holographic Archetypes - Archetypes are the symbols of the transformation of psyche. They help us get moving again after times of illness, stress or stagnation. To predict how you might react to something in the future, look at someone who's reacting to it today. We are not as different from each other as we think. Archetypes help us redefine human identity as a hyperconnective multiplicity in a continuous process of integration (holy union) embedded in a cosmic superhologram of consciousness, polarity, Life, death and renewal. In the mysteries of death and renewal, union with the source is a "death marriage", a return to the womb, and union with God.
All these forms and imagery arise from a cosmic holographic field or frequency domain that contains all of existence in potential. This holographic plenum is the ultimate source of existence, our cradle of being, the matrix of the phenomenal world. This is an entangled level of fundamental information and energy connected to every other thing imaginable, the ultimate superholographic blueprint of the world for all time, past and future. This is the wellspring of the Holographic Gods, of our being and consciousness -- the only living reality we know.
KEYWORDS: zeitgeist, paradigm, hologaphic universe, quantum physics, consciousness, transdisciplinary method, holographic brain, metaphor, complex, subpersonalities, shadow, dreams, transformation, memory, quantum holography, individuation, myth, archetype, dream, zero point, information, archetypal psychology, superhologram, godform, epistemology, DNA
Part I: Spirit of the Times - Archetypes are immense latent power, the archaic blueprints only one holographic domain removed from the undifferentiated source field. These ancient "gods and goddesses" are fountains of inspiration that characterize the emergence of forms and forces, including healing potential.
We can take a transdisciplinary approach to understanding godforms as symbols and powerful dynamics in our lives. We can use transpersonal techniques to take up conscious relationships with them, distinguishing ourselves from them, unbinding our identities and actualizing our negentropic potential. The heresy of the past becomes the health of our future.
The collective nature of archetypes is revealed in myth and dreams and our imaginal stream of consciousness. Jung described their energy-charged psychic aspect as systems of readiness for action, images, and emotions. Their magnetic autonomous expressions include our complexes, subpersonalities, shadows, and wisdom figures -- patterns of perception, behavior, motivation, and attitude. They characterize our personal experience as potentials of motivation, action and reaction in challenge, adaptation, and synthesis of emergent aspects of the self as they manifest.
Part II: Holographic Archetypes - Archetypes are the symbols of the transformation of psyche. They help us get moving again after times of illness, stress or stagnation. To predict how you might react to something in the future, look at someone who's reacting to it today. We are not as different from each other as we think. Archetypes help us redefine human identity as a hyperconnective multiplicity in a continuous process of integration (holy union) embedded in a cosmic superhologram of consciousness, polarity, Life, death and renewal. In the mysteries of death and renewal, union with the source is a "death marriage", a return to the womb, and union with God.
All these forms and imagery arise from a cosmic holographic field or frequency domain that contains all of existence in potential. This holographic plenum is the ultimate source of existence, our cradle of being, the matrix of the phenomenal world. This is an entangled level of fundamental information and energy connected to every other thing imaginable, the ultimate superholographic blueprint of the world for all time, past and future. This is the wellspring of the Holographic Gods, of our being and consciousness -- the only living reality we know.
KEYWORDS: zeitgeist, paradigm, hologaphic universe, quantum physics, consciousness, transdisciplinary method, holographic brain, metaphor, complex, subpersonalities, shadow, dreams, transformation, memory, quantum holography, individuation, myth, archetype, dream, zero point, information, archetypal psychology, superhologram, godform, epistemology, DNA
“It would be most satisfactory ... if physics and psyche could be seen as complementary aspects of the same reality.” --Wolfgang Pauli, 1945 Nobel Prize in Physics
“It isn’t that the world of appearances is wrong; it isn’t that there aren’t objects out there, at one level of reality. It’s that if you penetrate through and look at the universe with a holographic system, you arrive at a different view, a different reality. And that other reality can explain things that have hitherto remained inexplicable scientifically: paranormal phenomena, synchronicities, the apparently meaningful coincidence of events.”
– Karl Pribram, Psychology Today
PART I: The Spirit of the Times
“It isn’t that the world of appearances is wrong; it isn’t that there aren’t objects out there, at one level of reality. It’s that if you penetrate through and look at the universe with a holographic system, you arrive at a different view, a different reality. And that other reality can explain things that have hitherto remained inexplicable scientifically: paranormal phenomena, synchronicities, the apparently meaningful coincidence of events.”
– Karl Pribram, Psychology Today
PART I: The Spirit of the Times
"On the luminous continuity of existence which has no origin nor ever died, humans project all images of life and death, terror and joy, demons and gods...these images become their reality and we submit without thinking to their dance." --Tibetan Book of the Dead
Hegel writes: “Universal History is the exhibition of Geist in the process of working out the knowledge of that which it is potentially.”xxxiii Nevertheless, Geist cannot be understood as radically transcendent, apart from the world. Instead, Geist emptied itself into Creation, and then undertook the immense journey required to attain absolute self-consciousness and self-identity. --Zimmerman, The Singularity
For most of human history we had no idea how the world or ourselves worked. Most pre-scientific interpretations of universal forces involved spiritual or religious entities -- evil, elemental or ancestral spirits, or gods and goddesses that manipulated reality for their own mysterious ends. Like pregnant ghosts in the machine, they mediate the flow between virtual energy and manifest reality. Myth originates beyond our sphere of awareness, but not beyond that of psyche.
Human decision-making shows the brain is several seconds ahead of our conscious awareness. Unconscious circuits govern much of what we do, putting many activities on autopilot. Some of these choices are due to our habits, memories, instincts and our biological hardwiring, such as the panic button of the amygdala. We don' t have access to how our brain formulates ideas, much less emotions. We cannot know the unconscious directly, so mythic material, personal or collective, is the most radical, most immediate opening to the hidden world. It is the symbolic expression of the soul.
We change with every new experience. We only become aware of the holistic patterns after they pass through archetypal filters of informational content, giving us symbols, images, concepts and labels. Myth and somatic states are the deepest levels which we are permitted to access. Myth plays through our symptoms and complexes. We know that the unconscious is unfathomably vast, but this raises the question, are you in control of your unconscious or is it in control of you?
The gods found, ground, establish, and substantiate reality. The return to primordial origins is fundamental to all mythologies -- expressing a spontaneous regression to the ground that pierces through the world of appearances to 'reality', to immediacy. We experience our own origins through a kind of identity, through countless beings before and after oneself as the germ of infinity.
Our journey re-unfolds those same images which stream out of the ground, out of the abyss. In this way we are "grounding" ourselves. When we dive down to our own foundations we find the world of our common divine origin. Ceremony translates the mythological value into an act. The world of the ancestors is a subterranean storehouse of everything that grows and comes to birth.
We like to think we have outgrown the religious or spiritual superstitions of by-gone eras, but the fact remains that we still couch our interpretations of cosmic forces in theoretical or metaphorical terms. Alchemy informed the Renaissance search for the hidden knowledge of the unity of matter and creation. We can sweep away false assumptions and still retain our metaphorical relationships. The confluence of non-physical psyche and body forms our experience of reality. It is analogous to wave-particle duality.
The activity of universal energies, primal awareness and negentropic factors within us present new opportunities for healing our pathologies and rejuvenation in the human body. Carl Jung proposed a convenient hypothesis for the unknown. Complex psychic phenomena share dynamic core elements. The "collective unconscious" is a vast information store containing the entire religious, spiritual and mythological experiences of humanity.
According to Jung, these inherited ancient archetypes exist deep with the human psyche and heavily influence our psychophysical being. We access the noumenal via archetypal phenomena. We cannot know the divinities directly. We can only appropriate those images in which the numinous energies transcendent to consciousness have invested themselves. We must read through the image to find the energies driving it.
In Jung's allegedly phenomenological model we find a repertoire of constructs or categories that may or may not relate -- archetypes, individuation, the "Self", psychological transformation. There is disention among professional therapists about the relevancy or accuracy of such notions, though they have proven themselves invaluable for grasping and experiencing aspects of the unconscious. Models are theories which help us conceptualize certain realities until we have a better way of doing so. Certainly "reading the recipe" is not the same as "tasting the dish."
Archetypes are transubjective psychic systems -- emergent representations of emotions as images. Most of our responses are precipitated unconsciously. If we know the patterns, we can recognize their dynamic emergence in self, others and world. They arouse passion, not just inform the intellect. We know what we know because of images. Our embodied experience of reality is both "inner" and "outer", corporeal and psychic. Psyche is now likened to a dynamic field of energy.
The emotional image is an emergent psychological reality patterned by archetypes. If we know the patterns, we can recognize their dynamic emergence in self, others and world. Archetypes as constructs are difficult to explore or support in a reductive empirical view, as psyche is more than mind or a brain state. It is untestable.
Jung himself admitted the concept of the archetypes as embodiment and sentience could be revisioned and reformulated at any point. But neurobiology cannot explain emotional imagery. Psychology is about experience and meaning, not just brain states. Personal reality is a confluence of subjective and objective reality.
Worldview
The zeitgeist of an era is its worldview -- interwoven foundational or archetypal ideas. Our worldview is still mythic (representing man's original psychological experience) and controls and shapes unconscious instinct. Zeitgeist is German for 'time-spirit. The very notion of zeitgeist itself is archetypal -- a living principle -- the Spirit of the Times, the dominant influence of a particular period. The zeitgeist "god" emerges in time, establishing the current of that Age.
Quantum theory is the cornerstone of every natural science from physics, chemistry, biology and cosmology. It explains how the universe came into existence. Quantum field theory applies to both micro and macro size objects and accurately describes all of the energy and matter interactions in the universe. It also tells us that even our empirical view of reality is necessarily highly personal. It is our particular covert and overt relationships and experiences with archetypes that characterize us as unique.
Science is the zeitgeist of the 21st Century -- a confluence of quantum physics, cosmology, biology, chaos theory, and self-organizing systems.. A theory of information underlies classical and quantum physics as a model of how reality works. Information is as fundamental to physics as energy and matter.
A holographic concept of reality (Quantum Holography, QH) is rooted in quantum Information physics. We holistically quantify and process information about the world around us. The source field acts like the reference beam that illuminates holograms. Living organisms) exhibit quantum coherence and also carry information non-locally.
John Gowan, Jr. says, "Life is a molecular conservation domain of information, and life is the most creative force in the Universe. The two phenomena are connected; life is creative precisely because it has learned how to conserve information through its genetic system (via heritable genes), multiply information through reproduction, diversify information through sexual differentiation and dispersal, and evolve information through the negentropic process of natural selection."
"Humans, in turn, are the most creative of life forms because they represent a further iteration of the biological fractal: humans are creative because they have learned to use abstract, symbolic information in the same way that life uses molecular information through the genetic system of DNA. Humans conserve information through the structure of language and memory; they make this information concrete or manifest through the symbology of an alphabet (or pictograms) and writing, they reproduce this information through printing and electronic technologies; they disseminate and diversify this information through many cultures; and they evolve this information through the empirical selective process of science."
Memory is encoded as an interference pattern of quantum emissions from any material entity that carries information non-locally about the event history, including the entire space-time history of living organisms. Edgar Mitchell suggests that the primary means for accessing nonlocal transcendent information is via the process of resonance.
Information is simply what is contained in patterns of matter or energy. The meaning that is derived from these patterns is developed in the mind of the percipient based on prior experience (e.g. knowledge and memory). In other words, all events are subject to interpretation and that in turn is based on the prior experiences and beliefs of the perceiver. The more knowledge and experience we gain the more likely we are to interpret an event closer to actual reality.
Quantum Holography (QH) suggests the whole of creation learns, self-corrects, and evolves as a self-organizing inter-connected holistic system. Non-local quantum correlations exhibit the capacity to admit and absorb information at all scale sizes, guiding emergent processes with built in storage and retrieval mechanisms for vast quantities of information. The non-local quantum correlations observed in particles, and the non-local QH associated with molecular and larger scale objects provides information at all scale sizes to guide emergent processes.
All matter absorbs and reemits photons (quanta of energy) from and into the source field. Non-local quantum correlation between entangled quantum particles are the root cause of the phenomenon experienced as perception (through a form of resonance) in more complex matter. QH appears to be the mechanism of the non-local carrier of information for molecular and larger scale matter through the source field.
The base information-state of the universe is Zero Point, the virtual vacuum, beyond time and space. This source or Zero Point Field is the blueprint of existence. Ultimately, we can trace back everything to a collection of electric charges in continuous contact with this endless sea of energy. The field explains the instantaneous, ‘ghostlike’ transfer of information between entangled quantum particles. .Our interaction with this source field determines our past, present and emergent future, patterned by dynamic archetypal processes.
Ground Zero
The Zero-Point Energy (ZPE) field as electromagnetic quantum fluctuations represents an almost unlimited, ubiquitous energy source that permeates and sustains all matter and exists everywhere (even the vacuum of outer space). The Heisenberg uncertainty principle unambiguously demands that short-lived virtual photons pop in and out of existence (along with positron-electron pairs).
Mass and energy have been superseded in primacy for describing how nature works: information is the fundamental entity underlying all of physical reality -- information > laws of physics > matter. Theories of computation include all physical transformations. Formal statements of conservation laws are unified with the stronger operational ones, expressing the principles of testability and of the computability of nature (methodological and metaphysical respectively) as laws of physics. Such laws (i.e., 2nd Law of Thermodynamics) are emergent allowing exact statements.
Known physical laws, relativity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics, are all laws about information, especially limits on the speed, quantity, and quality of information transfer. Relativity limits speed; quantum mechanics limits quantity. The wave function of a system of quantum particles encapsulates all that is known about the system; it is essentially an information field. We aren't sure if the fundamental information is embedded in space-time or if information creates space-time itself.
A similar fundamental but more qualitative process follows cosmic laws at the personal level in individuation, the individual transformative process of coming to wholeness at a conscious level. If our minds are integral parts of the universe and information is fundamental, then consciousness is fundamental. A metaphorical correlation of imagery from science and depth psychology yields fruitful contemplation. Understanding the multiscale nature of life and consciousness requires more than physical science.
Dynamic archetypal patterns emerge from the timeless primordial field that is the ultimate source of all force and form.
Form is more than the result of the properties of matter; it is entangled with consciousness, symbols and imagery. The field is more than a mass of shimmering energy in the background of our existence. Our separate existence is replaced by this all-encompassing connection. In such a model, we influence our ancestors as much as they influence us.
All information is available in the Zero Point Field. Artists are interpreters and translators rather than creators. Their talent is not a miracle, but tuning into the field, whether in creativity, dreams, or process work. When the field tunes into us, we experience synchronicity as a resonance of inner and outer meaning.
Laszlo called the Zero Point Field an information carrier. "This quantum vacuum is the origin of mind and matter – a blueprint of the universe. Even our own memories are not stored in our brains, but are stockpiled like holographic information in the field. Our brains are mainly receivers and processors of this information. When they resonate with certain frequencies they gain access to specific information."
In the field there is no difference between a memory and a new experience. The brain retrieves ‘old’ and ‘new’ information the same way. Psyche is seamlessly interrelated with Cosmos. Jung's notion of archetypes and the archetypal nature of cosmos are the primordial perceptual elements of this process of infinite self-transformation. Feedback, turbulence and emergence harness chaos.
Fractals
Like archetypes, fractals are dynamic images that characterize natural phenomena -- self-similar patterns on different dimensional scales. In this sense, the hologram is a lower dimensional field of a fractal image - infinitely embedded structure. Holograms have many interesting properties related to their fractal structure. Corresponding symbols and imagery are the fractal expressions of archetypes. So we can think of archetypes as higher-dimensional fractals.
Fractals signify infinite compression. Their inner structure has the same pattern as their outer structure. Fractality describes the geometry of waves of energy or charge. Fractals manifest as wave patterns that evolve ad infinitum. In mathematics, a self-similar object is exactly or approximately similar to a part of itself (i.e. the whole has the same shape as one or more of the parts). Really, a fractal is nothing more than an algorithmic Mobius-like transformation of the coordinates of space.
Soljacic, et al suggest self-similarity and fractals are driven by soliton dynamics. The most deconstructed archetypal forms are vortexes, toroids, solitons, and singularities. A soliton is a self-reinforcing solitary wave (a wave packet or pulse) that maintains its shape while it travels at constant speed. Our chromosome continuum acts like a dynamical holographic grating, which displays or transduces weak laser light and solitonic electro-acoustic fields.
Solitons
DNA can be viewed as a liquid crystal gel-like state that acts on incoming light in the manner of a solitonic lattice. A soliton is an ultra stable wave train that arises in the context of non-linear wave oscillation. The DNA reading process can be modelled as a complex mechanical oscillator capable of producing solitonic wave transmissions. DNA, modelled as a kind of rotary pendulum can be simulated as a chain of non-linear oscillators. Complex dynamic patterns arise when taking into account the non-linear covalent connections between nucleotides.
The same researchers suspect the ability of chromosomes to transform their own genetic-sign laser radiations into broadband genetic-sign radio waves. The polarizations of chromosome laser photons are connected nonlocally and coherently to polarizations of radio waves. Thus, we have an explicit physical analogue for the traditional mystical apprehension of inner Light and the Audible Life Stream.
This is the main information channel of DNA, the same for both photons and radio waves. Superposed coherent waves of different types in the cells interact to form diffraction patterns, firstly in the acoustic domain, secondly in the electromagnetic domain -- a quantum hologram -- a translation proccess between acoustical and optical holograms. (Miller, Quantum Bioholography)
Solitons are caused by a cancellation of nonlinear and dispersive effects in the medium. The term "dispersive effects" refers to a property of certain systems where the speed of the waves varies according to frequency. Fractals may emerge from spatial and temporal solitons. Fractals are generated by the dynamics of solitons that undergo abrupt changes along their propagation paths; this method of fractal generation is universal.
Nonlinear systems that support solitons can often, (under proper conditions,) give rise to self-similarity and fractals on successively smaller scales. Such fractals can be observed in most soliton-supporting systems in nature. Solitons are all exactly self-similar, and deep-saturation solitons are all approximately self-similar. Large deviations of the pulse from the soliton existence curve will lead to the appearance of fractal structures driven by soliton dynamics (Soljacic).
Morphogenesis
Essence precedes existence. Consciousness couples with physicality. In this morphogenesis, we see life reflected through the meaningful depths of these forms. They cannot exist in pure, imaginal, or manifest forms in the world without confounding us. In a holographic model, the source field corresponds to the laser source, archetypes correspond to the objects recorded, and the matrix of existence corresponds to the photographic film.
Our notions of all aspects of reality require updating to keep pace with scientific discoveries. Such models or theories also function as metaphors to help us comprehend more accurately the nature of the incorporeal yet undeniably real, including holism and complexity. Fractals and chaos theory have contributed to our understanding of deeper reality. Fractals share holographic properties.
The holographic concept of reality is more than a metaphor. The universe is a dynamic superhologram and we each are indissolubly embedded within it. We are organized together and inextricably connected at the core. The center of this mandala is primordial emptiness (vacuum fluctuation) which is the mother of all force and form. Jung called it the Pleroma.
Spacetime, Energy, Matter and Light are the components of creation. The finest component is a coherent organization of spacetime structure. Matter and mind are the geometric correlates of space and time. Quantum criticality implies fractality. One dynamic process welds the virtual to the physical. Mind and consciousness have a non-local, non-linear holographic nature. Mass hologram production includes a chain of processes that is a robust system of growth.
The universal holographic field couples waves that cross-talk noise in multiplexed fractal forms. Perceptual holograms are image fractal aggregates -- animated self-similar harmonic fractal images. The aggregates are simulated as fractal patterns in the mind and imagination as well as at the physical level. Matter extends itself into space creating form. Existence is a negentropic scalar pump. Manifestation pumps its essence from the scalar potential of the vacuum into the full spectrum of the electromagnetic domain.
Pure, dimensionless or manifest information itself is a holomorphic field. Information processing is the conversion of latent (zero-dimension) implicit information into manifest information -- holographic representation. Information processing occurs through holographic projection and encoding. Thus, archetypes are holomorphic fields that manifest pure information through some n-dimensional holographic “cascade”.
At the center of everything virtual ensembles cyclically arise from and disaggregate back into the physical vacuum. A potential event arises from the physical vacuum as a virtual ensemble. That potential somehow comes into relationship with another potential and hooks up, however briefly, in that timeless, insubstantial, holographic realm. Virtual ensembles contact other virtual ensembles creating what science calls the qubit, quantum bit, or sub-quark.
So we now have fractal geometries, punctuated equilibrium, power laws, and quantum thresholds. These distributions, the distance between, the space in between electron orbitals are pure Fibonacci numbers. The configuration of fractals absolutely complies with Fibonacci numbers from the atomic to cosmological scales.
Mass is the product of underlying gravitational field effect interactions that make up nuclear particles. This tells us that mass is a product. Absolutely everything is information, organizing and creating the universe we live in. Fractal scaling is an implicit representation of information content.
Life appears to be rooted in a holographic system of coherence and interference. Order and patterns are the cornerstone of holography. A hologram is a fractal map of a region of regular space. Holographic transformations encode and project fractal differentiation and integration through feedback. Biologist Bruce Lipton supports the hypothesis that fractal mathematics and geometry are at the formative heart of biology and evolution.
Light itself encodes information as electromagnetic waves. This light is transduced from the vacuum by the holographic blueprint of our DNA. The brain and body operate on holographic principles at the quantum, electromagnetic, biophotonic, wave-genetic, molecular, cellular, neural, and systemic levels. Fractal organization controls structures all through the body.
Our superhologram is composed of grids created by a source consciousness. Grid cells may be the structural perceptual apparatus. These grid neurons encode a cognitive representation of 3D space in fractal sampling grids. They derive their name from the fact that connecting the centers of their firing fields gives a triangular grid.
The holographic matrix of the grid neurons resembles the mystic Flower of Life, or Buckminster Fuller's archetypal concept of the isotropic vector matrix - the primal universal pattern. Isotropic means “all the same”, vector means “line of energy”, and matrix means “a pattern of lines of energy”. In this multidimensional matrix the vertexes are everywhere the same and equidistant from one another. This omnitriangulated grid supersedes and is more flexible than the standard XYZ coordinate system. Any 90-degree angle in Fuller's system appears only as a side effect.
Tom Bearden describes how convergent light waves bleed into electrogravity when they meet and cancel out along three different axes (i.e. x, y and z, although not always right angles, of course). Conversely, when electrogravity is converged to cancel out, it bleeds back into light waves (hence the reciprocal relationship between light and electrogmagnetism).
Cosmos & Consciousness
The attempt to explain the nature, origin, and perhaps destiny of the universe is as old as humankind itself and has informed the content of myth, religion, and philosophy. As we extend our notions of the macrocosm and microcosm, our conceptualization of archetypes (aka gods and goddesses) likewise evolves. We resort to the supernatural, the magic of the extreme and the mundane, when comprehension fails.
There is a pre-physical, unobservable domain of potentiality in quantum theory -- countless nonlocally entangled quantum states of different magnitudes. It is the basis of fundamental interconnectedness and wholeness of Reality. We are connected to distant space and time not only by our imaginations but also through a common cosmic heritage.
Cosmic renewal correlates with individual psychic renewal. Jung noted, "Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche."
The structure of the universe is both fractal and holographic. The interaction of multiple fields creates virtual holograms -- the blueprints of form in the wave structure of manifest reality. Holograms conserve certain properties. Fractal geometry is the mathematical expression of a fundamentally holographic universe. When diversity accumulates, a system goes through a phase transition that proliferates forms and form-content relativity at that level. Scale and complexity create 'emergent' phenomenon.
