Trance Lucent
by Iona Miller, ©2011-2012
- luminescent nature
- luminescent natural awareness
- luminous vision
Aethyr Adept
Iona Miller, ©2011
Who's in Charge?
Symbolic thinking comes at a price. Ego imagines it controls our being, but archetypes play through us nonstop, conditioning our behavior, emotions, ideas and beliefs, especially about ourselves. Neural and hormonal control through the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems is regulated by forces most never think about.
We are largely unaware of the "holographic" psychoid field that connects us with the greater environment and bioenergetic charge. We can't see them, but we notice their effects. The archetype manifests itself on the level of material substance, on the level of human psychology as well as on the level of physical pathology, through similar mechanisms.
When basic elements are missing in an archetype, it is evidence of a "pathology." Its protean richness is circumscribed by an inherent archetypal structure and a pragmatically demonstrable phenomenology. Archetypes are the potential energy similar to a spectrum both within and beyond our sensibilities and knowledge. Therefore, pathology does not exist in the archetypal realm. Only personal or cultural over-identification locks the dynamic into a pathological response pattern.
Archetypes also play an important role in the genesis of scientific theories and in scientific discoveries. Jung spoke of a “psychoid” level of the psyche, located in the unconscious, that “functions as a kind of transformative interface between psyche and matter” (Chodorow, p. 44), or mind and body. However, Jung was interested in the emotional, affective core of archetypes -- the interface of mind and body, including their relationship to archetype.
Nature's laws are the instruments of top down control. Carolyn Myss calls archetypes “the language system of the soul”. Managing our power of choice is the creative and spiritual essence of the human experience. Yet, even "remedy" or "healing" is an archetype -- the "universal medicine" of alchemy. It is liberating and healing to step out of pathologizing ourselves and re-contextualize our personal conflicts, problems and wounds as part of a wider transpersonal pattern enfolded throughout the global field of human experience.
Paul Levy claims, "Our wound introduces and connects us with the transpersonal dimension of our being, whose realization, amazingly enough, initiates the transformation and potential healing of our wound. Simultaneously containing both the pathology and its own medicine, our wound is a higher-dimensional event which has manifested in the flat-land of our third dimensional life. Symbolically encoded in the wound, uniquely tailored to our exact sensibility and aesthetic, is both the seeming “problem” and its own re-solution co-joined in a state of open-ended and boundless, indwelling potentiality."
Through psychophysical means, archetypes exert a topdown and bottom up control on psyche and society. None of us are immune to their inherent influence but they affect our immunity, resilience, and metabolism, health and well-being. Unconscious topdown control leads to automatic emotional control. Psychophysical feedback completes the bottom-up regulation of attention and awareness. Functional integration unites the process. Moral sentiments and values are linked to compassion. With altruism, social concepts and values are actualized through decisions and goal-directed behavior. Topdown controlled alpha band activity determines how we perceive sensory information. http://www.neuroethics.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/20048/Moll_powerpoint.pdf
However, archetypes also condition our pathologies, which can be compounded by trauma, personality disorders, and neurological brain damage. Frontal lobe damage leads to lack of foresight, impulsiveness, rigidity, poor planning, impaired moral cognition and behavior, and and poor social judgement. Temporal lobe damage amplifies impaired social perception and conduct, and loss of empathy. Subcortical limbic damage leads to extreme violence, perversion and sociopathy. Motivation and abstract content are impaired. Visceral-emotional bias leads to bottom-up control of the ego. Reason alone does not save us from such holographic field effects that often bootstrap on our childhood traumas.
Psyche depends on body and body depends on psyche. Depth psychology describes psychic contents with psychic means. Psyche is subject and object, medium and message. Models, questions and proofs all originate in the human mind. And even in physics there is no objective observer outside the universe to experiment on it. Jung contended the common background of physics and depth psychology was psychic as much as physical. This essential third element is transcendental. Both disciplines engage in a reflective interior search for hidden connections along with the outward gaze of scientific inquiry.