Characteristics or a qualities emerge unexpectedly from a complex system that is stable enough to store information yet evanescent enough to transmit it. Fractal structures are equally complex at each self-similar level of scaling. The variations are infinite but similar. In a holographic structure each part contains the whole. Fractal forms reflect and are reflected by the whole. One form emerges from another. Increasing complexity is a fact of Nature in cosmic evolution.
Energy is the key scientific and numinous concept. Jung equated physical energy with what he called objective psychic energy. The evolution of the cosmos is a dynamic creative process with four stages: stability, stress, crisis and reorganization (solve et coagula). Psyche follows the same pattern. Our insights, revelations, and synchronicities (meaningful coincidences) are holographic processes. Universal principles pattern, structure, and permeate the human psyche and the world of human experience on many levels ("As Above, So Below").
Change comes from the expansion of configurational patterns over time. Jung observed that certain dreams, myths, hallucinations and religious symbols are shared by many people and cultures. Cultural structures and practices are: 1) fractally self-similar; 2) part-whole relations that recur at all scales; 3) fractal self-similarity has implications for character; 4) the model of fractal holography helps us perceive similarities at different scales in seemingly unrelated phenomena.
Our brains learn to edit out many of the frequency patterns, leaving selective subsets of information available to our conscious awareness. Seemingly random phenomena only appear chaotic because we are have filtered out the critical information necessary to discern the true underlying pattern, or order of infinitely higher degree. We believe we are observing chaos without any underlying pattern since we perceive only a fraction of available information. http://www.statpac.org/walonick/reality.htm
Polarity, Pattern, Process
Paradigms embody scientific knowledge in a conceptual system and experimental methodology for understanding and investigating our experience. Like a living organism, a paradigm maintains itself by feeding on data that it can digest and propagating itself through time. If the paradigm is exposed to anomalous data that it cannot digest, however, it begins to be stressed and pushed away from its former state of stability. If the anomalous data persist, a crisis results in a reorganization of the structures that characterized the very identity of the paradigm. http://www.integralscience.org/cosmic.html
The alchemists called the animated matter in the macrocosm the world soul -- the interpenetration of psyche and matter. Jung found the holistic order of psyche and matter mirrored in the alchemical notion of the unus mundus and synchronicity -- the harmony or disharmony surrounding the individual. Synchronistic events in the inner world behave as if outside and the outer world behaves as if inside. Archetypes are the elements of such primordial self-organizing patterning potential.
So, the cosmos (as well as culture and psyche) is
Vacuum fluctuations (connected to everything and everywhere) define the uncertainty principle. Reducing its energy density, cosmos sacrifices its unity in the creation of forms. These limited self-interactions are the basis for the stability of distinct forms. Complexity arises from self-organization. Stabilized particles bind together into more complex forms and novel composite forms.
The first emergence is the universe. At the point of emergence a complex system has an inconceivably vast array of possible configurations. Through synergistic association of elementary entities, composite beings emerge with their own unique identities. Fractal models or holographic models don't explain emergence.
Fractal geometry maps reality in a numerical fashion as it exists in the micro and macro realms. They show that simple iteration appears to liberate the hidden complexity as creative potential. The discovery of chaos theory [sic] showed an *underlying order,* a kind of memory operating in non-linear, evolving systems. Everything from stars to our genes manifest expressions of complexity rising over the course of cosmic time.
Obviously, the cosmos, at least locally, has produced complex and highly organized systems. Life, mind, consciousness, and healing may be emergent properties, as the the emergence of dynamic structure. Neither scale nor complexity are a fingerprint of design. Chaos becomes pattern. To understand is to perceive pattern. Incarnations of nature, archetypes are primal patterns that mold nature, energy and matter, including that of ourselves.
Fractal geometry illustrates that shapes have self-similarity at descending scales. In other words, the form, the *information,* is enfolded--already present in the depths of the cosmos as nonlinear internal feedback. Expansion of the Universe generates *information.* But for information to occur, a spontaneous, self-organizing order has to emerge from out of chaos. Such systems are always likely to give rise to greater complexity. The edge of chaos represents the ideal balance between stability and propensity to explore change. Beauty is a harmony of contrasts.
Because of its very nature a chaotic system cannot be decomposed. If consciousness is pure information it is not limited to physical form. Its patterning may emerge from chaotic dynamics operating at the quantum level, where the "no-thing" of pure information becomes a structured "some-thing," through intentionality coupled with chaotic determinism (self-organized emergent order). The undecomposable level of chaotic consciousness is experienced as the pure, unconditioned imprint of the whole.
Fractals are one of the keys to life, reflecting the multidimensional nature of consciousness. Digital mapping is broadcast within the electromagnetic spectrum and throughout eternity. The wholeness of each fractal level contains many probabilities as superpositions. Countless quantum states of different magnitudes impinge into 3D forms. Apply this to holography and we may have something approaching reality.
The holographic "blueprint" manifests the outward appearance from different probabilities. A complete gradient of contexts from the microscopic to the macroscopic can be kindled or regenerated from a virtual-state holographic matrix which contains all the states and probabilities. Our perceptions manifest fractal organization from the virtuality of the potential gradient spectrum. http://www.fractal.org/Bewustzijns-Besturings-Model/Source-of-Fractals.htm
In a radically holistic, holographic universe, even time and space can no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, including time and three-dimensional space. "Knowing" is a field connection. Fractal distribution of galaxies may be interpreted as a signature of holography ("fractal holography'').
The human body is not an object in space, but seamlessly welded to the cosmic fabric of reality. We are not merely a phenomenal body of flesh, but one of awareness, of consciousness, a living interface of inner and outer field phenomena. The brain is not confined to our skull, but permeates our whole being through the intracellular matrix and sensory system, as well as the strong EM fields generated by the beating heart. The multidimensional nature of consciousness is a holographic energy expression of a non-spacetime condition.
Archetypes are rooted in or emerge from the holographic source field as attractors that govern their evolution over time, or rather a set of physical properties toward which a system tends to evolve. Just as the attractor for life is the efficient liberation of bound energy, the attractor for consciousness is the liberation of bound psychic energy, the energy that is contained in the unconscious, both collectively and individually.
The archetype's evolution through the set of possible physical states is nonperiodic (chaotic). Chaotic systems manifest as self-similar fractal or reiterative structures that repeat at all levels of observation. Its set of states defines a fractal set. Patterns repeat at all scales. Organization is present within the randomness but its future state remains unpredictable.
Holograms contain many dimensions of “compressed” information in a subtle network of interacting frequencies. Interference patterns of waves can be visualized interacting like ripples on a pond. At the quantum level they create matter and energy as we perceive them as lifelike 3-dimenional effects. Consciousness and matter share the same essence, differing by degrees of subtlety or density.
The essence of the transformative process is revealed in the fractal nature of imagery and symbols--i.e. their ability to encode, enfold, or compress the informational content of the whole. Strange attractors condition and govern the transformative process through the complexity of information in dynamic flow. Emergent consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of the brain. Rather it is the transformational process of non-manifest, undifferentiated consciousness emerging into manifestation.
All potential information about the universe is holographically encoded in the spectrum of frequency patterns constantly bombarding us. The infinite set of states never settles into equilibrium, periodicity, or resonance. Transpersonal experience creates a new interpretation, or perspective on reality. Systems arise from positive feedback and amplification. Thus, archetypes introduce erratic behavior that leads to the emergence of new situations, including creative insight.
"In a letter to P.W. Martin (20 August 1945), the founder of the International Study Center of Applied Psychology in Oxted, England, C.G. Jung confirmed the centrality of numinous experience in his life and work: “It always seemed to me as if the real milestones were certain symbolic events characterized by a strong emotional tone. You are quite right, the main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character” (Jung 1973, 1: 377). . . The individuation process, as proposed by Jung and his followers, typically includes experiences of a numinous nature." (Stein)
Individuation is a deeply symbolic "Journey" of analysis and synthesis, making multifaceted psyche conscious from its symptomology -- ego's unconscious identifications and archetypal power and influence. First comes detachment and separation of archetypal elements. We confront the awesome and numinous "Other" with astonishment and wonder, deepening the process until we gaze into the blank face of cosmic Void.
The Kabbalists introduced a blessing to be recited before all positive commandments: “Behold I perform this commandment for the sake of the yihud [unity] between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the Shekhinah”. Every
human act serves to advance the communion within the divine. The mysteries connect the span of life with the symbol of death and renewal. The central symbol of the“process” is the creation of the world, its destruction and restoration.
But, this path doesn't end like the mystics in worshipful union with the Divine as either Void or Plenum, but in the unique stabilized wholeness described by alchemists as the ultima materia or the Philosopher's Stone -- a sort of Unified Field Theory of the psyche. Rather than being about "God", it is about human potential. Each life is specific and special – at once unique and reflective of myriad lives within lives. In a holographic concept of reality the part is not only contained within the whole, the whole is contained in every part, only in lower resolution.
The wave-particle nature of light goes to the heart of quantum mechanics and in much the same way the dual incorporeal essence and manifest aspects of archetypes describe the magnetic dynamics which form and define the psychic field. From the cosmos -- the dynamic matrix, the “mind stuff” – infinitesimal “particles” and human beings emerge, all capable of intercommunicating, not only locally but also, instantaneously, beyond space/time.
We are increasingly substituting organic models for mechanical ones, and shifting from structure-orientated to process-orientated thinking. Wholeness is neither a dogma nor ideology but a living, dynamic, all-pervasive principle. We can view the world in terms of universal flux of events and processes. Differentiation is the essence of creation.
Classical science is about taking reality apart, and then examining those parts, Systemic science is about experiencing the resultant Whole of parts relating together. Examination of a single part does not reveal the wholeness of parts. The truth lies in the relationships between parts -- not what things are called but what things are doing together.
According to Jung (1916): "What you should never forget is that the Pleroma has no qualities. We are the ones who create these qualities through our thinking. When you strive after differentiation or sameness or after other qualities, you strive after thoughts which flow to you from the Pleroma, namely thoughts about the non-existent qualities of the Pleroma. While you run after these thoughts, you fall again into the Pleroma and arrive at differentiation and sameness at the same time. Not your thinking but your being is differentiation. That is why you should not strive after differentiation and discrimination as you know these, but strive after your true nature. If you would thus truly strive, you would not need to know anything about the Pleroma and its qualities, and still you would arrive at the true goal because of your nature. However, because thinking alienates us from our true nature, therefore I must teach knowledge to you, with which you can keep your thinking under control." (Hoeller)
As expressed by Robert Newman, "The source of our life and potential is our fundamental and transpersonal awareness; that formless force is our life-itself. Our primary awareness is our transpersonal nature. There's a longing for awareness because we're already touching it. The tendency to awaken is based on our inherent capacity for recall in awareness-itself. The past has no power to stop you from being present now, where the magic of life is; but the hyperactive mind/emotion is only still in short gaps, natural breaks, before we lose awarenress of space, whether we do religious practice or not. Living in the present moment is unlimited life. Presence is a whole body phenomenon that transcends the body. Presence becomes a globalized sense of aware aliveness."
Cosmic & Psychic Dynamics
The Cosmos has many faces, including ours among them. We are all taking part in a deep mythological, archetypal, and cosmic drama of death and rebirth at the individual and global level. The creative process unfolds in each of us as it does in the world and universe. We are ourselves part of the canvas. We are characters in the story, driven by a multitude of personified cosmic characters.
"The hero or genius arouses our admiration for essentially the same reasons as a work of art. Heroism, for example, is beautiful because it is the result of integrating a multiplicity of contrasting experiences (strength and frustration, joy and tragedy, rebellion and resignation, life and death) into the unity of a single person’s story. Genius is beautiful because it requires the integration into a creative unity of a multiplicity of ideas, feelings and experiences that could lead to madness in a narrower personality. Because of the precarious nature of heroism and genius we esteem them more than the everyday modes of human existence. Similarly we might value a universe in which contradictions are constantly being unified into an aesthetic whole: entropy and evolution; order and chaos; novelty and continuity; permanence and perishing." <http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=1948&C=1815>
From the dawn of time, mankind has instinctively taken on and embodied archetypal forms (meta-forms) and patterns of behavior, both unconsciously and with spiritual purpose. This invisible groundplan molds both individual and collective psychic behavior. Psychic patterns, shared across cultures in countless energetic forms are buried deep in the manifold essence of our collective unconscious.
Carl Jung had a concept of the Collective Unconscious: “In addition to our immediate personal consciousness, (which we believe to be the only empirical psyche), there exists a second “inherited” psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.”
Ancestor worship is probably the oldest recognition of spiritual beings. Ancestors are discarnate helping spirits. Primitive conceptions of our state after death originated in this shamanic belief. Primordial belief in souls and spirits originates in energies and images that come from the unconscious. It is also the root of superstition. We must make a distinction between fantasy and imagination. Imagination happens to us; it is an autonomous force or energy, welling up from the depths as the water of life. We yearn for the Mystery of existence, our concealed wellspring -- the source of life.
Dr. Stanley Krippner says, "Shamans were the first dreamworkers...if someone could imagine or dream an event, that action was considered to be, in some sense, real." Souls correspond to the autonomous complexes of the personal unconscious (subconscious). Spirits are those of the collective unconscious, the inner universe. There are definite enduring forms in the unconscious psyche. Much depends on the interconnective density of the dominant factors of basic mental capabilities. Deeply hidden wisdom is expressed in the collective spirit that also pulsates within the individual soul. Such knowledge is accumulated over countless generations.
Archetypes bring spirit down to earth. Images lead into the realm of soul, which joins those of matter and spirit. They are the myriad forms of Nature's "to be". Highly symbolic forms, gods and goddesses arose from our elemental depths, altered states of consciousness and participatory wisdom to inform collective culture. The soul expresses itself in the symbolic language of dreams and esoteric doctrines which convey their messages. Some contend the archetypes emerge from cultures, not the unconscious. Campbell (1968, 1974) argued that most archetypal forms originated in Sumer and Akkad around 2500 B.C.
Culture consists of three layers: artifacts, values and beliefs, and underlying assumptions -- shared learning, experience, and problem-solving. Participation mystique links unconscious individual egos to larger and smaller groups. It provides the attractor that makes an individual want to be part of a given organization. It is the conduit for expressing collective sentiments by each person in the group. It is the nature of our subconscious to objectify inner as well as outer experiences. Multiple archetypes are expressed in each individual as behavioral patterns.
Culture normalizes a shared set of values. Values become underlying assumptions. Archetypes are the template of individuals and organizations, providing their psychic energy. This foundation is why our current institutions exhibit illness. The organizational shadow includes what has been repressed because the organization does not allow it by its rules, procedures or values. The buildings are sick and the organizations, such as banking, government, and academia are sick. (Levy)
The collective unconscious plays out through the existence of similar symbols and mythological figures in different civilizations – cross-cultural analogies. Stein contends that a symbol, "is different from a metaphor in that what it is communicating or presenting to consciousness is utterly untranslatable into any other terms, at least for the time being. Symbols are opaque and often bring thinking to a standstill. Metaphors are transparent and must be so if they are to do their job. They help us think in creative ways 'outside the box'."
For Jung, symbols were always grounded in an unconscious archetype giving it energy. "A symbol presents an unconscious content making its way toward consciousness. . .The symbol is alive only so long as it is pregnant with meaning.. . . symbols play a dynamic role in potentially moving the psyche forward in a development toward greater wholeness, rather than holding it back." (Stein)
Archetypal symbols are embedded in our collective subconscious, and, when exposed to them, we demonstrate awe, natural attraction and fascination. Feeling is contained within the psychic structures, but also creates them. Occult symbols can therefore exert a great impact on people, even if many individuals were never personally introduced to the symbol’s esoteric meaning. Staged psychodrama by the hidden hand of powers that be exploits this natural tendency for collective psychological struggle played out as a trance-enhanced multimedia techno opera of supercharged imagery.
Jose Delgado reminds us that, "To behave is to choose one pattern among many. To think we must proceed in some orderly fashion repressing unrelated ideas; to talk we must select a sequence of appropriate words; and to listen we need to extract certain information from background noise. . .We are optically and acoustically assaulted by scientific literature, news media, propaganda, and advertisements. The defense is to inhibit the processing of sensory stimuli. Conscious and unconscious behavioral inhibition should not be considered passive processes but active restraints, like holding the reins of a powerful horse, which prevent the disorderly display of existing energies and potentialities".
Archetypes create self-serving tacit assumptions that lead us to mistake certain beliefs for reality because each is only a relativistic viewpoint. They create immanent phenomenological experiences in existential reality, levels of cognitive awareness, and transcendental abstract speculations. Archetypal shift happens when focus migrates from one archetypal field to another. Each archetypal field contains traces from similar previous encounters. This residue takes the form of thoughts, images, and energy tones.
Jung thought that life altering archetypal experiences may be the origin of consciousness. Supernatural beliefs are a universal part of religions, perhaps because they carry deeper meaning (such as group identity) and are so emotionally satisfying. Our minds are capable of deceiving us into believing anything. When our own lack of critical thinking or abject denial fail, the archetypal Trickster arises from the collective level.
Supernatural beings have powers that are projections of our own power fantasies, such as smiting evil. The original gods represented the creativity of the life force and the vagaries of misfortune along with their feminine partners expressed as partnerships. Very ancient Gods simply gave us a sense of meaning in the existential quest for our own becoming in the fragile diversity of nature.
Archetypes form the immaterial basis of life. They represent our human potential, contained or encoded in clusters of related symbols. Symbols stand for abstract regularities in the world, Hofstadter asserts. Human brains create vast repertoires of these symbols, conferring the “power to represent phenomena of unlimited complexity and thus to twist back and to engulf themselves via a strange loop.”
Consciousness itself occurs when a system with such ability creates a higher-level symbol, a symbol for the ability to create symbols. That symbol is the self. The I. Consciousness. This self-generated symbol of the self operates only on the level of symbols. Mysteries multiply because the symbol is generated by the thing doing the symbolizing. (Siegfried)
Symbols are inevitably imperfect attempts to represent archetypes since they can only express a portion of it. Pure archetypes are essentially content-free. The nature of the exchange between the divine and the ego is like fire - pure, intense, pulsating, even if only for a moment.
Yet even with this model as our guide we should be cautious so we don't fail to understand the most basic issues of the relation of appearance to dynamics. Models remain interpretations of observations and this is particularly so of the metaphysical basis of sacred psychology, quantum theories, and consciousness. We are describing the abstract structure of a set of dynamic units, the 'possibilities' that are the members of that set.
Dynamic units are indivisible in both space and time; potentialities are as real as actualities and can be actualized at any place and time, given adequate mechanisms. Different sorts of dynamic units yield up information in rather different ways. Actualization goes on throughout the fabric of the universe all the time, but what is actual depends on complex issues of divergent and convergent paths.
Archetypes are visual symbols or energetic imprints that exist in our psyches, and appear at multiple levels of organization. The archetypal dimension of reality appears in the form of unfiltered psychic experience -- mythic figures and narratives from various cultures, gods and goddesses, transcendent Platonic Ideas, etc. We might imagine them as structural coding of nested fields.
We might ask if they are actually transcendent to life, or merely help us transcend functional errors by widening our behavioral repertoires in a constantly changing body/world. A good deal of our subconscious effort is devoted to maintaining a mind map of reality updated inside our heads, but there is no reason to assume consciousness arises solely from this dynamic. Idealistic transcendence remains an elusive concept.
Our models remain provisional. Yet, the felt-sense is real. In his Red Book, Jung described the primordial force as overwhelming to the point one no longer recognizes oneself and is consumed by fear of the inescapable. You come to know what a real God is, he tells us.
"Now you'll think up clever truisms, preventive measures, secret escape routes, excuses, potions capable of inducing forgetfulness, but it's all useless. The fire burns right through you. That which guides forces you onto the way. But the way is my own self my own life founded upon myself The God wants my life. He wants to go with me, sit at the table with me, work with me. Above all he wants to be ever-present! But I'm ashamed of my God. I don't want to be divine but reasonable. The divine appears to me as irrational craziness. I hate it as an absurd disturbance of my meaningful human activity. It seems an unbecoming sickness which has stolen into the regular course of my life. Yes, I even find the divine superfluous." (Jung, Red Book)
Archetypes are nested, structural-energetic emergent motifs. Once filled out, they enter consciousness, becoming subject to interpretations and qualities such as structured duality. All of us are the myth-makers and co-creators of the 21st century. Myth has become an important core feature of modern spirituality and self-understanding, and even within the best-practice of genealogy and gnosis.
These unconscious mental phenomena are at the root of our self-reflective consciousness and projected frameworks or worldviews. Archetypes take the form of personified mythological figures, as deities. The shift from spirits within natural forms to supernatural ("above nature") gods and deities signified a new religious paradigm, that of polytheism, or "many gods." The matrix of complex 'archetypal form' generates other forms (symbols and images) by selecting suitable parts.
Like the spirits of earlier religions, the existence of these gods explained many things. Their 'human' characteristics could be kind, ambitious, quarrelsome, jealous, angry, or wise. Some were evil, others were forces for good. They also took an active interest in human affairs, taking care of people in need, and administering a degree of cosmic law and order. Those who behaved badly were punished by the gods, either in their own lifetimes or in the afterlife–which by then had gathered its own rich mythology–while the repentant would be forgiven their misdeeds. (Russell)
Explanations transform the world. These polytheistic patterns persisted in the psyche even with the adaptive shift in spiritual paradigms to monotheistic, atheistic, pantheistic, and scientific worldviews. These paradigms are still colliding, redefining the relationship of the individual and society. But preoccupation with individualism cannot be sought at the expense of collective work. Collective work or work in the service of others (compassion) makes a significant difference to the quality of life for all humanity. Soul is also in the world, as well as our inner realm.
Jung insisted that our individuation is not about becoming "divine" like the transpersonal Gods, but in distinguishing, relating, and freeing ourselves from them in a creative way that constitutes a self-initiatory path -- a life lived with a unique, particularized connection to source, meaning, depth, and soul. He encouraged becoming more fully human. Most of us have experienced the power present in a collective field – moments when a deep well of meaning suddenly opens, expanding awareness.
We yearn for self-awareness, self-knowledge, an objective opinion or appraisal and comprehension of nature and our nature because we need the empirical world as a reflection by which to "see" ourselves. These reflections take numerous typical forms projected from and onto the zero-point ground of being and nonbeing. As godforms, they are ideal; as our personal complexes, less so -- as radically split-off elements, demonic. As the archetypes pattern the individual psyche they are subject to particularized distortions of their pure form. Each archetype has its polar opposite. Our authentic suffering comes from enduring conflicting opposites warring within us.
Holding the tension of the opposites and not succumbing to the resistance and urge to split is essential to bridging the gap between ego-consciousness and the unconscious. If we don't succumb to the urge to identify with one side or the other, the third, completely unexpected image, comes into view -- one that unites the two in a creative new way. When we hold the tension between the psyche and the ego, eventually consciousness expands to accommodate the previously unconscious content.
The transcendent function serves as a bridge between rational thinking and archetypal sensibility. This facilitates a renewed connection between the human psyche and the natural world. What is inside the psyche is projected outwardly, much like a hologram appears in multidimensional form when its wave form is illuminated by a coherent laser beam. Everything interpenetrates everything. When we are living within harmony with the Unified Field, we flow.
PART II: Holographic Archetypes
Holographic Archetypes
Archetypes are holographic parables -- cosmic messages, and highly complex mathematical equations. Both a hologram and an archetype function as a kind of lens that converts a meaningless blur of frequencies (the primary reality) into a coherent image. Our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain. An archetype, like a hologram never really changes -- it just is. However from each of the infinite points of view we have a dynamic ever-changing experience.
Our brains operate as a holographic frequency analyzer, decoding even space and time as constructs of the human brain. Berkovich likens the holographic paradigm to the concept of “Cloud Computing”. Individual brains are not stand-alone computers but collective users getting shared access to portions of the holographic memory of the Universe. (Berkovich)
Holograms encode and decode frequencies from a jeweled net of light. A hologram” according to Seth Riskin of MIT, “represents how the human brain, and light information interact to create the experience of three-dimensional space. Holography represents deeper technological access into light’s capacity as an image and information carrier.”"
Pribram saw the holographic brain as a lens, mathematically converting the frequencies it receives through the senses into our inner world of perceptions. We are holographic "receivers"; our DNA functions as an antenna. Floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency we extract and transmogrify into physical reality but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram. "Objective" reality ceases to exist in an infinitely connected, deconstructed manifold of potentials with certain strong tendencies to formation. Moving beyond our normal ego boundaries we may transcend individual consciousness.
Such "holographic godforms" define our bio-psycho-social roles and ways of being, our aspirations and our deepest frustrations. Each godform typically has physical, emotional, mental and spiritual aspects around which personality 'crystallizes'. We call them 'holographic' because of their primordial, informational, and multidimensional nature. There is a direct relationship between the external realm of matter and the realm of psyche. Everything in reality has to be seen as a metaphor; even the most haphazard events express some deeper underlying symmetry and meaning.
The gist of the holographic theory is that: "Our brains mathematically construct 'concrete' reality by interpreting frequencies from another dimension, a realm of meaningful, patterned primary reality that transcends time and space. The brain is a hologram, interpreting a holographic universe." And that includes the dreaming brain. In dreams we spontaneously construct a parallel reality that may include telepathic dreams, lucid dreams, transpersonal dreams.
Karl Pribram postulates a neural hologram, made by the interaction of waves in the cortex, which in turn is based on a hologram of much shorter wavelengths formed by the wave interactions on the sub-atomic level. Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram. Thus, we have a hologram within a hologram, and the interrelatedness of the two somehow gives rise to the sensory images. There is a more fundamental reality which is an invisible flux that is not comprised of parts, but a holistic inseparable interconnectedness.
Holograms have an astounding capacity for information storage in slightly offset multidimensional "layers". The holographic model has been suggested as a "physics of consciousness". The universe itself may be a giant hologram, quite literally a kind of image or construct created, at least in part, by the human mind. The hologram is an analogy for events in space-time, quantum states, or static entities of some nature. In their emergent manifestation archetypes are self-replicating patterns.
We become quantum entangled and structurally bound to those meaningful patterns within. Transformation is a first-order change of interholographic conversion. Engulfment of our entire entity could be likened to spirit "possession" by an ultramagnetic archetypal attractor. We could also liken the splitting off of a complex to fractal bifurcation - the splitting of a main body into two parts.
Archetypes make us wake up and pay attention to what they are doing. Jung said, "Nothing happens in which you are not entangled in a secret manner; for everything has ordered itself around you and plays your innermost. Nothing in you is hidden to things, no matter how remote, how precious, how secret it is. It inheres in things." He claimed we yearn "to hear of him who was not darkened by the shadow of earth, but illuminated it, who saw the thoughts of all, and whose thoughts no one guessed, who possessed in himself the meaning of all things, and whose meaning no thing could express."
Physicist Fred Alan Wolf offers a quantum mechanical model for the emergence of self awareness from holographically-generated dream images. He claims,
"Self-awareness arises from the ability of a simple memory device, an automaton in the brain, to obtain images of holographically-stored glial cell memories and, most importantly, through a quantum mechanical process, to also obtain images of itself. Each self-image is composed of a quantum-physical superposition of primary glial cell images and an image of the automaton containing those images. These self-reflective images are ordered according to a hierarchy based on increasing levels of self-inquiry conducted during the dreaming process."
This idea is based in part on the work of Nobili and of Albert. Nobili's work shows that ionic wave movement (that is similar in form and structure to quantum waves but different from them in certain essential details) occurs in the glial cells of the brain making it an ideal medium for supporting and producing holographic imagery.
Nobili (1985) proposed that Na+ and K+ transport through glial cells in the form of oscillating currents producing wave patterns that satisfy a Schrödinger Wave equation. Contrary to lightwave holography, Schrödinger wave holography is far more efficient in producing holograms in glial tissue. He also discovered that the close proximity of signal sources and receptors in the cortex was ideal for both production of reference waves and information wave recovery. Complete details for the mechanism for glial imaging/holography are in his paper. Nobili, Renato. "Schrödinger wave holography in brain cortex." Physical Review A Vol. 32, No. 6, p.3618-26. Dec. 1985.
Archetypes are the elements of the soul. They are exemplary forms or prototypes -- an informational code -- the original schema or dynamic patterns that model all things of the same kind. For Plato, they were the primordial forms of the universal mind. We recognize the world within us through their patterns. Being universal, archetypal forms can be found everywhere. They are the essence that sustains life.
We ourselves as living organic systems are very complex holographic entities so we can become resonantly entrained with specific archetypal attractors in the psychic field. Archetypal forms repeat nature's characteristic patterns from the largest to smallest scale. Dynamically, “archetypal” forms are underlying instinctual patterns of behavior which reflect how the unconscious “imagines” reality into being. Psyche, our "larger self", reveals itself in symbolic form through manifestations of the archetypes. They organize experience giving it collective meaning.
Each archetype has its structural parameters. They organize how we experience certain things. Their dreams are our realities. Within the myths a jumbled myriad of possibilities play through the personality seemingly at random. Yet each has its agenda and characteristic mode of appearance. The activation of a mytheme in a life is decoded by noticing its corresponding imagery and effects, in dreams and waking life. Archetypal energies awaken us to live a larger life where we are all healers, warriors, visionaries and teachers -- but many potentials remain latent or formless.
An individual's personal myth or mytheme can be conceived as an activated chaotic attractor, a magnetic vortex. In another phase of life, the focus and narrative could change to other patterns. Sometimes these transitions are fairly smooth, sometimes competitive, other times catastrophic, sweeping the old structure away in an uncontrollable fashion.
Before psychophysical embodiment in the experiential world, archetypes are like "empty sets". As a morphism, each archetype is a structure-preserving mapping of energetic information. Such "zero objects" or identity elements are the "pre-existent" blueprints (entities or components) for ways of being and becoming -- inborn forms of intuition. The Self is the common denominator of all symbolic sets. Archetypes and symbols share the holographic quality that the whole is contained within each part. They are are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper underlying unity that is ultimately holographic and indivisible.
Archetypal images designate patterns, typical basic forms, prefigurative determinants, and the tendency to repeat the same psychic experiences. They conceal the unborn eternal archetype (unconscious nucleus of meaning) while they reveal particularized meaning and form. Such ‘oculi piscium’ (fishes eyes)” are fiery soulsparks of the World-Soul, the light of nature, divine sparks of the spirit, according to Jung.
Specified but incorporeal forms, at the deepest level archetypes are the wave-like counterpart of our corporeality, figuratively and perhaps literally made of pure light and nonbeing. Divine light symbolizes the flow of feeling and of emotional understanding (“emotional intelligence”). The dialectic dialogue between the poles, the physical and the spiritual, is the source of divine light; it is the alchemic “work” (the opus), the psychological "process". This animated matrix is the root of form, as the Heart Sutra says, form is not other than void. Jung suggested in his notion of the nondual 'pleroma' that nothingness is the same as fullness.
Memory is not confined to the brain or mind. Because our entire organism is our psycho-physical structural memory, biography becomes biology. This why Jung suggested, "the gods have become diseases." Repressed shadow conflicts and unlived potential easily become physical problems embedded in deep tissues, often with symbolic overtones. The body mirrors our psychic state.
The living matrix is the molecular system that is the actual biophysical locus of the so-called subconscious, unconscious and intuitive processes. Structure is genetic and acquired memory, including muscle memory of the fundamental polarized dynamic of approach/avoidance. Deep tissue massage eradicates negative muscle memory by reworking the myofascial and connective tissue. Many cultural practices or roles can be seen as de facto ritual abuse in the way they are collectively forced upon us repetitiously, whether they 'fit' or not. Serial abuse creates repressed rage and depression.
Psychodynamic process therapies work on the psychophysical organism in a way analogous to deep tissue massage, destructuring and freeing up libido or psychic energy. What gets 'processed' is the bound energy. When deeply buried memories and experiences are expressed energy begins to flow more freely. Ideokinesis is a general term applied to mental imagery that affects posture and movement.
The body, emotions and thought field are unblocked by changing the attitudes and emotional reactions to memories. It requires engaging and processing through the emotional or right brain, not just the rational left brain mind. Our conscious self remains unaware of what our body knows, even though it is conditioned by it.
New postures arise from many options. Most archetypal imagery addresses the whole body and not just a part. Archetypal imagery can expose the importance of areas that are small or distant from a location of complaint, often unexpectedly. We assess any changes we sense.
Complexes
Feelings that are not dealt with through emotional release become repressed, and what we repress controls us. Chemical responses become structural traits and functional problems. Cellular, genetic and epigenetic memory are arguably even more primordial levels of information encoding through deep time. When we behave out of character, we wonder what got into us. Some personalities are more complex than others. Complexes are deeply significant in our lives.
In psyche and soma, what makes us feel better is deemed "good" while what makes us feel worse is deemed "bad". The catch-22 is that what we think, feel and believe to be good or bad is preconditioned by archetypal interplay and this is one source of ambivalence, confusion, chaos and mood swings. When this process opposes or thwarts rather than nourishes us, we call it a complex. Complexes are organized experiences patterned by the psychic energy of archetypes as they take form.
We all have a team of voices within, that either work for or against us. Something incompatible, unassimilated, and conflicting exists that can be an obstacle or act as a stimulus to greater effort, opening new possibilities. The complexes themselves are essential, healthy components of the psyche -- the generic forms and dynamic structure of the psyche -- unless they have been twisted by fate. The personal unconscious is the realm of the complex and personalized expressions of archetypes.
Unresolved issues carry a high emotional charge. If an 'entity' expresses through mythical or universal transpersonal imagery, it originated in the collective unconscious. If it is contaminated with individual, personalistic material, if it appears as a personalized conflict, then it emerged from the personal unconscious. We are not unified, consistent personalities. The basis of the human psyche seems to be a collective of selves--a multimind in a multiverse. Independent and autonomous, they relate with one another mostly unknown to our outer awareness.
Jung likened a complex to a rhizome representing the content of a neurosis -- a matrix of complexes, of symptoms, and of dreams. Dreams mirror the underground processes of the psyche, the 'roots' of the disease. Murray Stein points out, "this psychic symptom is a metaphor, in that it is borrowing the language of physicality (cancer, illness) and applying it to the psychic domain. This transfer of language from one domain to another is what poets do when they employ metaphors."
"He is in the grip of a complex, and this psychic factor - powerful, autonomous, and unconscious – is symbolized as a cancer. It must be analyzed and made conscious so that the very real suffering caused by the symptom-symbol can be transformed into psychic suffering. Perhaps other psychic resources can thus also be constellated, which will assist in bringing about the free flow of energy (libido) into more life enhancing tasks and goals." http://www.murraystein.com/symbols.html
Personification is a convenient way of relating to inner states or over-protective false ego states. They are sources of internally-generated self talk and internal debate that further influences our thinking, feelings, and behavior. They are mere facets of the whole or core personality, rather than independent of it. It is "bad" if it renders the core personality fearful or helpless, even though the core personality can generally override it. The persona or social mask is a prime example of a dynamic meant to protect the core in public life.
Subpersonalities
What Jung called complexes are more commonly termed subpersonalities, split-off emotional groupings of felt-sense, perspectives, memories, and beliefs. The less integrated we are, the more they influence us. These 'subways of the subconscious' form at different ages, and range from the sexual persona to the sage. Archetypal characters follow an established plot pattern to accomplish predefined goals.
Adaptations turn into distinct subpersonalities. Because we compulsively, reactivly, or unknowingly slip into them, we can be one type of person, then sometimes another. Unintegrated in the adult personality, they can become problematical. Such partial personalities or energy patterns are fragments of archetypes, like exiled gods and goddesses.
Complexes can appear as split-off subpersonalities or personifications that help us cope with certain aspects of life, such as Rebel, Judge, Child, Victim, Trickster, Skeptic, Warrior, Patriot, Parent, Professional, Protector, Controller, Buddy, Boss, Little Professor, Saboteur, Martyr, Outcast, Scapegoat, Partner, Muse, Artist, Hetaira, Fortune-Teller, Gossip, Innocent, Orphan, Adventurer, or Seeker, Hero/Heroine, etc.
Subs can deal with major issues, such as Love, Knowledge, Compassion, Quest, Humor, Discipline, Healing, Immortality, and Enlightenment. They originate in the cultural unconscious, social roles, internal conflicts, fantasy images, repeated trauma or stress. They mature at uneven rates. New complexes can arise in the spiritual crisis of midlife.
When the complex is cleared of the emotional baggage of the personalistic expression, its true, pure, archetypal center shines through. The personal was superimposed over the transpersonal, but that can be changed by raising it into conscious awareness. Then the nucleus or archetypal core shows through.
When the conflict seems unresolvable for consciousness, when its desires are continually thwarted, we often find that it is the contents of the collective psyche that are intractable. If a complex remains only a greater or lesser strange attractor in the deep psyche, if it doesn't swell up with too much personal baggage, then it usually stays positive. It functions as the energy-giving cell from which all psychic life flows. But if it is overcharged it can turn negative, in the form of neurosis or psychosis.
Unlimited by number, each of us has about a dozen of these unconscious pattern sets which have independent conflicting agendas, needs, impulses, desires, principles, eccentricities, and aspirations. They can appear as different genders and even be different personality types, in terms of extroversion-introversion, and characteristic functions like thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition.
Challenges and events that affect one subpersonality can ripple through the others. But we can become deliberately aware of what areas of life tend to be ruled by a subpersonality patterns and consciously examining those contexts, rather than waiting until the subpersonality has already risen to control. They can be healthy or pathological, positive or negative.
Therapies that connect subpersonalities and increase self-awareness include NLP, Psychosynthesis, and Transactional Analysis. We can extend our consciousness through dialoguing with them. Dialogue is a form of imagery. Rather than enemies, they are alternative strategies that function beyond our conscious control. They only become harmful when they control us inflexibly because we over-identify with them. The therapeutic cycle includes acceptance, cooperation, alignment, integration, and synthesis.
Only a certain number of complexes, varying with the individual, can be made conscious. No one can ever fathom the entire contents of the psyche or self. To attempt to do so would be superheroic, an ego error. It is grandiose to consider. The remaining complexes continue to exist as "nodal points" as "nuclear elements," which belong to the eternal matrix of every human psyche. They remain potential and do not express.
The complex is a meaningful feeling-toned group of representations in the unconscious. It is a manifold of symbolism all compulsively relating to the same archetype that distorts our energetic field. When the charge of one (or more) "nodal points" becomes so powerful that it "magnetically" attracts everything to itself, it confronts the ego with an autonomous alien entity.
Unlike the contents of the personal unconscious which seem to "belong" to us, the contents of the collective unconscious seem alien (Not-I), as if they had invaded from outside. The reintegration of a personal complex has the effect of release and often of healing (mental and physical). But the invasion of a complex from the deep collective psyche is a disturbing, even threatening, phenomenon.
The most powerful and ubiquitous autonomous subpersonalities come from a source having nothing to do with our daily life. They have to do with the deepest irrational contents of the psyche--that which has never been conscious before. Jung termed them shadow, anima/animus, and self.
The Shadow
The figure of the Adversary or Antagonist emerged in the myths of many cultures in the earliest times. It signifies a polarized psyche, suspended between the opposites, rather than freely circulating within the whole field. One representation of archetypal shadow and collective evil is The Devil. Jung claimed the Devil comes to all desirous solitaries "with smooth tongue and clear reasoning" knowing "the right word at the right moment", to lure us to his desire.
In alchemical writing, the shadow is the healing power, the antidote to disease. As the epitome of opposition, it is also symbolized by figures whose essence is “the other”. Jung understood a wide range of alchemic symbols and noticed the shadow appears in the shape of strange and threatening animals such as the wolf, snake and dragon.
The shadow is not experienced directly by the ego because it is part of the unconscious, so instead it is projected onto others. It includes our defense mechanisms: acting out, autistic fantasy, denial, devaluation, displacement, dissociation, idealization, intellectualization, isolation, passive aggression, projection, rationalization, reaction formation, repression, somatization, splitting, suppression, and undoing.
Such emergence in the collective or individual psyche signifies the constellation and energetic challenge of a meta-conflict (Good vs. Evil), the outcome of which will remain in doubt until these energies are either subdued or integrated. The solution of the protagonist (ego)-antagonist duality lies in the Observer Self -- an unidentified source of transfinite information that reconciles the opposites.
Toxic chemical and hormonal responses can be triggered by events in the present that remind us of the past. Locked in by fear and pain, we revert to feelings of insecurity, low self esteem, lack of confidence, lack of abundance, lack of joy etc., stuck and replaying old traumas and insults, again and again. This disturbs self-organization and self-regulation at the psychogenic root.
The nervous system governs the range of emotional expression, quality of communication, mobilization, and the ability to regulate bodily and behavioral states. The autonomic nervous system animates affective experience, emotional expression, facial gestures, communication and contingent social behavior.
Jung contends, "Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is." We might say, the less it is embodied in conscious awareness the more likely it is to go "into" or disturb the body, structurally and symptomatically. It is everything we deny and disown in ourselves, and therefore project outwardly and "stuff" inwardly. In part it is our link to more primitive animal instincts, superseded in early childhood by the conscious mind.
Jung saw the imagination as a bridge, over which the Psyche ("God") can cross from unconsciousness into consciousness. In the mythopoetic approach, The Devil is both the Ur-Adversary, and a tremendous source of strength, a nearly inexhaustible source of energy. Battling him gives us strength. Submitting to him completely is ego-death. The Adversary can be represented by death and dark symbols.
Jung referred to distinct images of Dragons in a number of his works. He initially cites it as the arch-enemy of the Hero archetype, drawing mainly from the New Testament and Gnosticism. The mother Dragon threatens to overwhelm the birth of the God, thus the ego must defeat the Dragon before becoming the Hero/heroine. He later views the Tiamat-Marduk myth as the basis of the Mercurial Serpent image - the Dragon that both destroys and creates itself and represents the Prime Material (or Philosopher's Stone).
The hero/heroine and adversary archetype often resemble each other symbolizing their relationship as two parts of the same whole. Similarly, the treasure which is the goal of many legendary heroes is seen as life itself, the resolution of the struggle between conscious and unconscious; through introversion, the entering of the cave, the treasure is regained, the self reborn.
Joseph Campbell called archetypes the "masks of God", because of their diversity and multidmensionality. Others suggest Lucifer as a "mask" of the Adversary, a motivator and illuminating force of the mind and subconscious. As higher intelligence, understanding and vision, the higher self and reason, Lucifer is seen as the Angel/Lord of Light, Divine Light and Pure Energy He is an initiatory rather than a Biblical character. Like God, he is a Mystery. The Self appears as evil incarnate because the polarities of good and evil are intrinsic to human life. Even spirit can be an adversary to the soul.
Jung identifies the adversarial Dragon directly with the unconscious, the natural state of consciousness vanquished by the Hero. The mother Dragon and the Mercurial Serpent are closely linked as creators. In Jung's idea of the Dragon as an archetype it may be a representation of the life-giving mother, though this is not true for all civilizations. The spirit of evil is fear, the forbidden desire, the adversary who opposes not only each individual heroic deed, but life in its struggle for eternal duration as well.
We have to fall back on Jung's statement that an archetype is a collective cultural artifact for Chaos. The Babylonian Tiamat is a Sumerian archetype. The Egyptian archetype is a snake which destroys life and has to be defeated before life is reborn - in other words the Prime Material. The Chinese archetype is that of the life-giver, the lizard which emerges with the onset of the spring rains.
Jung never contemplated the Hebrew God and the adversary the Devil (Satan) as literal persons. The occult is about energy, not personality. The Devil represents for us what Jung has called the collective shadow. It is a truism that we disown and project our own negativity through the shadow. "The opposite principle" splits the ego at work seeking to privilege its own insecurity. A healthy ego is capable of living with anxiety, ambiguity and ambivalence, without trying to always solve them. The spirit of evil is fear, negation, the adversary who opposes life, bondage, dissolution and extinction in the unconscious.
The reality is that life is anxious, life is ambivalent, life is ambiguous -- not just good or bad, black or white. The more we try to solve or resolve that or split it off, the more we're going to fall into a fundamentalism of some kind—military, political, theological, economic, psychological. The greater the light, the greater the shadow.
What we need is a more nuanced approach to the field -- the myriad psychological forms of gods and goddesses in dynamic interaction, in contemporary terms.
Jung believed to be spiritually alive and balanced we must perceive ourselves as part of a cosmic purpose. Our symptoms and difficulties are trying to transform us. In Quantum Mind and Healing, Arnold Mindell suggests, "Besides looking at symptoms as something to change or heal, you might also look at them this way: "From the viewpoint of dreamland, body symptoms are unsung songs. No body process is "wrong". Illness is simply a suitcase with unpacked musical gifts. Your symptoms are not just a part of an ill body but a group of parallel worlds waiting to be "sung".
We can renew our personal consciousness by examining all of our assumptions about ourselves and our lives, to assist us in growing beyond our difficulties to uncover our hidden potentials. Archetypes, embody our adversaries and allies and allow us to take up a conscious relationship with them.
Archetypes are universal principles, or forces that affect, impel, structure, and permeate the human psyche and the world of human experience on many levels. We can think of them in mythic terms as gods and goddesses. Essentially, archetypes are living symbols we all share in common. They reside in our psyche as patterns of potential but they also manifest in the physical world and in the depth dimension of soul through the imaginal process -- our stream of consciousness.
There is always an imaginal subtext or mythic overlay to the objective physical experiences of our lives. We react to both realities. Mythological motifs and recurrent expressions reawaken certain psychic experiences, formulated in an appropriate way. The remarkable thing is that 'the cure is in the poison'; that is, the healing is contained within the very process that plagues us through sickness, self-delusion, stuckness, fear, despair, pain -- and a poor self-image. Jung's individuation process, separating ourselves consciously from archetypal roles and collective imperatives, challenges us to become more fully engaged in life and a transformative way of life.
Analyst Bud Harris says, "Jung considered these things—that we usually dislike or despise about ourselves—as containers of a divine spark. At first they appear as blocks to our full development, such as the achievement of our goals or hopes and dreams, including those of having relationships built on love and trust. But, within these very blocks are the seeds, even the roadmaps and the energy, that when opened and tapped lead us to wholeness, which means the ability to live as fully as possible." He suggests we (1) Fully engage in life, (2) Reflect upon life, (3) Bear the burden of that conflict, and (4) Live the transformation.
Loss of soul is loss of self. If you are depressed, you have disconnected from the life giving place of energy, the bridge between the conscious and the unconscious. "Being that has soul is living being. Soul is the living thing in [us], which lives of itself and causes life" (Jung, CW 9/1, par. 56). Living spirituality grants us access to the numinous. Spirituality, allows our consciousness to be changed by the experience of the numinous. This is essential to confront and counteract the depression and confusion resulting from our existential condition.
We learn to listen more to the unconscious and its expressions, to discover and integrate our disowned parts and pursue an ultimate wholeness and balance. through continuous transformation. Difficult at times, it forces us to question our basic assumptions about who we are and what we value, again and again, even though our ego always prefers comfort and safety to transformation.