The archetypes of the collective unconscious are arrayed behind, yet infused in the scenes of our personal lives, and current worldwide conditions of crisis and confusion. They mirror our own states back at us, whether we notice, perceive them as such, or interpret them plausibly or not. They catch us in our psychological blindspots. We might be fascinated, even obsessed, with the paranormal or unexplainable experiences. Activated archetypes compensate for the one-sidedness of the times and provide preset ways to adapt. They show that a person's problem is also a problem of humanity, a basic human concern. It's healing to know the general human meaning of the problem.
The basis of learning and experience, they personify characteristics of the current state of the psyche. They contextualize our suffering. Functional at deeper levels, they display psyche's self regulatory system to consciousness in symbolic form. Soul only exists in one of their forms. Every event is infused with the meanings of all variants. Soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena. Taking fantasies literally and also confusing the literal and the concrete is a fundamentalist approach.
The curse of each god and its blindspot are as important to the affective pattern as the virtues it confers. Powerful symbol sets are self-validating and may appear magical. Archetypes attract, convince, fascinate, and overpower. Yet without any means to grasp high weirdness more than literally, we uncritically "believe" it concretely. Many fall victim to half-baked theories and overstatements from pop physics and pop psychology or their own narratives. Sometimes our experiences are self-deluding; our interpretations aren't accurate. The noise of ordinary consciousness and beliefs drowns out the signal. Unconsciousness is the mysterious background of our ordinary awareness.
Creativity is another word for insight. The creative person is different, a fact which they, themselves, recognize. They always ask questions about things which puzzle them, they are honest, shy, bashful, they appear inconsiderate, determined, persistent, industrious, never bored, spirited in disagreement, unwilling to accept the judgment of authority, and, they are visionary. The creative person may like to work alone and to strive for distant goals. As Torrance has pointed out, many of these characteristics, taken singly, may be desirable, but taken in combination they make the creative child a difficult child. (Henrickson)
Who's in Charge?
Symbolic thinking comes at a price. Ego imagines it controls our being, but archetypes play through us nonstop, conditioning our behavior, emotions, ideas and beliefs, especially about ourselves. Neural and hormonal control through the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems is regulated by forces most never think about.
We are largely unaware of the "holographic" psychoid field that connects us with the greater environment and bioenergetic charge. We can't see them, but we notice their effects. The archetype manifests itself on the level of material substance, on the level of human psychology as well as on the level of physical pathology, through similar mechanisms.
When basic elements are missing in an archetype, it is evidence of a "pathology." Its protean richness is circumscribed by an inherent archetypal structure and a pragmatically demonstrable phenomenology. Archetypes are the potential energy similar to a spectrum both within and beyond our sensibilities and knowledge. Therefore, pathology does not exist in the archetypal realm. Only personal or cultural over-identification locks the dynamic into a pathological response pattern.
Archetypes also play an important role in the genesis of scientific theories and in scientific discoveries. Jung spoke of a “psychoid” level of the psyche, located in the unconscious, that “functions as a kind of transformative interface between psyche and matter” (Chodorow, p. 44), or mind and body. However, Jung was interested in the emotional, affective core of archetypes -- the interface of mind and body, including their relationship to archetype.
Nature's laws are the instruments of top down control. Carolyn Myss calls archetypes “the language system of the soul”. Managing our power of choice is the creative and spiritual essence of the human experience. Yet, even "remedy" or "healing" is an archetype -- the "universal medicine" of alchemy. It is liberating and healing to step out of pathologizing ourselves and re-contextualize our personal conflicts, problems and wounds as part of a wider transpersonal pattern enfolded throughout the global field of human experience.
Paul Levy claims, "Our wound introduces and connects us with the transpersonal dimension of our being, whose realization, amazingly enough, initiates the transformation and potential healing of our wound. Simultaneously containing both the pathology and its own medicine, our wound is a higher-dimensional event which has manifested in the flat-land of our third dimensional life. Symbolically encoded in the wound, uniquely tailored to our exact sensibility and aesthetic, is both the seeming “problem” and its own re-solution co-joined in a state of open-ended and boundless, indwelling potentiality."