In mythology, defeating the dragon and winning the maiden is a metaphor for being heroic enough to leave the passive, dependent world of the illusory security of living unconsciously. We win our engagement with life through consciousness, mindfulness, and diffuse awareness -- unifying masculine and feminine energies within. When we experience ourselves, our being, as rooted in the unconscious and our instinctual lives, we are rooted in the feminine principle or the ground within ourselves. Becoming whole and renewing mystic vision is a spiritual necessity.
This is not self-improvement nor self-actualization, because it is not a heroic developmental process with a mundane social goal of security and prestige, but a way of life. It is about transformation and breaking through limitations -- conscious realization of our complex unique personality, including its strengths and weaknesses. Self-knowledge helps us recognize the importance the unconscious as a partner in informing our lives.
Facing the unpleasant reality that the pursuit of self-knowledge, we question every aspect of conventional wisdom, of our religion, or lack of religion, our notions of what love is, our approaches to problem solving, our ideas of peace and the value of struggle, of the value of suffering, and the meaning of unhappiness in our lives.
Jung suggested that the layer in our psyche he called collective unconscious provides the archetypal "geological" structure. Long forgotten memories strive to reveal itself in coded images and symbols, Jung called “archetypes.” Myths, fairy tales, legends, fantasies, and dreams give content to the events in our psyches. They underlie historical continuity and 'inhabit' a timeless, transcendent dimension. The collapse of time and space is characteristic of psychic experience. The energy created by the tension of opposites forms the raw material for a process.
The imaginal is a natural alternative level of reality, which is the spiritual aspect of our soul, but that doesn't mean we have to take psychic reality literally. We are part of a bigger reality that can change our perspective that has been within us since the beginning of time. We can learn the artless art of watching images in the psyche's mirror.and mindfulness of self. The imaginal is the voice of the transcendent. Imagination mediates between conscious and unconscious (outer and inner). It embodies the first images and the common matrix of myth and language.
Psyche "dresses up" the archetypes with our personal experience. Because they affect our attitudes, they impact what we believe, how we think and feel and our subsequent behavior. They are patterns of meaning and order that extends through every level. We know them largely by their EFFECTS. Images themselves are the embodiment of meaning. Metaphors of nature mirror our nature and processes of birth, death and renewal.
The gist of the holographic paradigm is that there is a more fundamental reality. There is an invisible flux not comprised of parts, but an inseparable interconnectedness. The holographic paradigm is one of reciprocal enfolding and unfolding of patterns of information. All potential information about the universe is holographically encoded in the spectrum of frequency patterns constantly bombarding us.
'Hologram' may be more than a metaphor for the emergence and expression of manifestation. Metaphors provide a reference point without defining reality. Thus metaphors are instructive. They are a central Way of leaping the epistemological chasm between old and new knowledge, old and new ways of essential being. Metaphorical understanding is the norm.
Hopefully the last in a series of mechanical models, the notion that the brain is like a computer is shifting toward more sufficient, more holistic analogies. Our understanding of complex, mysterious things always proceeds from metaphor to metaphor. When a metaphor changes new perspectives open in an ephochal shift that the old metaphor denied. We are all conditioned to think about our minds and selves on a very deep, very unconscious, very reflexive level. An effective metaphor must link up with revolutions in the realms of religion, spirituality, parapsychology, art, music, literature, and more.
Metaphors help us make this leap. A metaphor is the expression of an understanding of one concept in terms of another concept, where there is some similarity or correlation between the two; understanding one concept in terms of another. Perhaps universal history is the unfolding of several metaphors. Mental pictures and verbal processes meet in metaphor which promotes retrieval of images and verbal information that intersects with information aroused by the topic -- implying meaning.
Metaphors Be With You
Archetypes developed over millions of years to provide us with information about life's experiences. Myths are metaphorical representations of the content of the archetypes and can be used to provide us with information about life's experiences.
One value of myth and ritual is the unbidden psychological effect of having the archetypal forms pulled from the unconscious world into the conscious world. It enables us to gain insight into the sources of our fears, reactions, behaviors, and perceptions. Another value is as blueprint for handling specific situations that we experience in the cycle of our lifetimes.
Archetypes are root metaphors. Metaphor is not merely a superficial phenomenon of language, but shapes our judgments, and structures our language. Displaying many facets, metaphor pervades our everyday non-theoretical language.
A metaphor is a holistic schema, a unifying framework that links a conceptual representation to its sensory and experiential ground. It embodies the gestalt and ecological properties of thought. We can even imagine the physical as a metaphor for psychic transformation. Intense physical experiences go deep within our being and those memories are stored deep within the tissue and organs. Such experience is accessible as epistemological metaphors - how we know what we know, and what that experience is "like".
The network of underlying metaphors form a cognitive map, a web of concepts organized in terms which serve to ground the abstract. Archetypes embody this metaphorical quality. They help us enter a problematic situation in order to solve it, to explore it, and explore the world restructured by the metaphor. We can tap the source of creativity, healing and holistic restructuring through imagination and metaphor.
The possibilities for concepts and for thought are shaped in very special ways by both the body and the brain that evolved to control it. Each archetype can be literally or metaphorically illustrated by a consciousness state, particularly if we include dreamlife.
In fact, they are all present within each and every one of us when we turn our attention inward. It is as if archetypes 'happen to us'. We can observe what appears while we were just 'allowing it to happen'. But then don't just leave it there, engage it, grapple with and challenge it, confront it, enter into a dialogue with whatever you have come face to face with.
In Jung's biological model, archetypes exist embedded in the collective unconscious. The archetype is a primordial image whose content manifests only when it has become conscious and therefore informed by the material of conscious experience. The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a capacity or potential. The archetypal image makes the archetype appear in consciousness allowing us to form an active relationship with it.
Plato suggested we are each born with a unique daimon or guardian before we are born, and it has selected an
image or a pattern that we will live on earth. The daimon is the soul companion that guides us, but at birth we forget. The daimon remembers, however, what belongs to us, and therefore, it is our daimon that is the carrier of our destiny. It is essentially identical with Jung's notion of the Self.
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho echoes Jung's theory in biological terms. She postulates that, "a pure coherent state for the entire system would be a many-mode quantum electrodynamical field with a collective phase over all modes. It may be attainable only under very exceptional circumstances, as during an aesthetic or religious experience when the ‘pure duration’ of the here and now becomes completely delocalized in the realm of no-time and no-space.”
Metaphorical analysis displaces the assumed meanings of metaphors, especially if we expect those metaphors to provide stable epistemological connections. Alternative readings of metaphors, like altered states of consciousness, illustrate how knowledge and truth are displaced once they are detached from habits, memes, positivism, intended meanings, or predetermined uses, allowing us to rethink the narratives of our lives. More important than the stability of any methodological labels or particular methods is the way in which a specific processing technique is used as well as how that changes our possible interpretations and outcomes, including our self-image.
When metaphors are synchronistic, emergent, spontaneous, self-organizing expressions of our dynamic stream of consciousness, they are an imaginal encoding of information that bridges the domains of conscious and unconscious worlds, material and transpersonal realms. Such metaphors can be deeply transformative--more than mere language, a technology for changing our behaviors, feelings, thoughts, and beliefs. Intentional contact and immersion in these metaphors can transform our spirit and soul.
How can we know or describe anything about the changes we have not yet experienced, change that by universal consensus takes us beyond the realm of everyday reality, for which our words and concepts have been fashioned? Metaphors contain a subtle communication by containing meaning in a delicate net of imagery.
In psychotherapy and mysticism, both, it is characteristic of the Self to speak to the ego-personality in the language of myth and metaphor. It allows us to grasp some image of that which remains as-yet-unknown. The Self is an archetypal idea that coordinates and balances the relationship between the ego and psyche as a whole. One metaphor describes it this way.
Consider a symphony orchestra performance; the Self can be thought of as the conductor and the musicians coming together in an effort to extract the best music from the best talents; whereas the ego is the orchestra's manager who makes the humble but necessary decisions about bookings and tickets, hotels and transportation and meals. The manager is obviously not the music, and it would be catastrophic to confuse the manager's role with that of the conductor, but without the manager's services, the orchestra doesn't play. (Irene Gad, M.D., Ph.D)
Classical metaphors of transformation are embodied in the primordial wisdom traditions. Metaphors are strongly related to process-oriented psychotherapy and immersion in the stream of consciousness [itself a metaphor]. The process of individuation is largely coded in terms of metaphor and metaphorical transformations through the union of opposites. The notion and phenomenon of metaphor raises as many questions as it answers. Metaphors do not directly describe perceptual reality, but its language helps us imagine an "as if" reality -- the depth of the imaginal psyche.
The role of conscious and unconscious processes in metaphor production and interpretation is ubiquitous. The role of "seeing as" permeates the development of consciousness. It reflects interactions between archetypes, imagination, perception and cognition; how bodily and neural processes create and constrain imagination. Language, concept and world are the three realms of metaphor which is a mode of cognition.
In metaphorical reality, death and rebirth is a common occurrence. We die to our old form and waken to a new way of being. There are latent patterns and images that we recognize and give form to when they are activated, like seed potentials. New life comes from the darkness of our own unconscious creative process.
Hegel writes: “Universal History is the exhibition of Geist in the process of working out the knowledge of that which it is potentially.”xxxiii Nevertheless, Geist cannot be understood as radically transcendent, apart from the world. Instead, Geist emptied itself into Creation, and then undertook the immense journey required to attain absolute self-consciousness and self-identity. --Zimmerman, The Singularity
For most of human history we had no idea how the world or ourselves worked. Most pre-scientific interpretations of universal forces involved spiritual or religious entities -- evil, elemental or ancestral spirits, or gods and goddesses that manipulated reality for their own mysterious ends. Like pregnant ghosts in the machine, they mediate the flow between virtual energy and manifest reality. Myth originates beyond our sphere of awareness, but not beyond that of psyche.
Human decision-making shows the brain is several seconds ahead of our conscious awareness. Unconscious circuits govern much of what we do, putting many activities on autopilot. Some of these choices are due to our habits, memories, instincts and our biological hardwiring, such as the panic button of the amygdala. We don' t have access to how our brain formulates ideas, much less emotions. We cannot know the unconscious directly, so mythic material, personal or collective, is the most radical, most immediate opening to the hidden world. It is the symbolic expression of the soul.
We change with every new experience. We only become aware of the holistic patterns after they pass through archetypal filters of informational content, giving us symbols, images, concepts and labels. Myth and somatic states are the deepest levels which we are permitted to access. Myth plays through our symptoms and complexes. We know that the unconscious is unfathomably vast, but this raises the question, are you in control of your unconscious or is it in control of you?
The gods found, ground, establish, and substantiate reality. The return to primordial origins is fundamental to all mythologies -- expressing a spontaneous regression to the ground that pierces through the world of appearances to 'reality', to immediacy. We experience our own origins through a kind of identity, through countless beings before and after oneself as the germ of infinity.
Our journey re-unfolds those same images which stream out of the ground, out of the abyss. In this way we are "grounding" ourselves. When we dive down to our own foundations we find the world of our common divine origin. Ceremony translates the mythological value into an act. The world of the ancestors is a subterranean storehouse of everything that grows and comes to birth.
We like to think we have outgrown the religious or spiritual superstitions of by-gone eras, but the fact remains that we still couch our interpretations of cosmic forces in theoretical or metaphorical terms. Alchemy informed the Renaissance search for the hidden knowledge of the unity of matter and creation. We can sweep away false assumptions and still retain our metaphorical relationships. The confluence of non-physical psyche and body forms our experience of reality. It is analogous to wave-particle duality.
The activity of universal energies, primal awareness and negentropic factors within us present new opportunities for healing our pathologies and rejuvenation in the human body. Carl Jung proposed a convenient hypothesis for the unknown. Complex psychic phenomena share dynamic core elements. The "collective unconscious" is a vast information store containing the entire religious, spiritual and mythological experiences of humanity.
According to Jung, these inherited ancient archetypes exist deep with the human psyche and heavily influence our psychophysical being. We access the noumenal via archetypal phenomena. We cannot know the divinities directly. We can only appropriate those images in which the numinous energies transcendent to consciousness have invested themselves. We must read through the image to find the energies driving it.
In Jung's allegedly phenomenological model we find a repertoire of constructs or categories that may or may not relate -- archetypes, individuation, the "Self", psychological transformation. There is disention among professional therapists about the relevancy or accuracy of such notions, though they have proven themselves invaluable for grasping and experiencing aspects of the unconscious. Models are theories which help us conceptualize certain realities until we have a better way of doing so. Certainly "reading the recipe" is not the same as "tasting the dish."
Archetypes are transubjective psychic systems -- emergent representations of emotions as images. Most of our responses are precipitated unconsciously. If we know the patterns, we can recognize their dynamic emergence in self, others and world. They arouse passion, not just inform the intellect. We know what we know because of images. Our embodied experience of reality is both "inner" and "outer", corporeal and psychic. Psyche is now likened to a dynamic field of energy.
The emotional image is an emergent psychological reality patterned by archetypes. If we know the patterns, we can recognize their dynamic emergence in self, others and world. Archetypes as constructs are difficult to explore or support in a reductive empirical view, as psyche is more than mind or a brain state. It is untestable.
Jung himself admitted the concept of the archetypes as embodiment and sentience could be revisioned and reformulated at any point. But neurobiology cannot explain emotional imagery. Psychology is about experience and meaning, not just brain states. Personal reality is a confluence of subjective and objective reality.
Worldview
The zeitgeist of an era is its worldview -- interwoven foundational or archetypal ideas. Our worldview is still mythic (representing man's original psychological experience) and controls and shapes unconscious instinct. Zeitgeist is German for 'time-spirit. The very notion of zeitgeist itself is archetypal -- a living principle -- the Spirit of the Times, the dominant influence of a particular period. The zeitgeist "god" emerges in time, establishing the current of that Age.
Quantum theory is the cornerstone of every natural science from physics, chemistry, biology and cosmology. It explains how the universe came into existence. Quantum field theory applies to both micro and macro size objects and accurately describes all of the energy and matter interactions in the universe. It also tells us that even our empirical view of reality is necessarily highly personal. It is our particular covert and overt relationships and experiences with archetypes that characterize us as unique.
Science is the zeitgeist of the 21st Century -- a confluence of quantum physics, cosmology, biology, chaos theory, and self-organizing systems.. A theory of information underlies classical and quantum physics as a model of how reality works. Information is as fundamental to physics as energy and matter.
A holographic concept of reality (Quantum Holography, QH) is rooted in quantum Information physics. We holistically quantify and process information about the world around us. The source field acts like the reference beam that illuminates holograms. Living organisms) exhibit quantum coherence and also carry information non-locally.
John Gowan, Jr. says, "Life is a molecular conservation domain of information, and life is the most creative force in the Universe. The two phenomena are connected; life is creative precisely because it has learned how to conserve information through its genetic system (via heritable genes), multiply information through reproduction, diversify information through sexual differentiation and dispersal, and evolve information through the negentropic process of natural selection."
"Humans, in turn, are the most creative of life forms because they represent a further iteration of the biological fractal: humans are creative because they have learned to use abstract, symbolic information in the same way that life uses molecular information through the genetic system of DNA. Humans conserve information through the structure of language and memory; they make this information concrete or manifest through the symbology of an alphabet (or pictograms) and writing, they reproduce this information through printing and electronic technologies; they disseminate and diversify this information through many cultures; and they evolve this information through the empirical selective process of science."
Memory is encoded as an interference pattern of quantum emissions from any material entity that carries information non-locally about the event history, including the entire space-time history of living organisms. Edgar Mitchell suggests that the primary means for accessing nonlocal transcendent information is via the process of resonance.
Information is simply what is contained in patterns of matter or energy. The meaning that is derived from these patterns is developed in the mind of the percipient based on prior experience (e.g. knowledge and memory). In other words, all events are subject to interpretation and that in turn is based on the prior experiences and beliefs of the perceiver. The more knowledge and experience we gain the more likely we are to interpret an event closer to actual reality.
Quantum Holography (QH) suggests the whole of creation learns, self-corrects, and evolves as a self-organizing inter-connected holistic system. Non-local quantum correlations exhibit the capacity to admit and absorb information at all scale sizes, guiding emergent processes with built in storage and retrieval mechanisms for vast quantities of information. The non-local quantum correlations observed in particles, and the non-local QH associated with molecular and larger scale objects provides information at all scale sizes to guide emergent processes.
All matter absorbs and reemits photons (quanta of energy) from and into the source field. Non-local quantum correlation between entangled quantum particles are the root cause of the phenomenon experienced as perception (through a form of resonance) in more complex matter. QH appears to be the mechanism of the non-local carrier of information for molecular and larger scale matter through the source field.
The base information-state of the universe is Zero Point, the virtual vacuum, beyond time and space. This source or Zero Point Field is the blueprint of existence. Ultimately, we can trace back everything to a collection of electric charges in continuous contact with this endless sea of energy. The field explains the instantaneous, ‘ghostlike’ transfer of information between entangled quantum particles. .Our interaction with this source field determines our past, present and emergent future, patterned by dynamic archetypal processes.
Ground Zero
The Zero-Point Energy (ZPE) field as electromagnetic quantum fluctuations represents an almost unlimited, ubiquitous energy source that permeates and sustains all matter and exists everywhere (even the vacuum of outer space). The Heisenberg uncertainty principle unambiguously demands that short-lived virtual photons pop in and out of existence (along with positron-electron pairs).
Mass and energy have been superseded in primacy for describing how nature works: information is the fundamental entity underlying all of physical reality -- information > laws of physics > matter. Theories of computation include all physical transformations. Formal statements of conservation laws are unified with the stronger operational ones, expressing the principles of testability and of the computability of nature (methodological and metaphysical respectively) as laws of physics. Such laws (i.e., 2nd Law of Thermodynamics) are emergent allowing exact statements.
Known physical laws, relativity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics, are all laws about information, especially limits on the speed, quantity, and quality of information transfer. Relativity limits speed; quantum mechanics limits quantity. The wave function of a system of quantum particles encapsulates all that is known about the system; it is essentially an information field. We aren't sure if the fundamental information is embedded in space-time or if information creates space-time itself.
A similar fundamental but more qualitative process follows cosmic laws at the personal level in individuation, the individual transformative process of coming to wholeness at a conscious level. If our minds are integral parts of the universe and information is fundamental, then consciousness is fundamental. A metaphorical correlation of imagery from science and depth psychology yields fruitful contemplation. Understanding the multiscale nature of life and consciousness requires more than physical science.
Dynamic archetypal patterns emerge from the timeless primordial field that is the ultimate source of all force and form.
Form is more than the result of the properties of matter; it is entangled with consciousness, symbols and imagery. The field is more than a mass of shimmering energy in the background of our existence. Our separate existence is replaced by this all-encompassing connection. In such a model, we influence our ancestors as much as they influence us.
All information is available in the Zero Point Field. Artists are interpreters and translators rather than creators. Their talent is not a miracle, but tuning into the field, whether in creativity, dreams, or process work. When the field tunes into us, we experience synchronicity as a resonance of inner and outer meaning.
Laszlo called the Zero Point Field an information carrier. "This quantum vacuum is the origin of mind and matter – a blueprint of the universe. Even our own memories are not stored in our brains, but are stockpiled like holographic information in the field. Our brains are mainly receivers and processors of this information. When they resonate with certain frequencies they gain access to specific information."
In the field there is no difference between a memory and a new experience. The brain retrieves ‘old’ and ‘new’ information the same way. Psyche is seamlessly interrelated with Cosmos. Jung's notion of archetypes and the archetypal nature of cosmos are the primordial perceptual elements of this process of infinite self-transformation. Feedback, turbulence and emergence harness chaos.
Fractals
Like archetypes, fractals are dynamic images that characterize natural phenomena -- self-similar patterns on different dimensional scales. In this sense, the hologram is a lower dimensional field of a fractal image - infinitely embedded structure. Holograms have many interesting properties related to their fractal structure. Corresponding symbols and imagery are the fractal expressions of archetypes. So we can think of archetypes as higher-dimensional fractals.
Fractals signify infinite compression. Their inner structure has the same pattern as their outer structure. Fractality describes the geometry of waves of energy or charge. Fractals manifest as wave patterns that evolve ad infinitum. In mathematics, a self-similar object is exactly or approximately similar to a part of itself (i.e. the whole has the same shape as one or more of the parts). Really, a fractal is nothing more than an algorithmic Mobius-like transformation of the coordinates of space.
Soljacic, et al suggest self-similarity and fractals are driven by soliton dynamics. The most deconstructed archetypal forms are vortexes, toroids, solitons, and singularities. A soliton is a self-reinforcing solitary wave (a wave packet or pulse) that maintains its shape while it travels at constant speed. Our chromosome continuum acts like a dynamical holographic grating, which displays or transduces weak laser light and solitonic electro-acoustic fields.
Solitons
DNA can be viewed as a liquid crystal gel-like state that acts on incoming light in the manner of a solitonic lattice. A soliton is an ultra stable wave train that arises in the context of non-linear wave oscillation. The DNA reading process can be modelled as a complex mechanical oscillator capable of producing solitonic wave transmissions. DNA, modelled as a kind of rotary pendulum can be simulated as a chain of non-linear oscillators. Complex dynamic patterns arise when taking into account the non-linear covalent connections between nucleotides.
The same researchers suspect the ability of chromosomes to transform their own genetic-sign laser radiations into broadband genetic-sign radio waves. The polarizations of chromosome laser photons are connected nonlocally and coherently to polarizations of radio waves. Thus, we have an explicit physical analogue for the traditional mystical apprehension of inner Light and the Audible Life Stream.
This is the main information channel of DNA, the same for both photons and radio waves. Superposed coherent waves of different types in the cells interact to form diffraction patterns, firstly in the acoustic domain, secondly in the electromagnetic domain -- a quantum hologram -- a translation proccess between acoustical and optical holograms. (Miller, Quantum Bioholography)
Solitons are caused by a cancellation of nonlinear and dispersive effects in the medium. The term "dispersive effects" refers to a property of certain systems where the speed of the waves varies according to frequency. Fractals may emerge from spatial and temporal solitons. Fractals are generated by the dynamics of solitons that undergo abrupt changes along their propagation paths; this method of fractal generation is universal.
Nonlinear systems that support solitons can often, (under proper conditions,) give rise to self-similarity and fractals on successively smaller scales. Such fractals can be observed in most soliton-supporting systems in nature. Solitons are all exactly self-similar, and deep-saturation solitons are all approximately self-similar. Large deviations of the pulse from the soliton existence curve will lead to the appearance of fractal structures driven by soliton dynamics (Soljacic).
Morphogenesis
Essence precedes existence. Consciousness couples with physicality. In this morphogenesis, we see life reflected through the meaningful depths of these forms. They cannot exist in pure, imaginal, or manifest forms in the world without confounding us. In a holographic model, the source field corresponds to the laser source, archetypes correspond to the objects recorded, and the matrix of existence corresponds to the photographic film.
Our notions of all aspects of reality require updating to keep pace with scientific discoveries. Such models or theories also function as metaphors to help us comprehend more accurately the nature of the incorporeal yet undeniably real, including holism and complexity. Fractals and chaos theory have contributed to our understanding of deeper reality. Fractals share holographic properties.
The holographic concept of reality is more than a metaphor. The universe is a dynamic superhologram and we each are indissolubly embedded within it. We are organized together and inextricably connected at the core. The center of this mandala is primordial emptiness (vacuum fluctuation) which is the mother of all force and form. Jung called it the Pleroma.
Spacetime, Energy, Matter and Light are the components of creation. The finest component is a coherent organization of spacetime structure. Matter and mind are the geometric correlates of space and time. Quantum criticality implies fractality. One dynamic process welds the virtual to the physical. Mind and consciousness have a non-local, non-linear holographic nature. Mass hologram production includes a chain of processes that is a robust system of growth.
The universal holographic field couples waves that cross-talk noise in multiplexed fractal forms. Perceptual holograms are image fractal aggregates -- animated self-similar harmonic fractal images. The aggregates are simulated as fractal patterns in the mind and imagination as well as at the physical level. Matter extends itself into space creating form. Existence is a negentropic scalar pump. Manifestation pumps its essence from the scalar potential of the vacuum into the full spectrum of the electromagnetic domain.
Pure, dimensionless or manifest information itself is a holomorphic field. Information processing is the conversion of latent (zero-dimension) implicit information into manifest information -- holographic representation. Information processing occurs through holographic projection and encoding. Thus, archetypes are holomorphic fields that manifest pure information through some n-dimensional holographic “cascade”.
At the center of everything virtual ensembles cyclically arise from and disaggregate back into the physical vacuum. A potential event arises from the physical vacuum as a virtual ensemble. That potential somehow comes into relationship with another potential and hooks up, however briefly, in that timeless, insubstantial, holographic realm. Virtual ensembles contact other virtual ensembles creating what science calls the qubit, quantum bit, or sub-quark.
So we now have fractal geometries, punctuated equilibrium, power laws, and quantum thresholds. These distributions, the distance between, the space in between electron orbitals are pure Fibonacci numbers. The configuration of fractals absolutely complies with Fibonacci numbers from the atomic to cosmological scales.
Mass is the product of underlying gravitational field effect interactions that make up nuclear particles. This tells us that mass is a product. Absolutely everything is information, organizing and creating the universe we live in. Fractal scaling is an implicit representation of information content.
Life appears to be rooted in a holographic system of coherence and interference. Order and patterns are the cornerstone of holography. A hologram is a fractal map of a region of regular space. Holographic transformations encode and project fractal differentiation and integration through feedback. Biologist Bruce Lipton supports the hypothesis that fractal mathematics and geometry are at the formative heart of biology and evolution.
Light itself encodes information as electromagnetic waves. This light is transduced from the vacuum by the holographic blueprint of our DNA. The brain and body operate on holographic principles at the quantum, electromagnetic, biophotonic, wave-genetic, molecular, cellular, neural, and systemic levels. Fractal organization controls structures all through the body.
Our superhologram is composed of grids created by a source consciousness. Grid cells may be the structural perceptual apparatus. These grid neurons encode a cognitive representation of 3D space in fractal sampling grids. They derive their name from the fact that connecting the centers of their firing fields gives a triangular grid.
The holographic matrix of the grid neurons resembles the mystic Flower of Life, or Buckminster Fuller's archetypal concept of the isotropic vector matrix - the primal universal pattern. Isotropic means “all the same”, vector means “line of energy”, and matrix means “a pattern of lines of energy”. In this multidimensional matrix the vertexes are everywhere the same and equidistant from one another. This omnitriangulated grid supersedes and is more flexible than the standard XYZ coordinate system. Any 90-degree angle in Fuller's system appears only as a side effect.
Tom Bearden describes how convergent light waves bleed into electrogravity when they meet and cancel out along three different axes (i.e. x, y and z, although not always right angles, of course). Conversely, when electrogravity is converged to cancel out, it bleeds back into light waves (hence the reciprocal relationship between light and electrogmagnetism).
Cosmos & Consciousness
The attempt to explain the nature, origin, and perhaps destiny of the universe is as old as humankind itself and has informed the content of myth, religion, and philosophy. As we extend our notions of the macrocosm and microcosm, our conceptualization of archetypes (aka gods and goddesses) likewise evolves. We resort to the supernatural, the magic of the extreme and the mundane, when comprehension fails.
There is a pre-physical, unobservable domain of potentiality in quantum theory -- countless nonlocally entangled quantum states of different magnitudes. It is the basis of fundamental interconnectedness and wholeness of Reality. We are connected to distant space and time not only by our imaginations but also through a common cosmic heritage.
Cosmic renewal correlates with individual psychic renewal. Jung noted, "Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche."
The structure of the universe is both fractal and holographic. The interaction of multiple fields creates virtual holograms -- the blueprints of form in the wave structure of manifest reality. Holograms conserve certain properties. Fractal geometry is the mathematical expression of a fundamentally holographic universe. When diversity accumulates, a system goes through a phase transition that proliferates forms and form-content relativity at that level. Scale and complexity create 'emergent' phenomenon.
Characteristics or a qualities emerge unexpectedly from a complex system that is stable enough to store information yet evanescent enough to transmit it. Fractal structures are equally complex at each self-similar level of scaling. The variations are infinite but similar. In a holographic structure each part contains the whole. Fractal forms reflect and are reflected by the whole. One form emerges from another. Increasing complexity is a fact of Nature in cosmic evolution.
Energy is the key scientific and numinous concept. Jung equated physical energy with what he called objective psychic energy. The evolution of the cosmos is a dynamic creative process with four stages: stability, stress, crisis and reorganization (solve et coagula). Psyche follows the same pattern. Our insights, revelations, and synchronicities (meaningful coincidences) are holographic processes. Universal principles pattern, structure, and permeate the human psyche and the world of human experience on many levels ("As Above, So Below").
Change comes from the expansion of configurational patterns over time. Jung observed that certain dreams, myths, hallucinations and religious symbols are shared by many people and cultures. Cultural structures and practices are: 1) fractally self-similar; 2) part-whole relations that recur at all scales; 3) fractal self-similarity has implications for character; 4) the model of fractal holography helps us perceive similarities at different scales in seemingly unrelated phenomena.
Our brains learn to edit out many of the frequency patterns, leaving selective subsets of information available to our conscious awareness. Seemingly random phenomena only appear chaotic because we are have filtered out the critical information necessary to discern the true underlying pattern, or order of infinitely higher degree. We believe we are observing chaos without any underlying pattern since we perceive only a fraction of available information. http://www.statpac.org/walonick/reality.htm
Polarity, Pattern, Process
Paradigms embody scientific knowledge in a conceptual system and experimental methodology for understanding and investigating our experience. Like a living organism, a paradigm maintains itself by feeding on data that it can digest and propagating itself through time. If the paradigm is exposed to anomalous data that it cannot digest, however, it begins to be stressed and pushed away from its former state of stability. If the anomalous data persist, a crisis results in a reorganization of the structures that characterized the very identity of the paradigm. http://www.integralscience.org/cosmic.html
The alchemists called the animated matter in the macrocosm the world soul -- the interpenetration of psyche and matter. Jung found the holistic order of psyche and matter mirrored in the alchemical notion of the unus mundus and synchronicity -- the harmony or disharmony surrounding the individual. Synchronistic events in the inner world behave as if outside and the outer world behaves as if inside. Archetypes are the elements of such primordial self-organizing patterning potential.
So, the cosmos (as well as culture and psyche) is
- fractal (the same pattern of wholeness is found at every scale), and
- holographic (the wholeness is present everywhere and within every entity), as well as
- synergetic (the whole is greater than and unpredictable from the sum of the parts)
- emergent (complex systems & patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions).
Vacuum fluctuations (connected to everything and everywhere) define the uncertainty principle. Reducing its energy density, cosmos sacrifices its unity in the creation of forms. These limited self-interactions are the basis for the stability of distinct forms. Complexity arises from self-organization. Stabilized particles bind together into more complex forms and novel composite forms.
The first emergence is the universe. At the point of emergence a complex system has an inconceivably vast array of possible configurations. Through synergistic association of elementary entities, composite beings emerge with their own unique identities. Fractal models or holographic models don't explain emergence.
Fractal geometry maps reality in a numerical fashion as it exists in the micro and macro realms. They show that simple iteration appears to liberate the hidden complexity as creative potential. The discovery of chaos theory [sic] showed an *underlying order,* a kind of memory operating in non-linear, evolving systems. Everything from stars to our genes manifest expressions of complexity rising over the course of cosmic time.
Obviously, the cosmos, at least locally, has produced complex and highly organized systems. Life, mind, consciousness, and healing may be emergent properties, as the the emergence of dynamic structure. Neither scale nor complexity are a fingerprint of design. Chaos becomes pattern. To understand is to perceive pattern. Incarnations of nature, archetypes are primal patterns that mold nature, energy and matter, including that of ourselves.
Fractal geometry illustrates that shapes have self-similarity at descending scales. In other words, the form, the *information,* is enfolded--already present in the depths of the cosmos as nonlinear internal feedback. Expansion of the Universe generates *information.* But for information to occur, a spontaneous, self-organizing order has to emerge from out of chaos. Such systems are always likely to give rise to greater complexity. The edge of chaos represents the ideal balance between stability and propensity to explore change. Beauty is a harmony of contrasts.
Because of its very nature a chaotic system cannot be decomposed. If consciousness is pure information it is not limited to physical form. Its patterning may emerge from chaotic dynamics operating at the quantum level, where the "no-thing" of pure information becomes a structured "some-thing," through intentionality coupled with chaotic determinism (self-organized emergent order). The undecomposable level of chaotic consciousness is experienced as the pure, unconditioned imprint of the whole.
Fractals are one of the keys to life, reflecting the multidimensional nature of consciousness. Digital mapping is broadcast within the electromagnetic spectrum and throughout eternity. The wholeness of each fractal level contains many probabilities as superpositions. Countless quantum states of different magnitudes impinge into 3D forms. Apply this to holography and we may have something approaching reality.
The holographic "blueprint" manifests the outward appearance from different probabilities. A complete gradient of contexts from the microscopic to the macroscopic can be kindled or regenerated from a virtual-state holographic matrix which contains all the states and probabilities. Our perceptions manifest fractal organization from the virtuality of the potential gradient spectrum. http://www.fractal.org/Bewustzijns-Besturings-Model/Source-of-Fractals.htm
In a radically holistic, holographic universe, even time and space can no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, including time and three-dimensional space. "Knowing" is a field connection. Fractal distribution of galaxies may be interpreted as a signature of holography ("fractal holography'').
The human body is not an object in space, but seamlessly welded to the cosmic fabric of reality. We are not merely a phenomenal body of flesh, but one of awareness, of consciousness, a living interface of inner and outer field phenomena. The brain is not confined to our skull, but permeates our whole being through the intracellular matrix and sensory system, as well as the strong EM fields generated by the beating heart. The multidimensional nature of consciousness is a holographic energy expression of a non-spacetime condition.
Archetypes are rooted in or emerge from the holographic source field as attractors that govern their evolution over time, or rather a set of physical properties toward which a system tends to evolve. Just as the attractor for life is the efficient liberation of bound energy, the attractor for consciousness is the liberation of bound psychic energy, the energy that is contained in the unconscious, both collectively and individually.
The archetype's evolution through the set of possible physical states is nonperiodic (chaotic). Chaotic systems manifest as self-similar fractal or reiterative structures that repeat at all levels of observation. Its set of states defines a fractal set. Patterns repeat at all scales. Organization is present within the randomness but its future state remains unpredictable.
Holograms contain many dimensions of “compressed” information in a subtle network of interacting frequencies. Interference patterns of waves can be visualized interacting like ripples on a pond. At the quantum level they create matter and energy as we perceive them as lifelike 3-dimenional effects. Consciousness and matter share the same essence, differing by degrees of subtlety or density.
The essence of the transformative process is revealed in the fractal nature of imagery and symbols--i.e. their ability to encode, enfold, or compress the informational content of the whole. Strange attractors condition and govern the transformative process through the complexity of information in dynamic flow. Emergent consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of the brain. Rather it is the transformational process of non-manifest, undifferentiated consciousness emerging into manifestation.
All potential information about the universe is holographically encoded in the spectrum of frequency patterns constantly bombarding us. The infinite set of states never settles into equilibrium, periodicity, or resonance. Transpersonal experience creates a new interpretation, or perspective on reality. Systems arise from positive feedback and amplification. Thus, archetypes introduce erratic behavior that leads to the emergence of new situations, including creative insight.
"In a letter to P.W. Martin (20 August 1945), the founder of the International Study Center of Applied Psychology in Oxted, England, C.G. Jung confirmed the centrality of numinous experience in his life and work: “It always seemed to me as if the real milestones were certain symbolic events characterized by a strong emotional tone. You are quite right, the main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character” (Jung 1973, 1: 377). . . The individuation process, as proposed by Jung and his followers, typically includes experiences of a numinous nature." (Stein)
Individuation is a deeply symbolic "Journey" of analysis and synthesis, making multifaceted psyche conscious from its symptomology -- ego's unconscious identifications and archetypal power and influence. First comes detachment and separation of archetypal elements. We confront the awesome and numinous "Other" with astonishment and wonder, deepening the process until we gaze into the blank face of cosmic Void.
The Kabbalists introduced a blessing to be recited before all positive commandments: “Behold I perform this commandment for the sake of the yihud [unity] between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the Shekhinah”. Every
human act serves to advance the communion within the divine. The mysteries connect the span of life with the symbol of death and renewal. The central symbol of the“process” is the creation of the world, its destruction and restoration.
But, this path doesn't end like the mystics in worshipful union with the Divine as either Void or Plenum, but in the unique stabilized wholeness described by alchemists as the ultima materia or the Philosopher's Stone -- a sort of Unified Field Theory of the psyche. Rather than being about "God", it is about human potential. Each life is specific and special – at once unique and reflective of myriad lives within lives. In a holographic concept of reality the part is not only contained within the whole, the whole is contained in every part, only in lower resolution.
The wave-particle nature of light goes to the heart of quantum mechanics and in much the same way the dual incorporeal essence and manifest aspects of archetypes describe the magnetic dynamics which form and define the psychic field. From the cosmos -- the dynamic matrix, the “mind stuff” – infinitesimal “particles” and human beings emerge, all capable of intercommunicating, not only locally but also, instantaneously, beyond space/time.
We are increasingly substituting organic models for mechanical ones, and shifting from structure-orientated to process-orientated thinking. Wholeness is neither a dogma nor ideology but a living, dynamic, all-pervasive principle. We can view the world in terms of universal flux of events and processes. Differentiation is the essence of creation.
Classical science is about taking reality apart, and then examining those parts, Systemic science is about experiencing the resultant Whole of parts relating together. Examination of a single part does not reveal the wholeness of parts. The truth lies in the relationships between parts -- not what things are called but what things are doing together.
According to Jung (1916): "What you should never forget is that the Pleroma has no qualities. We are the ones who create these qualities through our thinking. When you strive after differentiation or sameness or after other qualities, you strive after thoughts which flow to you from the Pleroma, namely thoughts about the non-existent qualities of the Pleroma. While you run after these thoughts, you fall again into the Pleroma and arrive at differentiation and sameness at the same time. Not your thinking but your being is differentiation. That is why you should not strive after differentiation and discrimination as you know these, but strive after your true nature. If you would thus truly strive, you would not need to know anything about the Pleroma and its qualities, and still you would arrive at the true goal because of your nature. However, because thinking alienates us from our true nature, therefore I must teach knowledge to you, with which you can keep your thinking under control." (Hoeller)
As expressed by Robert Newman, "The source of our life and potential is our fundamental and transpersonal awareness; that formless force is our life-itself. Our primary awareness is our transpersonal nature. There's a longing for awareness because we're already touching it. The tendency to awaken is based on our inherent capacity for recall in awareness-itself. The past has no power to stop you from being present now, where the magic of life is; but the hyperactive mind/emotion is only still in short gaps, natural breaks, before we lose awarenress of space, whether we do religious practice or not. Living in the present moment is unlimited life. Presence is a whole body phenomenon that transcends the body. Presence becomes a globalized sense of aware aliveness."
Cosmic & Psychic Dynamics
The Cosmos has many faces, including ours among them. We are all taking part in a deep mythological, archetypal, and cosmic drama of death and rebirth at the individual and global level. The creative process unfolds in each of us as it does in the world and universe. We are ourselves part of the canvas. We are characters in the story, driven by a multitude of personified cosmic characters.
"The hero or genius arouses our admiration for essentially the same reasons as a work of art. Heroism, for example, is beautiful because it is the result of integrating a multiplicity of contrasting experiences (strength and frustration, joy and tragedy, rebellion and resignation, life and death) into the unity of a single person’s story. Genius is beautiful because it requires the integration into a creative unity of a multiplicity of ideas, feelings and experiences that could lead to madness in a narrower personality. Because of the precarious nature of heroism and genius we esteem them more than the everyday modes of human existence. Similarly we might value a universe in which contradictions are constantly being unified into an aesthetic whole: entropy and evolution; order and chaos; novelty and continuity; permanence and perishing." <http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=1948&C=1815>
From the dawn of time, mankind has instinctively taken on and embodied archetypal forms (meta-forms) and patterns of behavior, both unconsciously and with spiritual purpose. This invisible groundplan molds both individual and collective psychic behavior. Psychic patterns, shared across cultures in countless energetic forms are buried deep in the manifold essence of our collective unconscious.
Carl Jung had a concept of the Collective Unconscious: “In addition to our immediate personal consciousness, (which we believe to be the only empirical psyche), there exists a second “inherited” psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.”
Ancestor worship is probably the oldest recognition of spiritual beings. Ancestors are discarnate helping spirits. Primitive conceptions of our state after death originated in this shamanic belief. Primordial belief in souls and spirits originates in energies and images that come from the unconscious. It is also the root of superstition. We must make a distinction between fantasy and imagination. Imagination happens to us; it is an autonomous force or energy, welling up from the depths as the water of life. We yearn for the Mystery of existence, our concealed wellspring -- the source of life.
Dr. Stanley Krippner says, "Shamans were the first dreamworkers...if someone could imagine or dream an event, that action was considered to be, in some sense, real." Souls correspond to the autonomous complexes of the personal unconscious (subconscious). Spirits are those of the collective unconscious, the inner universe. There are definite enduring forms in the unconscious psyche. Much depends on the interconnective density of the dominant factors of basic mental capabilities. Deeply hidden wisdom is expressed in the collective spirit that also pulsates within the individual soul. Such knowledge is accumulated over countless generations.
Archetypes bring spirit down to earth. Images lead into the realm of soul, which joins those of matter and spirit. They are the myriad forms of Nature's "to be". Highly symbolic forms, gods and goddesses arose from our elemental depths, altered states of consciousness and participatory wisdom to inform collective culture. The soul expresses itself in the symbolic language of dreams and esoteric doctrines which convey their messages. Some contend the archetypes emerge from cultures, not the unconscious. Campbell (1968, 1974) argued that most archetypal forms originated in Sumer and Akkad around 2500 B.C.
Culture consists of three layers: artifacts, values and beliefs, and underlying assumptions -- shared learning, experience, and problem-solving. Participation mystique links unconscious individual egos to larger and smaller groups. It provides the attractor that makes an individual want to be part of a given organization. It is the conduit for expressing collective sentiments by each person in the group. It is the nature of our subconscious to objectify inner as well as outer experiences. Multiple archetypes are expressed in each individual as behavioral patterns.
Culture normalizes a shared set of values. Values become underlying assumptions. Archetypes are the template of individuals and organizations, providing their psychic energy. This foundation is why our current institutions exhibit illness. The organizational shadow includes what has been repressed because the organization does not allow it by its rules, procedures or values. The buildings are sick and the organizations, such as banking, government, and academia are sick. (Levy)
The collective unconscious plays out through the existence of similar symbols and mythological figures in different civilizations – cross-cultural analogies. Stein contends that a symbol, "is different from a metaphor in that what it is communicating or presenting to consciousness is utterly untranslatable into any other terms, at least for the time being. Symbols are opaque and often bring thinking to a standstill. Metaphors are transparent and must be so if they are to do their job. They help us think in creative ways 'outside the box'."
For Jung, symbols were always grounded in an unconscious archetype giving it energy. "A symbol presents an unconscious content making its way toward consciousness. . .The symbol is alive only so long as it is pregnant with meaning.. . . symbols play a dynamic role in potentially moving the psyche forward in a development toward greater wholeness, rather than holding it back." (Stein)
Archetypal symbols are embedded in our collective subconscious, and, when exposed to them, we demonstrate awe, natural attraction and fascination. Feeling is contained within the psychic structures, but also creates them. Occult symbols can therefore exert a great impact on people, even if many individuals were never personally introduced to the symbol’s esoteric meaning. Staged psychodrama by the hidden hand of powers that be exploits this natural tendency for collective psychological struggle played out as a trance-enhanced multimedia techno opera of supercharged imagery.
Jose Delgado reminds us that, "To behave is to choose one pattern among many. To think we must proceed in some orderly fashion repressing unrelated ideas; to talk we must select a sequence of appropriate words; and to listen we need to extract certain information from background noise. . .We are optically and acoustically assaulted by scientific literature, news media, propaganda, and advertisements. The defense is to inhibit the processing of sensory stimuli. Conscious and unconscious behavioral inhibition should not be considered passive processes but active restraints, like holding the reins of a powerful horse, which prevent the disorderly display of existing energies and potentialities".
Archetypes create self-serving tacit assumptions that lead us to mistake certain beliefs for reality because each is only a relativistic viewpoint. They create immanent phenomenological experiences in existential reality, levels of cognitive awareness, and transcendental abstract speculations. Archetypal shift happens when focus migrates from one archetypal field to another. Each archetypal field contains traces from similar previous encounters. This residue takes the form of thoughts, images, and energy tones.
Jung thought that life altering archetypal experiences may be the origin of consciousness. Supernatural beliefs are a universal part of religions, perhaps because they carry deeper meaning (such as group identity) and are so emotionally satisfying. Our minds are capable of deceiving us into believing anything. When our own lack of critical thinking or abject denial fail, the archetypal Trickster arises from the collective level.
Supernatural beings have powers that are projections of our own power fantasies, such as smiting evil. The original gods represented the creativity of the life force and the vagaries of misfortune along with their feminine partners expressed as partnerships. Very ancient Gods simply gave us a sense of meaning in the existential quest for our own becoming in the fragile diversity of nature.
Archetypes form the immaterial basis of life. They represent our human potential, contained or encoded in clusters of related symbols. Symbols stand for abstract regularities in the world, Hofstadter asserts. Human brains create vast repertoires of these symbols, conferring the “power to represent phenomena of unlimited complexity and thus to twist back and to engulf themselves via a strange loop.”
Consciousness itself occurs when a system with such ability creates a higher-level symbol, a symbol for the ability to create symbols. That symbol is the self. The I. Consciousness. This self-generated symbol of the self operates only on the level of symbols. Mysteries multiply because the symbol is generated by the thing doing the symbolizing. (Siegfried)
Symbols are inevitably imperfect attempts to represent archetypes since they can only express a portion of it. Pure archetypes are essentially content-free. The nature of the exchange between the divine and the ego is like fire - pure, intense, pulsating, even if only for a moment.
Yet even with this model as our guide we should be cautious so we don't fail to understand the most basic issues of the relation of appearance to dynamics. Models remain interpretations of observations and this is particularly so of the metaphysical basis of sacred psychology, quantum theories, and consciousness. We are describing the abstract structure of a set of dynamic units, the 'possibilities' that are the members of that set.
Dynamic units are indivisible in both space and time; potentialities are as real as actualities and can be actualized at any place and time, given adequate mechanisms. Different sorts of dynamic units yield up information in rather different ways. Actualization goes on throughout the fabric of the universe all the time, but what is actual depends on complex issues of divergent and convergent paths.