Through psychophysical means, archetypes exert a topdown and bottom up control on psyche and society. None of us are immune to their inherent influence but they affect our immunity, resilience, and metabolism, health and well-being. Unconscious topdown control leads to automatic emotional control. Psychophysical feedback completes the bottom-up regulation of attention and awareness. Functional integration unites the process. Moral sentiments and values are linked to compassion. With altruism, social concepts and values are actualized through decisions and goal-directed behavior. Topdown controlled alpha band activity determines how we perceive sensory information. http://www.neuroethics.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/20048/Moll_powerpoint.pdf
However, archetypes also condition our pathologies, which can be compounded by trauma, personality disorders, and neurological brain damage. Frontal lobe damage leads to lack of foresight, impulsiveness, rigidity, poor planning, impaired moral cognition and behavior, and and poor social judgement. Temporal lobe damage amplifies impaired social perception and conduct, and loss of empathy. Subcortical limbic damage leads to extreme violence, perversion and sociopathy. Motivation and abstract content are impaired. Visceral-emotional bias leads to bottom-up control of the ego. Reason alone does not save us from such holographic field effects that often bootstrap on our childhood traumas.
Psyche depends on body and body depends on psyche. Depth psychology describes psychic contents with psychic means. Psyche is subject and object, medium and message. Models, questions and proofs all originate in the human mind. And even in physics there is no objective observer outside the universe to experiment on it. Jung contended the common background of physics and depth psychology was psychic as much as physical. This essential third element is transcendental. Both disciplines engage in a reflective interior search for hidden connections along with the outward gaze of scientific inquiry.
The archetypes of the collective unconscious are arrayed behind, yet infused in the scenes of our personal lives, and current worldwide conditions of crisis and confusion. They mirror our own states back at us, whether we notice, perceive them as such, or interpret them plausibly or not. They catch us in our psychological blindspots. We might be fascinated, even obsessed, with the paranormal or unexplainable experiences. Activated archetypes compensate for the one-sidedness of the times and provide preset ways to adapt. They show that a person's problem is also a problem of humanity, a basic human concern. It's healing to know the general human meaning of the problem.
The basis of learning and experience, they personify characteristics of the current state of the psyche. They contextualize our suffering. Functional at deeper levels, they display psyche's self regulatory system to consciousness in symbolic form. Soul only exists in one of their forms. Every event is infused with the meanings of all variants. Soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena. Taking fantasies literally and also confusing the literal and the concrete is a fundamentalist approach.
The curse of each god and its blindspot are as important to the affective pattern as the virtues it confers. Powerful symbol sets are self-validating and may appear magical. Archetypes attract, convince, fascinate, and overpower. Yet without any means to grasp high weirdness more than literally, we uncritically "believe" it concretely. Many fall victim to half-baked theories and overstatements from pop physics and pop psychology or their own narratives. Sometimes our experiences are self-deluding; our interpretations aren't accurate. The noise of ordinary consciousness and beliefs drowns out the signal. Unconsciousness is the mysterious background of our ordinary awareness.
Creativity is another word for insight. The creative person is different, a fact which they, themselves, recognize. They always ask questions about things which puzzle them, they are honest, shy, bashful, they appear inconsiderate, determined, persistent, industrious, never bored, spirited in disagreement, unwilling to accept the judgment of authority, and, they are visionary. The creative person may like to work alone and to strive for distant goals. As Torrance has pointed out, many of these characteristics, taken singly, may be desirable, but taken in combination they make the creative child a difficult child. (Henrickson)
Meta- Levels
Our whole psychophysical organism is very much at the center of such effects. Imaginal space is a net of multiple images and meaning -- the ground of meaning and metaphor. The organismic source is our human bodies and the focus of human consciousness. The fantasy principle dethrones reality, but can be dissociative or compensatory. The human mind is a meme-scape, subject to the distortions of cultural "viruses."