Archetypes are visual symbols or energetic imprints that exist in our psyches, and appear at multiple levels of organization. The archetypal dimension of reality appears in the form of unfiltered psychic experience -- mythic figures and narratives from various cultures, gods and goddesses, transcendent Platonic Ideas, etc. We might imagine them as structural coding of nested fields.
We might ask if they are actually transcendent to life, or merely help us transcend functional errors by widening our behavioral repertoires in a constantly changing body/world. A good deal of our subconscious effort is devoted to maintaining a mind map of reality updated inside our heads, but there is no reason to assume consciousness arises solely from this dynamic. Idealistic transcendence remains an elusive concept.
Our models remain provisional. Yet, the felt-sense is real. In his Red Book, Jung described the primordial force as overwhelming to the point one no longer recognizes oneself and is consumed by fear of the inescapable. You come to know what a real God is, he tells us.
"Now you'll think up clever truisms, preventive measures, secret escape routes, excuses, potions capable of inducing forgetfulness, but it's all useless. The fire burns right through you. That which guides forces you onto the way. But the way is my own self my own life founded upon myself The God wants my life. He wants to go with me, sit at the table with me, work with me. Above all he wants to be ever-present! But I'm ashamed of my God. I don't want to be divine but reasonable. The divine appears to me as irrational craziness. I hate it as an absurd disturbance of my meaningful human activity. It seems an unbecoming sickness which has stolen into the regular course of my life. Yes, I even find the divine superfluous." (Jung, Red Book)
Archetypes are nested, structural-energetic emergent motifs. Once filled out, they enter consciousness, becoming subject to interpretations and qualities such as structured duality. All of us are the myth-makers and co-creators of the 21st century. Myth has become an important core feature of modern spirituality and self-understanding, and even within the best-practice of genealogy and gnosis.
These unconscious mental phenomena are at the root of our self-reflective consciousness and projected frameworks or worldviews. Archetypes take the form of personified mythological figures, as deities. The shift from spirits within natural forms to supernatural ("above nature") gods and deities signified a new religious paradigm, that of polytheism, or "many gods." The matrix of complex 'archetypal form' generates other forms (symbols and images) by selecting suitable parts.
Like the spirits of earlier religions, the existence of these gods explained many things. Their 'human' characteristics could be kind, ambitious, quarrelsome, jealous, angry, or wise. Some were evil, others were forces for good. They also took an active interest in human affairs, taking care of people in need, and administering a degree of cosmic law and order. Those who behaved badly were punished by the gods, either in their own lifetimes or in the afterlife–which by then had gathered its own rich mythology–while the repentant would be forgiven their misdeeds. (Russell)
Explanations transform the world. These polytheistic patterns persisted in the psyche even with the adaptive shift in spiritual paradigms to monotheistic, atheistic, pantheistic, and scientific worldviews. These paradigms are still colliding, redefining the relationship of the individual and society. But preoccupation with individualism cannot be sought at the expense of collective work. Collective work or work in the service of others (compassion) makes a significant difference to the quality of life for all humanity. Soul is also in the world, as well as our inner realm.
Jung insisted that our individuation is not about becoming "divine" like the transpersonal Gods, but in distinguishing, relating, and freeing ourselves from them in a creative way that constitutes a self-initiatory path -- a life lived with a unique, particularized connection to source, meaning, depth, and soul. He encouraged becoming more fully human. Most of us have experienced the power present in a collective field – moments when a deep well of meaning suddenly opens, expanding awareness.
We yearn for self-awareness, self-knowledge, an objective opinion or appraisal and comprehension of nature and our nature because we need the empirical world as a reflection by which to "see" ourselves. These reflections take numerous typical forms projected from and onto the zero-point ground of being and nonbeing. As godforms, they are ideal; as our personal complexes, less so -- as radically split-off elements, demonic. As the archetypes pattern the individual psyche they are subject to particularized distortions of their pure form. Each archetype has its polar opposite. Our authentic suffering comes from enduring conflicting opposites warring within us.
Holding the tension of the opposites and not succumbing to the resistance and urge to split is essential to bridging the gap between ego-consciousness and the unconscious. If we don't succumb to the urge to identify with one side or the other, the third, completely unexpected image, comes into view -- one that unites the two in a creative new way. When we hold the tension between the psyche and the ego, eventually consciousness expands to accommodate the previously unconscious content.
The transcendent function serves as a bridge between rational thinking and archetypal sensibility. This facilitates a renewed connection between the human psyche and the natural world. What is inside the psyche is projected outwardly, much like a hologram appears in multidimensional form when its wave form is illuminated by a coherent laser beam. Everything interpenetrates everything. When we are living within harmony with the Unified Field, we flow.
PART II: Holographic Archetypes
Holographic Archetypes
Archetypes are holographic parables -- cosmic messages, and highly complex mathematical equations. Both a hologram and an archetype function as a kind of lens that converts a meaningless blur of frequencies (the primary reality) into a coherent image. Our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain. An archetype, like a hologram never really changes -- it just is. However from each of the infinite points of view we have a dynamic ever-changing experience.
Our brains operate as a holographic frequency analyzer, decoding even space and time as constructs of the human brain. Berkovich likens the holographic paradigm to the concept of “Cloud Computing”. Individual brains are not stand-alone computers but collective users getting shared access to portions of the holographic memory of the Universe. (Berkovich)
Holograms encode and decode frequencies from a jeweled net of light. A hologram” according to Seth Riskin of MIT, “represents how the human brain, and light information interact to create the experience of three-dimensional space. Holography represents deeper technological access into light’s capacity as an image and information carrier.”"
Pribram saw the holographic brain as a lens, mathematically converting the frequencies it receives through the senses into our inner world of perceptions. We are holographic "receivers"; our DNA functions as an antenna. Floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency we extract and transmogrify into physical reality but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram. "Objective" reality ceases to exist in an infinitely connected, deconstructed manifold of potentials with certain strong tendencies to formation. Moving beyond our normal ego boundaries we may transcend individual consciousness.
Such "holographic godforms" define our bio-psycho-social roles and ways of being, our aspirations and our deepest frustrations. Each godform typically has physical, emotional, mental and spiritual aspects around which personality 'crystallizes'. We call them 'holographic' because of their primordial, informational, and multidimensional nature. There is a direct relationship between the external realm of matter and the realm of psyche. Everything in reality has to be seen as a metaphor; even the most haphazard events express some deeper underlying symmetry and meaning.
The gist of the holographic theory is that: "Our brains mathematically construct 'concrete' reality by interpreting frequencies from another dimension, a realm of meaningful, patterned primary reality that transcends time and space. The brain is a hologram, interpreting a holographic universe." And that includes the dreaming brain. In dreams we spontaneously construct a parallel reality that may include telepathic dreams, lucid dreams, transpersonal dreams.
Karl Pribram postulates a neural hologram, made by the interaction of waves in the cortex, which in turn is based on a hologram of much shorter wavelengths formed by the wave interactions on the sub-atomic level. Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram. Thus, we have a hologram within a hologram, and the interrelatedness of the two somehow gives rise to the sensory images. There is a more fundamental reality which is an invisible flux that is not comprised of parts, but a holistic inseparable interconnectedness.
Holograms have an astounding capacity for information storage in slightly offset multidimensional "layers". The holographic model has been suggested as a "physics of consciousness". The universe itself may be a giant hologram, quite literally a kind of image or construct created, at least in part, by the human mind. The hologram is an analogy for events in space-time, quantum states, or static entities of some nature. In their emergent manifestation archetypes are self-replicating patterns.
We become quantum entangled and structurally bound to those meaningful patterns within. Transformation is a first-order change of interholographic conversion. Engulfment of our entire entity could be likened to spirit "possession" by an ultramagnetic archetypal attractor. We could also liken the splitting off of a complex to fractal bifurcation - the splitting of a main body into two parts.
Archetypes make us wake up and pay attention to what they are doing. Jung said, "Nothing happens in which you are not entangled in a secret manner; for everything has ordered itself around you and plays your innermost. Nothing in you is hidden to things, no matter how remote, how precious, how secret it is. It inheres in things." He claimed we yearn "to hear of him who was not darkened by the shadow of earth, but illuminated it, who saw the thoughts of all, and whose thoughts no one guessed, who possessed in himself the meaning of all things, and whose meaning no thing could express."
Physicist Fred Alan Wolf offers a quantum mechanical model for the emergence of self awareness from holographically-generated dream images. He claims,
"Self-awareness arises from the ability of a simple memory device, an automaton in the brain, to obtain images of holographically-stored glial cell memories and, most importantly, through a quantum mechanical process, to also obtain images of itself. Each self-image is composed of a quantum-physical superposition of primary glial cell images and an image of the automaton containing those images. These self-reflective images are ordered according to a hierarchy based on increasing levels of self-inquiry conducted during the dreaming process."
This idea is based in part on the work of Nobili and of Albert. Nobili's work shows that ionic wave movement (that is similar in form and structure to quantum waves but different from them in certain essential details) occurs in the glial cells of the brain making it an ideal medium for supporting and producing holographic imagery.
Nobili (1985) proposed that Na+ and K+ transport through glial cells in the form of oscillating currents producing wave patterns that satisfy a Schrödinger Wave equation. Contrary to lightwave holography, Schrödinger wave holography is far more efficient in producing holograms in glial tissue. He also discovered that the close proximity of signal sources and receptors in the cortex was ideal for both production of reference waves and information wave recovery. Complete details for the mechanism for glial imaging/holography are in his paper. Nobili, Renato. "Schrödinger wave holography in brain cortex." Physical Review A Vol. 32, No. 6, p.3618-26. Dec. 1985.
Archetypes are the elements of the soul. They are exemplary forms or prototypes -- an informational code -- the original schema or dynamic patterns that model all things of the same kind. For Plato, they were the primordial forms of the universal mind. We recognize the world within us through their patterns. Being universal, archetypal forms can be found everywhere. They are the essence that sustains life.
We ourselves as living organic systems are very complex holographic entities so we can become resonantly entrained with specific archetypal attractors in the psychic field. Archetypal forms repeat nature's characteristic patterns from the largest to smallest scale. Dynamically, “archetypal” forms are underlying instinctual patterns of behavior which reflect how the unconscious “imagines” reality into being. Psyche, our "larger self", reveals itself in symbolic form through manifestations of the archetypes. They organize experience giving it collective meaning.
Each archetype has its structural parameters. They organize how we experience certain things. Their dreams are our realities. Within the myths a jumbled myriad of possibilities play through the personality seemingly at random. Yet each has its agenda and characteristic mode of appearance. The activation of a mytheme in a life is decoded by noticing its corresponding imagery and effects, in dreams and waking life. Archetypal energies awaken us to live a larger life where we are all healers, warriors, visionaries and teachers -- but many potentials remain latent or formless.
An individual's personal myth or mytheme can be conceived as an activated chaotic attractor, a magnetic vortex. In another phase of life, the focus and narrative could change to other patterns. Sometimes these transitions are fairly smooth, sometimes competitive, other times catastrophic, sweeping the old structure away in an uncontrollable fashion.
Before psychophysical embodiment in the experiential world, archetypes are like "empty sets". As a morphism, each archetype is a structure-preserving mapping of energetic information. Such "zero objects" or identity elements are the "pre-existent" blueprints (entities or components) for ways of being and becoming -- inborn forms of intuition. The Self is the common denominator of all symbolic sets. Archetypes and symbols share the holographic quality that the whole is contained within each part. They are are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper underlying unity that is ultimately holographic and indivisible.
Archetypal images designate patterns, typical basic forms, prefigurative determinants, and the tendency to repeat the same psychic experiences. They conceal the unborn eternal archetype (unconscious nucleus of meaning) while they reveal particularized meaning and form. Such ‘oculi piscium’ (fishes eyes)” are fiery soulsparks of the World-Soul, the light of nature, divine sparks of the spirit, according to Jung.
Specified but incorporeal forms, at the deepest level archetypes are the wave-like counterpart of our corporeality, figuratively and perhaps literally made of pure light and nonbeing. Divine light symbolizes the flow of feeling and of emotional understanding (“emotional intelligence”). The dialectic dialogue between the poles, the physical and the spiritual, is the source of divine light; it is the alchemic “work” (the opus), the psychological "process". This animated matrix is the root of form, as the Heart Sutra says, form is not other than void. Jung suggested in his notion of the nondual 'pleroma' that nothingness is the same as fullness.
Memory is not confined to the brain or mind. Because our entire organism is our psycho-physical structural memory, biography becomes biology. This why Jung suggested, "the gods have become diseases." Repressed shadow conflicts and unlived potential easily become physical problems embedded in deep tissues, often with symbolic overtones. The body mirrors our psychic state.
The living matrix is the molecular system that is the actual biophysical locus of the so-called subconscious, unconscious and intuitive processes. Structure is genetic and acquired memory, including muscle memory of the fundamental polarized dynamic of approach/avoidance. Deep tissue massage eradicates negative muscle memory by reworking the myofascial and connective tissue. Many cultural practices or roles can be seen as de facto ritual abuse in the way they are collectively forced upon us repetitiously, whether they 'fit' or not. Serial abuse creates repressed rage and depression.
Psychodynamic process therapies work on the psychophysical organism in a way analogous to deep tissue massage, destructuring and freeing up libido or psychic energy. What gets 'processed' is the bound energy. When deeply buried memories and experiences are expressed energy begins to flow more freely. Ideokinesis is a general term applied to mental imagery that affects posture and movement.
The body, emotions and thought field are unblocked by changing the attitudes and emotional reactions to memories. It requires engaging and processing through the emotional or right brain, not just the rational left brain mind. Our conscious self remains unaware of what our body knows, even though it is conditioned by it.
New postures arise from many options. Most archetypal imagery addresses the whole body and not just a part. Archetypal imagery can expose the importance of areas that are small or distant from a location of complaint, often unexpectedly. We assess any changes we sense.
Complexes
Feelings that are not dealt with through emotional release become repressed, and what we repress controls us. Chemical responses become structural traits and functional problems. Cellular, genetic and epigenetic memory are arguably even more primordial levels of information encoding through deep time. When we behave out of character, we wonder what got into us. Some personalities are more complex than others. Complexes are deeply significant in our lives.
In psyche and soma, what makes us feel better is deemed "good" while what makes us feel worse is deemed "bad". The catch-22 is that what we think, feel and believe to be good or bad is preconditioned by archetypal interplay and this is one source of ambivalence, confusion, chaos and mood swings. When this process opposes or thwarts rather than nourishes us, we call it a complex. Complexes are organized experiences patterned by the psychic energy of archetypes as they take form.
We all have a team of voices within, that either work for or against us. Something incompatible, unassimilated, and conflicting exists that can be an obstacle or act as a stimulus to greater effort, opening new possibilities. The complexes themselves are essential, healthy components of the psyche -- the generic forms and dynamic structure of the psyche -- unless they have been twisted by fate. The personal unconscious is the realm of the complex and personalized expressions of archetypes.
Unresolved issues carry a high emotional charge. If an 'entity' expresses through mythical or universal transpersonal imagery, it originated in the collective unconscious. If it is contaminated with individual, personalistic material, if it appears as a personalized conflict, then it emerged from the personal unconscious. We are not unified, consistent personalities. The basis of the human psyche seems to be a collective of selves--a multimind in a multiverse. Independent and autonomous, they relate with one another mostly unknown to our outer awareness.
Jung likened a complex to a rhizome representing the content of a neurosis -- a matrix of complexes, of symptoms, and of dreams. Dreams mirror the underground processes of the psyche, the 'roots' of the disease. Murray Stein points out, "this psychic symptom is a metaphor, in that it is borrowing the language of physicality (cancer, illness) and applying it to the psychic domain. This transfer of language from one domain to another is what poets do when they employ metaphors."
"He is in the grip of a complex, and this psychic factor - powerful, autonomous, and unconscious – is symbolized as a cancer. It must be analyzed and made conscious so that the very real suffering caused by the symptom-symbol can be transformed into psychic suffering. Perhaps other psychic resources can thus also be constellated, which will assist in bringing about the free flow of energy (libido) into more life enhancing tasks and goals." http://www.murraystein.com/symbols.html
Personification is a convenient way of relating to inner states or over-protective false ego states. They are sources of internally-generated self talk and internal debate that further influences our thinking, feelings, and behavior. They are mere facets of the whole or core personality, rather than independent of it. It is "bad" if it renders the core personality fearful or helpless, even though the core personality can generally override it. The persona or social mask is a prime example of a dynamic meant to protect the core in public life.
Subpersonalities
What Jung called complexes are more commonly termed subpersonalities, split-off emotional groupings of felt-sense, perspectives, memories, and beliefs. The less integrated we are, the more they influence us. These 'subways of the subconscious' form at different ages, and range from the sexual persona to the sage. Archetypal characters follow an established plot pattern to accomplish predefined goals.
Adaptations turn into distinct subpersonalities. Because we compulsively, reactivly, or unknowingly slip into them, we can be one type of person, then sometimes another. Unintegrated in the adult personality, they can become problematical. Such partial personalities or energy patterns are fragments of archetypes, like exiled gods and goddesses.
Complexes can appear as split-off subpersonalities or personifications that help us cope with certain aspects of life, such as Rebel, Judge, Child, Victim, Trickster, Skeptic, Warrior, Patriot, Parent, Professional, Protector, Controller, Buddy, Boss, Little Professor, Saboteur, Martyr, Outcast, Scapegoat, Partner, Muse, Artist, Hetaira, Fortune-Teller, Gossip, Innocent, Orphan, Adventurer, or Seeker, Hero/Heroine, etc.
Subs can deal with major issues, such as Love, Knowledge, Compassion, Quest, Humor, Discipline, Healing, Immortality, and Enlightenment. They originate in the cultural unconscious, social roles, internal conflicts, fantasy images, repeated trauma or stress. They mature at uneven rates. New complexes can arise in the spiritual crisis of midlife.
When the complex is cleared of the emotional baggage of the personalistic expression, its true, pure, archetypal center shines through. The personal was superimposed over the transpersonal, but that can be changed by raising it into conscious awareness. Then the nucleus or archetypal core shows through.
When the conflict seems unresolvable for consciousness, when its desires are continually thwarted, we often find that it is the contents of the collective psyche that are intractable. If a complex remains only a greater or lesser strange attractor in the deep psyche, if it doesn't swell up with too much personal baggage, then it usually stays positive. It functions as the energy-giving cell from which all psychic life flows. But if it is overcharged it can turn negative, in the form of neurosis or psychosis.
Unlimited by number, each of us has about a dozen of these unconscious pattern sets which have independent conflicting agendas, needs, impulses, desires, principles, eccentricities, and aspirations. They can appear as different genders and even be different personality types, in terms of extroversion-introversion, and characteristic functions like thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition.
Challenges and events that affect one subpersonality can ripple through the others. But we can become deliberately aware of what areas of life tend to be ruled by a subpersonality patterns and consciously examining those contexts, rather than waiting until the subpersonality has already risen to control. They can be healthy or pathological, positive or negative.
Therapies that connect subpersonalities and increase self-awareness include NLP, Psychosynthesis, and Transactional Analysis. We can extend our consciousness through dialoguing with them. Dialogue is a form of imagery. Rather than enemies, they are alternative strategies that function beyond our conscious control. They only become harmful when they control us inflexibly because we over-identify with them. The therapeutic cycle includes acceptance, cooperation, alignment, integration, and synthesis.
Only a certain number of complexes, varying with the individual, can be made conscious. No one can ever fathom the entire contents of the psyche or self. To attempt to do so would be superheroic, an ego error. It is grandiose to consider. The remaining complexes continue to exist as "nodal points" as "nuclear elements," which belong to the eternal matrix of every human psyche. They remain potential and do not express.
The complex is a meaningful feeling-toned group of representations in the unconscious. It is a manifold of symbolism all compulsively relating to the same archetype that distorts our energetic field. When the charge of one (or more) "nodal points" becomes so powerful that it "magnetically" attracts everything to itself, it confronts the ego with an autonomous alien entity.
Unlike the contents of the personal unconscious which seem to "belong" to us, the contents of the collective unconscious seem alien (Not-I), as if they had invaded from outside. The reintegration of a personal complex has the effect of release and often of healing (mental and physical). But the invasion of a complex from the deep collective psyche is a disturbing, even threatening, phenomenon.
The most powerful and ubiquitous autonomous subpersonalities come from a source having nothing to do with our daily life. They have to do with the deepest irrational contents of the psyche--that which has never been conscious before. Jung termed them shadow, anima/animus, and self.
The Shadow
The figure of the Adversary or Antagonist emerged in the myths of many cultures in the earliest times. It signifies a polarized psyche, suspended between the opposites, rather than freely circulating within the whole field. One representation of archetypal shadow and collective evil is The Devil. Jung claimed the Devil comes to all desirous solitaries "with smooth tongue and clear reasoning" knowing "the right word at the right moment", to lure us to his desire.
In alchemical writing, the shadow is the healing power, the antidote to disease. As the epitome of opposition, it is also symbolized by figures whose essence is “the other”. Jung understood a wide range of alchemic symbols and noticed the shadow appears in the shape of strange and threatening animals such as the wolf, snake and dragon.
The shadow is not experienced directly by the ego because it is part of the unconscious, so instead it is projected onto others. It includes our defense mechanisms: acting out, autistic fantasy, denial, devaluation, displacement, dissociation, idealization, intellectualization, isolation, passive aggression, projection, rationalization, reaction formation, repression, somatization, splitting, suppression, and undoing.
Such emergence in the collective or individual psyche signifies the constellation and energetic challenge of a meta-conflict (Good vs. Evil), the outcome of which will remain in doubt until these energies are either subdued or integrated. The solution of the protagonist (ego)-antagonist duality lies in the Observer Self -- an unidentified source of transfinite information that reconciles the opposites.
Toxic chemical and hormonal responses can be triggered by events in the present that remind us of the past. Locked in by fear and pain, we revert to feelings of insecurity, low self esteem, lack of confidence, lack of abundance, lack of joy etc., stuck and replaying old traumas and insults, again and again. This disturbs self-organization and self-regulation at the psychogenic root.
The nervous system governs the range of emotional expression, quality of communication, mobilization, and the ability to regulate bodily and behavioral states. The autonomic nervous system animates affective experience, emotional expression, facial gestures, communication and contingent social behavior.
Jung contends, "Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is." We might say, the less it is embodied in conscious awareness the more likely it is to go "into" or disturb the body, structurally and symptomatically. It is everything we deny and disown in ourselves, and therefore project outwardly and "stuff" inwardly. In part it is our link to more primitive animal instincts, superseded in early childhood by the conscious mind.
Jung saw the imagination as a bridge, over which the Psyche ("God") can cross from unconsciousness into consciousness. In the mythopoetic approach, The Devil is both the Ur-Adversary, and a tremendous source of strength, a nearly inexhaustible source of energy. Battling him gives us strength. Submitting to him completely is ego-death. The Adversary can be represented by death and dark symbols.
Jung referred to distinct images of Dragons in a number of his works. He initially cites it as the arch-enemy of the Hero archetype, drawing mainly from the New Testament and Gnosticism. The mother Dragon threatens to overwhelm the birth of the God, thus the ego must defeat the Dragon before becoming the Hero/heroine. He later views the Tiamat-Marduk myth as the basis of the Mercurial Serpent image - the Dragon that both destroys and creates itself and represents the Prime Material (or Philosopher's Stone).
The hero/heroine and adversary archetype often resemble each other symbolizing their relationship as two parts of the same whole. Similarly, the treasure which is the goal of many legendary heroes is seen as life itself, the resolution of the struggle between conscious and unconscious; through introversion, the entering of the cave, the treasure is regained, the self reborn.
Joseph Campbell called archetypes the "masks of God", because of their diversity and multidmensionality. Others suggest Lucifer as a "mask" of the Adversary, a motivator and illuminating force of the mind and subconscious. As higher intelligence, understanding and vision, the higher self and reason, Lucifer is seen as the Angel/Lord of Light, Divine Light and Pure Energy He is an initiatory rather than a Biblical character. Like God, he is a Mystery. The Self appears as evil incarnate because the polarities of good and evil are intrinsic to human life. Even spirit can be an adversary to the soul.
Jung identifies the adversarial Dragon directly with the unconscious, the natural state of consciousness vanquished by the Hero. The mother Dragon and the Mercurial Serpent are closely linked as creators. In Jung's idea of the Dragon as an archetype it may be a representation of the life-giving mother, though this is not true for all civilizations. The spirit of evil is fear, the forbidden desire, the adversary who opposes not only each individual heroic deed, but life in its struggle for eternal duration as well.
We have to fall back on Jung's statement that an archetype is a collective cultural artifact for Chaos. The Babylonian Tiamat is a Sumerian archetype. The Egyptian archetype is a snake which destroys life and has to be defeated before life is reborn - in other words the Prime Material. The Chinese archetype is that of the life-giver, the lizard which emerges with the onset of the spring rains.
Jung never contemplated the Hebrew God and the adversary the Devil (Satan) as literal persons. The occult is about energy, not personality. The Devil represents for us what Jung has called the collective shadow. It is a truism that we disown and project our own negativity through the shadow. "The opposite principle" splits the ego at work seeking to privilege its own insecurity. A healthy ego is capable of living with anxiety, ambiguity and ambivalence, without trying to always solve them. The spirit of evil is fear, negation, the adversary who opposes life, bondage, dissolution and extinction in the unconscious.
The reality is that life is anxious, life is ambivalent, life is ambiguous -- not just good or bad, black or white. The more we try to solve or resolve that or split it off, the more we're going to fall into a fundamentalism of some kind—military, political, theological, economic, psychological. The greater the light, the greater the shadow.
What we need is a more nuanced approach to the field -- the myriad psychological forms of gods and goddesses in dynamic interaction, in contemporary terms.
Jung believed to be spiritually alive and balanced we must perceive ourselves as part of a cosmic purpose. Our symptoms and difficulties are trying to transform us. In Quantum Mind and Healing, Arnold Mindell suggests, "Besides looking at symptoms as something to change or heal, you might also look at them this way: "From the viewpoint of dreamland, body symptoms are unsung songs. No body process is "wrong". Illness is simply a suitcase with unpacked musical gifts. Your symptoms are not just a part of an ill body but a group of parallel worlds waiting to be "sung".
We can renew our personal consciousness by examining all of our assumptions about ourselves and our lives, to assist us in growing beyond our difficulties to uncover our hidden potentials. Archetypes, embody our adversaries and allies and allow us to take up a conscious relationship with them.
Archetypes are universal principles, or forces that affect, impel, structure, and permeate the human psyche and the world of human experience on many levels. We can think of them in mythic terms as gods and goddesses. Essentially, archetypes are living symbols we all share in common. They reside in our psyche as patterns of potential but they also manifest in the physical world and in the depth dimension of soul through the imaginal process -- our stream of consciousness.
There is always an imaginal subtext or mythic overlay to the objective physical experiences of our lives. We react to both realities. Mythological motifs and recurrent expressions reawaken certain psychic experiences, formulated in an appropriate way. The remarkable thing is that 'the cure is in the poison'; that is, the healing is contained within the very process that plagues us through sickness, self-delusion, stuckness, fear, despair, pain -- and a poor self-image. Jung's individuation process, separating ourselves consciously from archetypal roles and collective imperatives, challenges us to become more fully engaged in life and a transformative way of life.
Analyst Bud Harris says, "Jung considered these things—that we usually dislike or despise about ourselves—as containers of a divine spark. At first they appear as blocks to our full development, such as the achievement of our goals or hopes and dreams, including those of having relationships built on love and trust. But, within these very blocks are the seeds, even the roadmaps and the energy, that when opened and tapped lead us to wholeness, which means the ability to live as fully as possible." He suggests we (1) Fully engage in life, (2) Reflect upon life, (3) Bear the burden of that conflict, and (4) Live the transformation.
Loss of soul is loss of self. If you are depressed, you have disconnected from the life giving place of energy, the bridge between the conscious and the unconscious. "Being that has soul is living being. Soul is the living thing in [us], which lives of itself and causes life" (Jung, CW 9/1, par. 56). Living spirituality grants us access to the numinous. Spirituality, allows our consciousness to be changed by the experience of the numinous. This is essential to confront and counteract the depression and confusion resulting from our existential condition.
We learn to listen more to the unconscious and its expressions, to discover and integrate our disowned parts and pursue an ultimate wholeness and balance. through continuous transformation. Difficult at times, it forces us to question our basic assumptions about who we are and what we value, again and again, even though our ego always prefers comfort and safety to transformation.
In mythology, defeating the dragon and winning the maiden is a metaphor for being heroic enough to leave the passive, dependent world of the illusory security of living unconsciously. We win our engagement with life through consciousness, mindfulness, and diffuse awareness -- unifying masculine and feminine energies within. When we experience ourselves, our being, as rooted in the unconscious and our instinctual lives, we are rooted in the feminine principle or the ground within ourselves. Becoming whole and renewing mystic vision is a spiritual necessity.
This is not self-improvement nor self-actualization, because it is not a heroic developmental process with a mundane social goal of security and prestige, but a way of life. It is about transformation and breaking through limitations -- conscious realization of our complex unique personality, including its strengths and weaknesses. Self-knowledge helps us recognize the importance the unconscious as a partner in informing our lives.
Facing the unpleasant reality that the pursuit of self-knowledge, we question every aspect of conventional wisdom, of our religion, or lack of religion, our notions of what love is, our approaches to problem solving, our ideas of peace and the value of struggle, of the value of suffering, and the meaning of unhappiness in our lives.
Jung suggested that the layer in our psyche he called collective unconscious provides the archetypal "geological" structure. Long forgotten memories strive to reveal itself in coded images and symbols, Jung called “archetypes.” Myths, fairy tales, legends, fantasies, and dreams give content to the events in our psyches. They underlie historical continuity and 'inhabit' a timeless, transcendent dimension. The collapse of time and space is characteristic of psychic experience. The energy created by the tension of opposites forms the raw material for a process.
The imaginal is a natural alternative level of reality, which is the spiritual aspect of our soul, but that doesn't mean we have to take psychic reality literally. We are part of a bigger reality that can change our perspective that has been within us since the beginning of time. We can learn the artless art of watching images in the psyche's mirror.and mindfulness of self. The imaginal is the voice of the transcendent. Imagination mediates between conscious and unconscious (outer and inner). It embodies the first images and the common matrix of myth and language.
Psyche "dresses up" the archetypes with our personal experience. Because they affect our attitudes, they impact what we believe, how we think and feel and our subsequent behavior. They are patterns of meaning and order that extends through every level. We know them largely by their EFFECTS. Images themselves are the embodiment of meaning. Metaphors of nature mirror our nature and processes of birth, death and renewal.
The gist of the holographic paradigm is that there is a more fundamental reality. There is an invisible flux not comprised of parts, but an inseparable interconnectedness. The holographic paradigm is one of reciprocal enfolding and unfolding of patterns of information. All potential information about the universe is holographically encoded in the spectrum of frequency patterns constantly bombarding us.
'Hologram' may be more than a metaphor for the emergence and expression of manifestation. Metaphors provide a reference point without defining reality. Thus metaphors are instructive. They are a central Way of leaping the epistemological chasm between old and new knowledge, old and new ways of essential being. Metaphorical understanding is the norm.
Hopefully the last in a series of mechanical models, the notion that the brain is like a computer is shifting toward more sufficient, more holistic analogies. Our understanding of complex, mysterious things always proceeds from metaphor to metaphor. When a metaphor changes new perspectives open in an ephochal shift that the old metaphor denied. We are all conditioned to think about our minds and selves on a very deep, very unconscious, very reflexive level. An effective metaphor must link up with revolutions in the realms of religion, spirituality, parapsychology, art, music, literature, and more.
Metaphors help us make this leap. A metaphor is the expression of an understanding of one concept in terms of another concept, where there is some similarity or correlation between the two; understanding one concept in terms of another. Perhaps universal history is the unfolding of several metaphors. Mental pictures and verbal processes meet in metaphor which promotes retrieval of images and verbal information that intersects with information aroused by the topic -- implying meaning.
Metaphors Be With You
Archetypes developed over millions of years to provide us with information about life's experiences. Myths are metaphorical representations of the content of the archetypes and can be used to provide us with information about life's experiences.
One value of myth and ritual is the unbidden psychological effect of having the archetypal forms pulled from the unconscious world into the conscious world. It enables us to gain insight into the sources of our fears, reactions, behaviors, and perceptions. Another value is as blueprint for handling specific situations that we experience in the cycle of our lifetimes.
Archetypes are root metaphors. Metaphor is not merely a superficial phenomenon of language, but shapes our judgments, and structures our language. Displaying many facets, metaphor pervades our everyday non-theoretical language.
A metaphor is a holistic schema, a unifying framework that links a conceptual representation to its sensory and experiential ground. It embodies the gestalt and ecological properties of thought. We can even imagine the physical as a metaphor for psychic transformation. Intense physical experiences go deep within our being and those memories are stored deep within the tissue and organs. Such experience is accessible as epistemological metaphors - how we know what we know, and what that experience is "like".
The network of underlying metaphors form a cognitive map, a web of concepts organized in terms which serve to ground the abstract. Archetypes embody this metaphorical quality. They help us enter a problematic situation in order to solve it, to explore it, and explore the world restructured by the metaphor. We can tap the source of creativity, healing and holistic restructuring through imagination and metaphor.
The possibilities for concepts and for thought are shaped in very special ways by both the body and the brain that evolved to control it. Each archetype can be literally or metaphorically illustrated by a consciousness state, particularly if we include dreamlife.
In fact, they are all present within each and every one of us when we turn our attention inward. It is as if archetypes 'happen to us'. We can observe what appears while we were just 'allowing it to happen'. But then don't just leave it there, engage it, grapple with and challenge it, confront it, enter into a dialogue with whatever you have come face to face with.
In Jung's biological model, archetypes exist embedded in the collective unconscious. The archetype is a primordial image whose content manifests only when it has become conscious and therefore informed by the material of conscious experience. The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a capacity or potential. The archetypal image makes the archetype appear in consciousness allowing us to form an active relationship with it.
Plato suggested we are each born with a unique daimon or guardian before we are born, and it has selected an
image or a pattern that we will live on earth. The daimon is the soul companion that guides us, but at birth we forget. The daimon remembers, however, what belongs to us, and therefore, it is our daimon that is the carrier of our destiny. It is essentially identical with Jung's notion of the Self.
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho echoes Jung's theory in biological terms. She postulates that, "a pure coherent state for the entire system would be a many-mode quantum electrodynamical field with a collective phase over all modes. It may be attainable only under very exceptional circumstances, as during an aesthetic or religious experience when the ‘pure duration’ of the here and now becomes completely delocalized in the realm of no-time and no-space.”
Metaphorical analysis displaces the assumed meanings of metaphors, especially if we expect those metaphors to provide stable epistemological connections. Alternative readings of metaphors, like altered states of consciousness, illustrate how knowledge and truth are displaced once they are detached from habits, memes, positivism, intended meanings, or predetermined uses, allowing us to rethink the narratives of our lives. More important than the stability of any methodological labels or particular methods is the way in which a specific processing technique is used as well as how that changes our possible interpretations and outcomes, including our self-image.
When metaphors are synchronistic, emergent, spontaneous, self-organizing expressions of our dynamic stream of consciousness, they are an imaginal encoding of information that bridges the domains of conscious and unconscious worlds, material and transpersonal realms. Such metaphors can be deeply transformative--more than mere language, a technology for changing our behaviors, feelings, thoughts, and beliefs. Intentional contact and immersion in these metaphors can transform our spirit and soul.
How can we know or describe anything about the changes we have not yet experienced, change that by universal consensus takes us beyond the realm of everyday reality, for which our words and concepts have been fashioned? Metaphors contain a subtle communication by containing meaning in a delicate net of imagery.
In psychotherapy and mysticism, both, it is characteristic of the Self to speak to the ego-personality in the language of myth and metaphor. It allows us to grasp some image of that which remains as-yet-unknown. The Self is an archetypal idea that coordinates and balances the relationship between the ego and psyche as a whole. One metaphor describes it this way.
Consider a symphony orchestra performance; the Self can be thought of as the conductor and the musicians coming together in an effort to extract the best music from the best talents; whereas the ego is the orchestra's manager who makes the humble but necessary decisions about bookings and tickets, hotels and transportation and meals. The manager is obviously not the music, and it would be catastrophic to confuse the manager's role with that of the conductor, but without the manager's services, the orchestra doesn't play. (Irene Gad, M.D., Ph.D)
Classical metaphors of transformation are embodied in the primordial wisdom traditions. Metaphors are strongly related to process-oriented psychotherapy and immersion in the stream of consciousness [itself a metaphor]. The process of individuation is largely coded in terms of metaphor and metaphorical transformations through the union of opposites. The notion and phenomenon of metaphor raises as many questions as it answers. Metaphors do not directly describe perceptual reality, but its language helps us imagine an "as if" reality -- the depth of the imaginal psyche.
The role of conscious and unconscious processes in metaphor production and interpretation is ubiquitous. The role of "seeing as" permeates the development of consciousness. It reflects interactions between archetypes, imagination, perception and cognition; how bodily and neural processes create and constrain imagination. Language, concept and world are the three realms of metaphor which is a mode of cognition.
In metaphorical reality, death and rebirth is a common occurrence. We die to our old form and waken to a new way of being. There are latent patterns and images that we recognize and give form to when they are activated, like seed potentials. New life comes from the darkness of our own unconscious creative process.
Archetypal Psychology
Jung modeled the Self as the harmonization of such opposites as masculine/feminine, good/bad, hero/adversary, etc. It also contains the patterns for experience of the cyclic nature of life's crises points. Its contents include the quest for meaning and the cycle of death and rebirth. Containing everything, it represents the maximal potential of any individual.
The Self provides an inner model of oneself in an idealized future. It confers experiences of the highest value through powers beyond one's conscious abilities. It is a mode of transcending the mundane world. Therefore, Self is both personal and transcendent. This gives divine worth to each individual manifestation of human nature, and dignity to everyone's' personal experience. The archetypes, symbolized collectively by the Self, shape and define human behavior, attitudes, thoughts, feelings, and the very body itself.
Archetypes are vessels that inspire and contain our awe and dictate our emotions. In deliberate rituals, we contact or identify with them, and they permeate the psyche modulating and balancing the system. We begin invocations by creating the holographic image of the godform. In the reverse passive process of possession, the process is largely unconscious and may go unnnoticed. If you identify with an archetype, you lose your humanity, your individuality. You get inflated by it. You get taken over by it. And you may remain blind to or in denial of the whole cycle.
The Collective Unconscious is essentially a superhologram. Nonlocal consciousness is not confined to specific points in space, including brains or bodies, nor to the present moment. Imagination is unbound. It is an ordering principle that can inject information into disorganized or random systems. It can operate beyond mere awareness, unconsciously, drawing on individual and collective consciousness, as well as the world or environment.
Symbols arise from and are embedded in the environment as holographic fields of energy. They are morphogenic veils of primal forces. If your brain acts like a self-contained hologram, it is possible your consciousness is actually a piece of a much larger hologram of overall human consciousness. Jung noticed that patterns spontaneously appear over and over around the world. They also appear as our Ancestral Memories or holographic wisdom field.
In the archetypal world, everyone is the same, all around the world... we are all Gods, and our emotional addictions to pain and suffering, contempt, insecurities, doubt, failure, is holographically-recorded and can be holographically healed. All archetypes are a form of human expression that is both holographic and physical. Physical formations of archetypal sequences cause humans to behave in parallel manners to each ancestor that is associated.
Integration is a function of intentionality -- conscious and unconsciously maintained or incorporated. Integration occurs both without effort, as a redesign of the central processor of our minds, and voluntarily as a deliberate effort to understand, find meaning, and as rectification of our behavior towards others and towards ourselves.
Imagination is structured by the archetypal potentials of the unconscious. Archetypes structure the possibility to generate and entertain such ideas even in dreams. The archetype itself cannot be known but structures everything we come to know. Their totality functions as a psychic organ. Universal themes appear in distinct cultural garb. The psychoid field imposes holistic function. Autonomous inner forces arouse compelling opportunities to enact archetypal behaviors. They guide our perceptions and behavior, usually without our awareness.
With archetypes comes the potential for wisdom, relatedness, sociality, ambiguity, paranoia, projection, identification, denial, inflation, subpersonalities (fragmentation), defensiveness, obsession, hypnotic dissociation, the contagion of participation mystique, mythologizing, complexes, compensation, self-delusion, and transcendence. Compensation may calm or disturb consciousness.
There is no imperative for the ego to integrate these alternative perspectives, private and public myths. The unconscious can produce deep wisdom and utter nonsense. It is up to the ego to discriminate. The value of myths is purely heuristic, not pragmatic. Mythological consciousness has a persona, cultural and archetypal dimension that manifest in dreams, fantasies, delusion and visions.
The concept of a God, archetype or god-form is not necessarily an absolute but appears to be more than symbolic. We perceive and label their symbol clusters which we identify through pattern recognition. Such energy is ontological and epistemological -- it informs us 'how we know what we know'. Epistemological metaphors -- how you know what you know and what it's like -- are a gateway to the subconscious, as are dreams and symptoms. They veil our conception of reality. By analogizing, rather than interpreting, we simply ask, "What is this image like?" Analogies carry us into many meanings, amplifying, not restricting the image.
Epistemology is the study of knowledge; how we know something. Epistemological metaphors are the symbolic language of our unconscious and underlie every thought and feeling we have. When you are sad or when you are happy how do you know that you are sad or happy? There is a metaphor that contains all the history and memories associated with that particular state. It might be a deep dark hole or a bright blue sky; it could be a heavy weight or a bright shining light; it could be a bottomless pit or a shining lake, but every ‘sad’ or every ‘happy’ will be individual idiosyncratic and unique.
We can use our holographic minds to facilitate realization of our 3-D visualizations. Attitudes also are related to our body chemistry, to stress hormones and lifestyle. Emotions control the immune system. The psychosomatic network can be easily accessed through hypnosis. There is a biological, emotional, mental and spiritual aspect to healing. Interrelating metaphors enable a cycle of transformation between epistemological modes.
Multidimensional perception of deep natural processes informs our unconscious being and behavior. In the holographic model of consciousness, the processing of mental forms occurs within the context of a part/whole relationship, where the identified part exists within the code of the whole. This paradigm can be applied to the energetic archetypal field.
"Each grain (brain) of a hologram (pantheon of gods) contains the whole image at very low resolution. As more grains (brains) are involved, the hologram (pantheon) gains more detail. As the hologram becomes more and more detailed, those details influence the behavior of the brains." (Burt Webb)
The interactive dynamics of holographic gods are recounted in myths. They are our motivating factors, operating like cyclic, bipolar and strange attractors within our psyches, shifting our energetic gears. Some forces are more user-friendly than others. There are wisdom keys that help us understand these discrete states of consciousness more fully. They are the substanceless blueprints of all form, hinting at deeper Mystery.
Reality is fluid, dynamic process that is multi-dimensional, multi-leveled, multivalent, and meaning-full. That reality is subtle, expressing an ontological relationship between the self and the universe. To be human is necessarily to participate in reality, whose perception is potentially active, conscious, intentional, and creative).
Functioning like "psychic DNA", archetypes are the strange attractors organizing the psyche. The psychoid level of archetypes is analogous to the heritable DNA biohologram, whereas their expressive nature can be likened to epigenetics. Epigenetics is typically defined as the study of heritable changes in gene expression that are not due to changes in DNA sequence. Every cell in the body has the same genetic information. What makes cells, tissues and organs different is that different sets of genes are turned on or expressed.
Environmental factors and our choices alter the way genes and archetypes are expressed and characterize our being. Jung claimed that "the gods have become diseases." The field of epigenetics is now revealing a molecular basis for how heritable information other than DNA sequence can influence gene function, morphology, and plasticity. These advances also add to our understanding of transcriptional regulation, nuclear organization, development and disease.
Archetypes characterize and particularize perennial wisdom, language, images and ideas (theories), and emotion-laden complexes. Sometimes, such complex expression looks like pathology or pathologizing but psyche is trying to tell its perennial story in particularized form. We exist in relation to ourselves, to others, to myths, to images, or to archetypes. Their expression is the essence of our being.
Typical archetypal correspondences come alive through direct conscious experience. The sight of even one aspect of the hologram is enough to grasp the unity of the macrocosm. Pure and abstract energetic forms, like holograms, contain within themselves all possible combinations and expressions. Aspects of nature are reflected in our own natures. But we don't recognize and fully act in accordance with our divine nature, so we are subject to the severe and often capricious rule of "divine forces", and the corresponding passions within ourselves. By its very nature, gnosis permeates and enlivens all things.
"...it can only be embodied, i.e., manifested, actualized, in time and space. Less a method of knowing than a fluid way of knowing, "feminine" gnosis is deeply rooted in the body and in Nature, which contains the body. "Feminine" gnosis is produced by Nature, supported by Nature. Like Nature, it is characterized by emergence, process, and infinite creativity.
Like esoteric gnosis, "Feminine" gnosis approaches Nature as a repository of signs, a book which must be read, interpreted; more than that, however, "feminine" gnosis approaches Nature not only as a repository of actual signs, but as a repository of potential signs, like a book which is still being written by us in participation with Nature. "Feminine" gnosis places great value on personal experience, i.e., the subjective. It is a way of knowing which entails opening, not closing. It is a way of knowing in which a subject opens onto an object, and thereby enters into relation with it, and experiences a change in being as a result. " (Karen Clair Voss)
Holographic Gods
Over aeons, ritual observances produced reassuring order and security in a very uncertain world. If you had a problem, chances are some mything being had it first, and moreso. Christianity suppressed, reviled and demonized the ancient pagan gods but could only reallocate rather than eradicate their forces. Their primordial correlates remained. Because they are invisible and subjective doesn't make them any less potent.
The Age of Enlightenment dismissed their spirituality, and Freud's psychology reduced them conceptually to projections. But we err if we think of them as evil or nonexistent. Jung saw them in a more positive, if abstract, light, as unconscious symbols. But the gods are in no way limited to this and continue filling the space between primeval Divinity and mankind.
It is our comprehension of their deepest meaning that remains primitive, even though we know that they aren't agents of Satan. Debate about the reality and nature of spiritual entities continues. The old biases and contempt for anthropomorphic deities is still with us, even as those very forces inform and deform as continuously as ever. To what degree and how they are real has been codified in archetypal psychology, extending Jung's theory of the heroic monomyth and Self into a dynamic polytheistic field.
Archetypes as described by Jung , play out their eternal patterns with little regard for our puny human personalities, which are both their medium and their externalization in the mundane world. Collectively, they house or encode our diverse identities in their shifting dynamics. All these essential qualities exist as potentials within us. Which ones get expressed depends on circumstances and the environment.
Functioning like "psychic DNA", archetypes are the strange attractors organizing the psyche. The psychoid level of archetypes is analogous to the heritable DNA biohologram, whereas their expressive nature can be likened to epigenetics. Epigenetics is typically defined as the study of heritable changes in gene expression that are not due to changes in DNA sequence. Every cell in the body has the same genetic information. What makes cells, tissues and organs different is that different sets of genes are turned on or expressed.