Structurally organized archetypes play a central role as powerful intrusions of archetypal energy in the formation of complex and symptom These intrusions lead to particular patterns of fragmentation in the behavioral and cognitive presentations. Pre-conceived concepts vie with structures, concepts with images, constructions with deconstruction and spectacle. We bamboozle ourselves. Unless we apply certain illuminative processes to our deeper life, it remains hidden in the shadows. The patterns expressed by archetypes remain beyond our awareness. We stay in the dark about much of our being.
For example, Robert Moore calls the trickster archetype, "psyche's answer to oppression and grandiosity." Fearless and uncompromising, it exposes pretension and pomposity wherever it is manifest -- either in self or other. If possessed by this archetype, however, one becomes a compulsive critic who seeks to ridicule, shame, and humiliate without compassion. Meant to be an agent of liberation and the ally of new creations, the shadow expression of this psychological structure becomes the enemy of both creativity and creation itself.
Automatic Trance States
Archetypes appear unbidden, "possessing" us with trance states that exemplify their typical qualities. The existence of archetypes is demonstrated in the analysis of adult and childhood dreams, active imagination, psychotic delusions, and fantasies produced in the trance state. Such trances condition and cloud our vision. Client-centered therapy uses the trance state as a doorway to a larger world beyond the walls of the conscious psyche.
Everybody sees their own fantasies through their own memes. This deeper level manifests itself in universal archaic images expressed in dreams, religious beliefs, myths, and fairytales. The archetypes, as unfiltered psychic experience, appear sometimes in their most primitive and naive forms (in dreams), sometimes in a considerably more complex form due to the operation of conscious elaboration (in myths).
For James Hillman the task of the therapist is "to keep the snake there". He wants the psyche, by way of the limitless depths of its images to "threaten the hell out of you," to keep you in the realm of the unknown for as long as possible, and it is in this way that real psychological work can begin. Hillman's views here are close to the Kabbalist Azriel of Gerona's charge that to have "faith" is to enter into a relationship with one's "nothingness" and the "unknown" of the infinite, Ein-sof. It also accords well with those elements within the Kabbalah that deny the possibility of cognitive, as opposed to experiential, knowledge of the divine. http://www.newkabbalah.com/hil2.html
Like scientists who ignore their own assumed truths, we leapfrog over our beliefs, blindspots, and personality deficits, claiming idiosyncratic imagination as literal reality. It couldn't be further from the existential truth and symbolism is utterly lost. Superstitiously looking for signs or mind-blowing synchronicities is no substitute for actively interacting in a healthy process of self-transformation -- individuation.
When meaning is usurped by media mania, a 24/7 assault on the senses, the metaphors that might heal us overwhelm and enslave us. Archetypes function as programming options, modulating our emotional addictions to pain, fear and suffering, contempt, insecurities, doubt, failure, even love. The images that heal emerge from our insight and realizations, not ones imposed on us from without. All events are 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 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, others 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 an implicate order -- 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.
Nonlocal Creative Source
Can we have a sense of the cosmos in the world without unwittingly projecting myriad fantasies on it that we embrace literally? Sometimes we lose sight of the fact that we cannot escape our entangled embedding in the universe; we are indissolubly connected. Has the world become so horrible it is unreasonable to be realistic? Perhaps we know far too many ways for it to end and not nearly enough ways to reconstitute. We may need to look at our drives and wishes, rather than the fantasy content. In content-free therapy, the narrative is less relevant than the process itself. We have to factor in our own desires in our own logic tests and philosophy of natural realization.