Environmental factors and our choices alter the way genes and archetypes are expressed and characterize our being. Jung claimed that "the gods have become diseases." The field of epigenetics is now revealing a molecular basis for how heritable information other than DNA sequence can influence gene function, morphology, and plasticity. These advances also add to our understanding of transcriptional regulation, nuclear organization, development and disease.
Archetypes characterize and particularize perennial wisdom, language, images and ideas (theories), and emotion-laden complexes. Sometimes, such complex expression looks like pathology or pathologizing but psyche is trying to tell its perennial story in particularized form. We exist in relation to ourselves, to others, to myths, to images, or to archetypes. Their expression is the essence of our being. When our dominant archetypes change we go through transitions.
Archetypes are formative principles and structural elements, as well as typical preconscious modes of apprehension and action. Frey-Rohn characterized them as, "...not only the focal point of ancient pathways but also the center from which new creative endeavors emanated... "The archetypes, then being inherent in the life process, represented forces and tendencies which not only repeated experiences but also formed creative centers of numinous effect ".
Archetypal images designate typical basic forms, prefigurative determinants, and the tendency to repeat the same psychic experiences. They conceal the unborn eternal archetype while they reveal particularized meaning and form.
Holographic archetypes effectively echo their nested-structure and resonant patterns throughout the field as phenomenological, biophysical, literal and symbolic "reflectaphors". They are fractal expressions and reiterations of psychic life. Archetypal morphogenetic fields (or attractors) arise harmonically within nested domains.
The interweaving transient forms of the holographic archetype include the hologram, psychic structure, wave-genetics, and synchronicity. As cosmic forces and patterns, the archetypes are holographic, existing in their own dimensional spaces, unfolding as nature presents opportunities for expression. When we embody them, and can see through the process, they become manifest, living realities -- a meta-text to our own desires and lifestyles.
For millennia priests and shamans have taken on the sacred roles, embodying the purely spiritual for their communities, uniting the heavens and earth. They manifest their divine splendor and awesomeness in our microcosmic lives. Light, energy and life-force span the cosmos as holographic connectors with the whole. Holographic patterns in the mindbody manifest in the outer world, from essence to synergistic tangibility.
Holographic gods remain true to their own primordial patterns and domains of influence, effectively exerting their wills over our own and apparently usurping or overriding our rational agendas and plans for our own lives. Which of these patterns intrudes on our lives determines whether we are in resonance with the broader environment or at odds with it and ourselves. Try as we might, we cannot separate ourselves from this spiritual component that underlies our existence and all existence, as archetypes are in no way limited to the human sphere.
Holographic Gods produce their own forms of archetypal intoxication; they can possess, frustrate and even defeat our best intentions. But we are not the eternal slaves of these behavior paradigms. Jung's methods of individuation and other transpersonal therapies open the way to developing more conscious relationships with these cosmic patterns, leading to more individual freedom from archetypal role-boundedness and spiritual parochialism.
The story of gods in our lives and the universe is still being written. Extra-dimensional truths are encoded in the descriptions traditionally described as gods and goddesses. The ancient classical gods are well documented, but the Gods of the gaps are less well-known, occupying those parts of the Universe that are unexplored and unexplained, that science is just beginning to explore, such as the so-called god particle.
Holographic Gods challenge own own beliefs in God or not, putting them to the secular acid test. The catch-22 is that even all those notions are conditioned by the very archetypes we seek to illumine, whether or not we identify with them consciously. They are just as likely to produce misguided inner authority as perennial wisdom. Whether we like it or not they enter us, intrude on our personal dramas, by modulating the playing field in the game of life.
All archetypes are a form of human expression that is both holographic and physical. Physical formations of archetypal sequences cause humans to behave in parallel ways to each associated ancestor, experience or process. Integration is a function of intentionality -- conscious and unconsciously maintained, or incorporated. Integration occurs both without effort, as a redesign of the central processor of our minds, and voluntarily as a deliberate effort to understand, find meaning, and rectify our behavior towards self, other and world. Sometimes when we lose ourselves in transcendent experiences, we somehow come back reborn and full of compassion. We are nurtured by the depths.
Images, like the holographic universe, have a deeper enfolded dimension. Memories aren't localized in one place, but are spread across the associative areas of the brain. Associative areas aren't set aside for particular functions like speech production, language comprehension, and memory encoding. Instead, they are responsible for all "miscellaneous" tasks. Each associative area seems to contain echoes of all of the information. Symbols arise from and are embedded in the environment as holographic fields of energy. There are innumerable morphogenic veils of primal forces.
Archetypal realities, passed on through DNA, are expressed in distinctive neuronal tracts in the brain. They include customs and laws regarding property, incest, marriage, kinship, and social status or roles; myths and legends; beliefs about the supernatural and cosmos; gambling, adultery, homicide, schizophrenia, and the therapies to deal with them. A mythic and visionary language of immediate experience encompasses themes of deepest, highest, and ultimate concern.
Jean Shinoda Bolin describes the unfolding process of individuation: "As you get older, your path becomes increasingly a realization that you have moved in an authentic way along the journey. There are the archetypes in both men and women: goddesses in every woman, gods in every man. . . Most men and women find that they’re a mix of different archetypal energies, much as we are all mixes of human talents."
In a holographic universe, even time and space can no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else. Time and three-dimensional space also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. Core mystical experiences of transformation usher us into this holographic domain of pure frequencies, altered states of consciousness, and revelations.
Altered states open the way to polyphasic depth, expressing and engaging meaning. We learn to tolerate the irrational and holographically experience the simultaneity of cosmos and individual life. At its deeper level, reality is a sort of super hologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously, informed by the depth dimension of psyche or the imaginal.
Some suggest that given the right technology we might be able to retrieve scenes from the past from the super-holographic level of reality. Or not. A fantasy of such penetration or phenomena inside the head is not the same as that penetration. A fantasy of enlightenment is not stabilized enlightenment. But it may be a pro-active step in the right direction in distinguishing ourselves from the holographic gods.
REFERENCES
Berkovich, Simon, Holographic model of human memory and tridimensionality of the space of perception http://structurevisualspacegroup.blogspot.com/2010/10/holographic-model-of-human-memory-and.html
Cope, Theo A., Fear of Jung: The Complex Doctrine And Emotional Science,
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Hoeller, Stephen, (Translation by Stephan A. Hoeller, © 1982) http://www.gnosis.org/library/7Sermons_hoeller_trans.htm
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Miller, Iona, 1993 IMAGE PROCESSING: The Fractal Nature of Emergent Consciousness
Mitchell, Edgar The Quantum Hologram And the Nature of Consciousness Edgar D. Mitchell, Sc.D.1, and Robert Staretz, M.S. , Journal of Cosmology, 2011, Vol. 14. http://journalofcosmology.com/Consciousness149.html
Russell, http://www.peterrussell.com/SG/Ch8.php
Siegfried, Tom, Self as Symbol The loopy nature of consciousness trips up scientists studying themselves. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/337947/description/Self_as_Symbol
Marin Soljacic,(1) Suzanne Sears,(1) Mordechai Segev,(2,3) Dmitriy Krylov,(2) and Keren Bergman,(2), Self-Similarity and Fractals Driven by Soliton Dynamics http://www.mit.edu/~soljacic/frac_euro_fin.pdf
Stein, Murray, “Symbols and the Transformation of the Psyche ” http://www.murraystein.com/symbols.htmlS
Susskind, Leonard (1995). "The World as a Hologram". Journal of Mathematical Physics 36 (11): 6377–6396. arXiv:hep-th/9409089. Bibcode 1995JMP....36.6377S. doi:10.1063/1.531249.
Voss Karen-Clair, Gnosis, http://www.istanbul-yes-istanbul.co.uk/gnosis/istanbul.htm
Zimmerman, Michael, E., (2008), The Singularity: A Crucial Phase in Divine Self-Actualization? Published in Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy. http://www.colorado.edu/artssciences/CHA/profiles/zimmpdf/Singularity.pdf
Jung modeled the Self as the harmonization of such opposites as masculine/feminine, good/bad, hero/adversary, etc. It also contains the patterns for experience of the cyclic nature of life's crises points. Its contents include the quest for meaning and the cycle of death and rebirth. Containing everything, it represents the maximal potential of any individual.
The Self provides an inner model of oneself in an idealized future. It confers experiences of the highest value through powers beyond one's conscious abilities. It is a mode of transcending the mundane world. Therefore, Self is both personal and transcendent. This gives divine worth to each individual manifestation of human nature, and dignity to everyone's' personal experience. The archetypes, symbolized collectively by the Self, shape and define human behavior, attitudes, thoughts, feelings, and the very body itself.
Archetypes are vessels that inspire and contain our awe and dictate our emotions. In deliberate rituals, we contact or identify with them, and they permeate the psyche modulating and balancing the system. We begin invocations by creating the holographic image of the godform. In the reverse passive process of possession, the process is largely unconscious and may go unnnoticed. If you identify with an archetype, you lose your humanity, your individuality. You get inflated by it. You get taken over by it. And you may remain blind to or in denial of the whole cycle.
The Collective Unconscious is essentially a superhologram. Nonlocal consciousness is not confined to specific points in space, including brains or bodies, nor to the present moment. Imagination is unbound. It is an ordering principle that can inject information into disorganized or random systems. It can operate beyond mere awareness, unconsciously, drawing on individual and collective consciousness, as well as the world or environment.
Symbols arise from and are embedded in the environment as holographic fields of energy. They are morphogenic veils of primal forces. If your brain acts like a self-contained hologram, it is possible your consciousness is actually a piece of a much larger hologram of overall human consciousness. Jung noticed that patterns spontaneously appear over and over around the world. They also appear as our Ancestral Memories or holographic wisdom field.
In the archetypal world, everyone is the same, all around the world... we are all Gods, and our emotional addictions to pain and suffering, contempt, insecurities, doubt, failure, is holographically-recorded and can be holographically healed. All archetypes are a form of human expression that is both holographic and physical. Physical formations of archetypal sequences cause humans to behave in parallel manners to each ancestor that is associated.
Integration is a function of intentionality -- conscious and unconsciously maintained or incorporated. Integration occurs both without effort, as a redesign of the central processor of our minds, and voluntarily as a deliberate effort to understand, find meaning, and as rectification of our behavior towards others and towards ourselves.
Imagination is structured by the archetypal potentials of the unconscious. Archetypes structure the possibility to generate and entertain such ideas even in dreams. The archetype itself cannot be known but structures everything we come to know. Their totality functions as a psychic organ. Universal themes appear in distinct cultural garb. The psychoid field imposes holistic function. Autonomous inner forces arouse compelling opportunities to enact archetypal behaviors. They guide our perceptions and behavior, usually without our awareness.
With archetypes comes the potential for wisdom, relatedness, sociality, ambiguity, paranoia, projection, identification, denial, inflation, subpersonalities (fragmentation), defensiveness, obsession, hypnotic dissociation, the contagion of participation mystique, mythologizing, complexes, compensation, self-delusion, and transcendence. Compensation may calm or disturb consciousness.
There is no imperative for the ego to integrate these alternative perspectives, private and public myths. The unconscious can produce deep wisdom and utter nonsense. It is up to the ego to discriminate. The value of myths is purely heuristic, not pragmatic. Mythological consciousness has a persona, cultural and archetypal dimension that manifest in dreams, fantasies, delusion and visions.
The concept of a God, archetype or god-form is not necessarily an absolute but appears to be more than symbolic. We perceive and label their symbol clusters which we identify through pattern recognition. Such energy is ontological and epistemological -- it informs us 'how we know what we know'. Epistemological metaphors -- how you know what you know and what it's like -- are a gateway to the subconscious, as are dreams and symptoms. They veil our conception of reality. By analogizing, rather than interpreting, we simply ask, "What is this image like?" Analogies carry us into many meanings, amplifying, not restricting the image.
Epistemology is the study of knowledge; how we know something. Epistemological metaphors are the symbolic language of our unconscious and underlie every thought and feeling we have. When you are sad or when you are happy how do you know that you are sad or happy? There is a metaphor that contains all the history and memories associated with that particular state. It might be a deep dark hole or a bright blue sky; it could be a heavy weight or a bright shining light; it could be a bottomless pit or a shining lake, but every ‘sad’ or every ‘happy’ will be individual idiosyncratic and unique.
We can use our holographic minds to facilitate realization of our 3-D visualizations. Attitudes also are related to our body chemistry, to stress hormones and lifestyle. Emotions control the immune system. The psychosomatic network can be easily accessed through hypnosis. There is a biological, emotional, mental and spiritual aspect to healing. Interrelating metaphors enable a cycle of transformation between epistemological modes.
Multidimensional perception of deep natural processes informs our unconscious being and behavior. In the holographic model of consciousness, the processing of mental forms occurs within the context of a part/whole relationship, where the identified part exists within the code of the whole. This paradigm can be applied to the energetic archetypal field.
"Each grain (brain) of a hologram (pantheon of gods) contains the whole image at very low resolution. As more grains (brains) are involved, the hologram (pantheon) gains more detail. As the hologram becomes more and more detailed, those details influence the behavior of the brains." (Burt Webb)
The interactive dynamics of holographic gods are recounted in myths. They are our motivating factors, operating like cyclic, bipolar and strange attractors within our psyches, shifting our energetic gears. Some forces are more user-friendly than others. There are wisdom keys that help us understand these discrete states of consciousness more fully. They are the substanceless blueprints of all form, hinting at deeper Mystery.
Reality is fluid, dynamic process that is multi-dimensional, multi-leveled, multivalent, and meaning-full. That reality is subtle, expressing an ontological relationship between the self and the universe. To be human is necessarily to participate in reality, whose perception is potentially active, conscious, intentional, and creative).
Functioning like "psychic DNA", archetypes are the strange attractors organizing the psyche. The psychoid level of archetypes is analogous to the heritable DNA biohologram, whereas their expressive nature can be likened to epigenetics. Epigenetics is typically defined as the study of heritable changes in gene expression that are not due to changes in DNA sequence. Every cell in the body has the same genetic information. What makes cells, tissues and organs different is that different sets of genes are turned on or expressed.
Environmental factors and our choices alter the way genes and archetypes are expressed and characterize our being. Jung claimed that "the gods have become diseases." The field of epigenetics is now revealing a molecular basis for how heritable information other than DNA sequence can influence gene function, morphology, and plasticity. These advances also add to our understanding of transcriptional regulation, nuclear organization, development and disease.
Archetypes characterize and particularize perennial wisdom, language, images and ideas (theories), and emotion-laden complexes. Sometimes, such complex expression looks like pathology or pathologizing but psyche is trying to tell its perennial story in particularized form. We exist in relation to ourselves, to others, to myths, to images, or to archetypes. Their expression is the essence of our being.
Typical archetypal correspondences come alive through direct conscious experience. The sight of even one aspect of the hologram is enough to grasp the unity of the macrocosm. Pure and abstract energetic forms, like holograms, contain within themselves all possible combinations and expressions. Aspects of nature are reflected in our own natures. But we don't recognize and fully act in accordance with our divine nature, so we are subject to the severe and often capricious rule of "divine forces", and the corresponding passions within ourselves. By its very nature, gnosis permeates and enlivens all things.
"...it can only be embodied, i.e., manifested, actualized, in time and space. Less a method of knowing than a fluid way of knowing, "feminine" gnosis is deeply rooted in the body and in Nature, which contains the body. "Feminine" gnosis is produced by Nature, supported by Nature. Like Nature, it is characterized by emergence, process, and infinite creativity.
Like esoteric gnosis, "Feminine" gnosis approaches Nature as a repository of signs, a book which must be read, interpreted; more than that, however, "feminine" gnosis approaches Nature not only as a repository of actual signs, but as a repository of potential signs, like a book which is still being written by us in participation with Nature. "Feminine" gnosis places great value on personal experience, i.e., the subjective. It is a way of knowing which entails opening, not closing. It is a way of knowing in which a subject opens onto an object, and thereby enters into relation with it, and experiences a change in being as a result. " (Karen Clair Voss)
Holographic Gods
Over aeons, ritual observances produced reassuring order and security in a very uncertain world. If you had a problem, chances are some mything being had it first, and moreso. Christianity suppressed, reviled and demonized the ancient pagan gods but could only reallocate rather than eradicate their forces. Their primordial correlates remained. Because they are invisible and subjective doesn't make them any less potent.
The Age of Enlightenment dismissed their spirituality, and Freud's psychology reduced them conceptually to projections. But we err if we think of them as evil or nonexistent. Jung saw them in a more positive, if abstract, light, as unconscious symbols. But the gods are in no way limited to this and continue filling the space between primeval Divinity and mankind.
It is our comprehension of their deepest meaning that remains primitive, even though we know that they aren't agents of Satan. Debate about the reality and nature of spiritual entities continues. The old biases and contempt for anthropomorphic deities is still with us, even as those very forces inform and deform as continuously as ever. To what degree and how they are real has been codified in archetypal psychology, extending Jung's theory of the heroic monomyth and Self into a dynamic polytheistic field.
Archetypes as described by Jung , play out their eternal patterns with little regard for our puny human personalities, which are both their medium and their externalization in the mundane world. Collectively, they house or encode our diverse identities in their shifting dynamics. All these essential qualities exist as potentials within us. Which ones get expressed depends on circumstances and the environment.
Functioning like "psychic DNA", archetypes are the strange attractors organizing the psyche. The psychoid level of archetypes is analogous to the heritable DNA biohologram, whereas their expressive nature can be likened to epigenetics. Epigenetics is typically defined as the study of heritable changes in gene expression that are not due to changes in DNA sequence. Every cell in the body has the same genetic information. What makes cells, tissues and organs different is that different sets of genes are turned on or expressed.
Environmental factors and our choices alter the way genes and archetypes are expressed and characterize our being. Jung claimed that "the gods have become diseases." The field of epigenetics is now revealing a molecular basis for how heritable information other than DNA sequence can influence gene function, morphology, and plasticity. These advances also add to our understanding of transcriptional regulation, nuclear organization, development and disease.
Archetypes characterize and particularize perennial wisdom, language, images and ideas (theories), and emotion-laden complexes. Sometimes, such complex expression looks like pathology or pathologizing but psyche is trying to tell its perennial story in particularized form. We exist in relation to ourselves, to others, to myths, to images, or to archetypes. Their expression is the essence of our being. When our dominant archetypes change we go through transitions.
Archetypes are formative principles and structural elements, as well as typical preconscious modes of apprehension and action. Frey-Rohn characterized them as, "...not only the focal point of ancient pathways but also the center from which new creative endeavors emanated... "The archetypes, then being inherent in the life process, represented forces and tendencies which not only repeated experiences but also formed creative centers of numinous effect ".
Archetypal images designate typical basic forms, prefigurative determinants, and the tendency to repeat the same psychic experiences. They conceal the unborn eternal archetype while they reveal particularized meaning and form.
Holographic archetypes effectively echo their nested-structure and resonant patterns throughout the field as phenomenological, biophysical, literal and symbolic "reflectaphors". They are fractal expressions and reiterations of psychic life. Archetypal morphogenetic fields (or attractors) arise harmonically within nested domains.
The interweaving transient forms of the holographic archetype include the hologram, psychic structure, wave-genetics, and synchronicity. As cosmic forces and patterns, the archetypes are holographic, existing in their own dimensional spaces, unfolding as nature presents opportunities for expression. When we embody them, and can see through the process, they become manifest, living realities -- a meta-text to our own desires and lifestyles.
For millennia priests and shamans have taken on the sacred roles, embodying the purely spiritual for their communities, uniting the heavens and earth. They manifest their divine splendor and awesomeness in our microcosmic lives. Light, energy and life-force span the cosmos as holographic connectors with the whole. Holographic patterns in the mindbody manifest in the outer world, from essence to synergistic tangibility.
Holographic gods remain true to their own primordial patterns and domains of influence, effectively exerting their wills over our own and apparently usurping or overriding our rational agendas and plans for our own lives. Which of these patterns intrudes on our lives determines whether we are in resonance with the broader environment or at odds with it and ourselves. Try as we might, we cannot separate ourselves from this spiritual component that underlies our existence and all existence, as archetypes are in no way limited to the human sphere.
Holographic Gods produce their own forms of archetypal intoxication; they can possess, frustrate and even defeat our best intentions. But we are not the eternal slaves of these behavior paradigms. Jung's methods of individuation and other transpersonal therapies open the way to developing more conscious relationships with these cosmic patterns, leading to more individual freedom from archetypal role-boundedness and spiritual parochialism.
The story of gods in our lives and the universe is still being written. Extra-dimensional truths are encoded in the descriptions traditionally described as gods and goddesses. The ancient classical gods are well documented, but the Gods of the gaps are less well-known, occupying those parts of the Universe that are unexplored and unexplained, that science is just beginning to explore, such as the so-called god particle.
Holographic Gods challenge own own beliefs in God or not, putting them to the secular acid test. The catch-22 is that even all those notions are conditioned by the very archetypes we seek to illumine, whether or not we identify with them consciously. They are just as likely to produce misguided inner authority as perennial wisdom. Whether we like it or not they enter us, intrude on our personal dramas, by modulating the playing field in the game of life.
All archetypes are a form of human expression that is both holographic and physical. Physical formations of archetypal sequences cause humans to behave in parallel ways to each associated ancestor, experience or process. Integration is a function of intentionality -- conscious and unconsciously maintained, or incorporated. Integration occurs both without effort, as a redesign of the central processor of our minds, and voluntarily as a deliberate effort to understand, find meaning, and rectify our behavior towards self, other and world. Sometimes when we lose ourselves in transcendent experiences, we somehow come back reborn and full of compassion. We are nurtured by the depths.
Images, like the holographic universe, have a deeper enfolded dimension. Memories aren't localized in one place, but are spread across the associative areas of the brain. Associative areas aren't set aside for particular functions like speech production, language comprehension, and memory encoding. Instead, they are responsible for all "miscellaneous" tasks. Each associative area seems to contain echoes of all of the information. Symbols arise from and are embedded in the environment as holographic fields of energy. There are innumerable morphogenic veils of primal forces.
Archetypal realities, passed on through DNA, are expressed in distinctive neuronal tracts in the brain. They include customs and laws regarding property, incest, marriage, kinship, and social status or roles; myths and legends; beliefs about the supernatural and cosmos; gambling, adultery, homicide, schizophrenia, and the therapies to deal with them. A mythic and visionary language of immediate experience encompasses themes of deepest, highest, and ultimate concern.
Jean Shinoda Bolin describes the unfolding process of individuation: "As you get older, your path becomes increasingly a realization that you have moved in an authentic way along the journey. There are the archetypes in both men and women: goddesses in every woman, gods in every man. . . Most men and women find that they’re a mix of different archetypal energies, much as we are all mixes of human talents."
In a holographic universe, even time and space can no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else. Time and three-dimensional space also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. Core mystical experiences of transformation usher us into this holographic domain of pure frequencies, altered states of consciousness, and revelations.
Altered states open the way to polyphasic depth, expressing and engaging meaning. We learn to tolerate the irrational and holographically experience the simultaneity of cosmos and individual life. At its deeper level, reality is a sort of super hologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously, informed by the depth dimension of psyche or the imaginal.
Some suggest that given the right technology we might be able to retrieve scenes from the past from the super-holographic level of reality. Or not. A fantasy of such penetration or phenomena inside the head is not the same as that penetration. A fantasy of enlightenment is not stabilized enlightenment. But it may be a pro-active step in the right direction in distinguishing ourselves from the holographic gods.
REFERENCES
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