The capacity for transcending the self through art arises from the creative process, an altered state of consciousness facilitating the occurrence of anomalous events such as precognition and interior visions that appear to be outside the spacetime of waking life. Frustration can trigger the far-from-equilibrium conditions necessary for creativity, while inspiration may seem as if its source is exterior to the artist, and the experience of flow, like a trance state, can produce an altered sense of time. Archetypes in the creative process link a single mind to the collective unconscious and works of art become self-opening worlds that create an expanded reality. (Zausner) www.jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/download/173/182
The Great Unknown lies behind Jung's transcendent function and mostly we remain clueless in the face of this Mystery even as we encounter its inescapable phenomenology. Non-ordinary states of consciousness reveal a hidden holographic order. However, unlke recreational altered states, only integrative states radically reorganize the psyche and brain. Lesser states can destabilize habitual adaptation, leaving us fragile with split assumptions.
Conflict arises from destabilizing information and experience. Clarity comes in realizing we cannot permanently function in that realm because archetypes don't understand our personality needs as they play out their own agendas. Deconstructing of reality is a dangerous as well as prospective process not all psyches survive intact. This is why historically we have spiritual and religious guides to that realm. But, again, you'd best be careful who those guides are and what they actually lead toward -- increased health and well-being or disintegration.
Psyche constructs reality. Our experience of so-called reality is always mediated by our image of it. Our image of it is now conditioned by new media. Even if all the contents of the psyche are real, that doesn't mean they are realistic. That psyche is real is still a radical proposition, but psychic politics certainly color the self-image and ideas of everyone. We observe and participate with images, but if we navigate this dream-scape poorly we become essentially "lost at sea."
It is not a question of nature or nurture (genes alone or experience alone). Rather, everything is both. We inherit the structures that make our experience what it is. But the structure itself is “empty,” and each human culture “fills” it with its own specific adaptations. It is difficult to define an archetype and set boundaries that distinguish it from others. In a hologram each part contains all the information but in lower resolution. Archetypes have this interpenetrating holographic quality. There are patterns within patterns within patterns. Some overlap with others, and some are nested inside others.
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.
Holistic individualism is a construct. Most fantasy-based individuals are at a complete loss to coherently explain their own conventional behavior much less anomalous events and their deep meaning, or the cultural unconscious, or mythological unconscious matrix. But they try, and become utterly entrenched in their belief that they are right about the nature of the world and reality. We have pseudo-memories about our personal lives. Why not moreso for our collective life?
Studies show that magical thinking in New Age adherents is correlated with schizotypal traits, emotional oversensitivity, and cognitive-perceptual looseness. The subject matter often revolves around escapist fantasy, catastrophe, creation and the mythopoeic forces of mankind. Ignorant of such dynamics, interpretive mistakes and displaced psychic contents proliferate into errors of fact. Propaganda, media distortions, memes, and disinformation compound the social problem of misapprehension further. http://www.asanas.org.uk/files/jasanas002.pdf
Shameless self-promotion by narcissistic personalities of such alternative ideas leads to cults. They make up myths about the myths of by-gone eras. Roiling unconscious images can be fatally confusing. Thought illusions culminate in personal projections and collective projections of mythology. Jung suggested symbols live only as long as they are pregnant with meaning.
Philosophy arose from criticism of myth, from discussing and challenging it. In science, we criticize, reject and eliminate theories. At the edge of the abyss of the unknown, new signs and symbols emerge. Credible theories and paradigms must include biology, physics, and neurophysiology.
When meaning is usurped by media mania, a 24/7 assault on the senses, the metaphors that might heal us overwhelm and enslave us. Archetypes function as programming options, modulating our emotional addictions to pain, fear and suffering, contempt, insecurities, doubt, failure, even love. The images that heal emerge from our insight and realizations, not ones imposed on us from without. All events are 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 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, others 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 an implicate order -- 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.
Nonlocal Creative Source
Can we have a sense of the cosmos in the world without unwittingly projecting myriad fantasies on it that we embrace literally? Sometimes we lose sight of the fact that we cannot escape our entangled embedding in the universe; we are indissolubly connected. Has the world become so horrible it is unreasonable to be realistic? Perhaps we know far too many ways for it to end and not nearly enough ways to reconstitute. We may need to look at our drives and wishes, rather than the fantasy content. In content-free therapy, the narrative is less relevant than the process itself. We have to factor in our own desires in our own logic tests and philosophy of natural realization.
The capacity for transcending the self through art arises from the creative process, an altered state of consciousness facilitating the occurrence of anomalous events such as precognition and interior visions that appear to be outside the spacetime of waking life. Frustration can trigger the far-from-equilibrium conditions necessary for creativity, while inspiration may seem as if its source is exterior to the artist, and the experience of flow, like a trance state, can produce an altered sense of time. Archetypes in the creative process link a single mind to the collective unconscious and works of art become self-opening worlds that create an expanded reality. (Zausner) www.jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/download/173/182
The Great Unknown lies behind Jung's transcendent function and mostly we remain clueless in the face of this Mystery even as we encounter its inescapable phenomenology. Non-ordinary states of consciousness reveal a hidden holographic order. However, unlke recreational altered states, only integrative states radically reorganize the psyche and brain. Lesser states can destabilize habitual adaptation, leaving us fragile with split assumptions.
Conflict arises from destabilizing information and experience. Clarity comes in realizing we cannot permanently function in that realm because archetypes don't understand our personality needs as they play out their own agendas. Deconstructing of reality is a dangerous as well as prospective process not all psyches survive intact. This is why historically we have spiritual and religious guides to that realm. But, again, you'd best be careful who those guides are and what they actually lead toward -- increased health and well-being or disintegration.
Psyche constructs reality. Our experience of so-called reality is always mediated by our image of it. Our image of it is now conditioned by new media. Even if all the contents of the psyche are real, that doesn't mean they are realistic. That psyche is real is still a radical proposition, but psychic politics certainly color the self-image and ideas of everyone. We observe and participate with images, but if we navigate this dream-scape poorly we become essentially "lost at sea."
It is not a question of nature or nurture (genes alone or experience alone). Rather, everything is both. We inherit the structures that make our experience what it is. But the structure itself is “empty,” and each human culture “fills” it with its own specific adaptations. It is difficult to define an archetype and set boundaries that distinguish it from others. In a hologram each part contains all the information but in lower resolution. Archetypes have this interpenetrating holographic quality. There are patterns within patterns within patterns. Some overlap with others, and some are nested inside others.
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.
Holistic individualism is a construct. Most fantasy-based individuals are at a complete loss to coherently explain their own conventional behavior much less anomalous events and their deep meaning, or the cultural unconscious, or mythological unconscious matrix. But they try, and become utterly entrenched in their belief that they are right about the nature of the world and reality. We have pseudo-memories about our personal lives. Why not moreso for our collective life?
Studies show that magical thinking in New Age adherents is correlated with schizotypal traits, emotional oversensitivity, and cognitive-perceptual looseness. The subject matter often revolves around escapist fantasy, catastrophe, creation and the mythopoeic forces of mankind. Ignorant of such dynamics, interpretive mistakes and displaced psychic contents proliferate into errors of fact. Propaganda, media distortions, memes, and disinformation compound the social problem of misapprehension further. http://www.asanas.org.uk/files/jasanas002.pdf
Shameless self-promotion by narcissistic personalities of such alternative ideas leads to cults. They make up myths about the myths of by-gone eras. Roiling unconscious images can be fatally confusing. Thought illusions culminate in personal projections and collective projections of mythology. Jung suggested symbols live only as long as they are pregnant with meaning.
Philosophy arose from criticism of myth, from discussing and challenging it. In science, we criticize, reject and eliminate theories. At the edge of the abyss of the unknown, new signs and symbols emerge. Credible theories and paradigms must include biology, physics, and neurophysiology.
Is it God or Memorex?
One of the reasons people "see God", or a guru, or anomalies may be because our brains are constructed to see reality through the eyes of others. There are heaps of mirror neurons which are there to make us feel the 'other'. Mirror neurons do for psychology what DNA did for biology. They provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities.
As in the psychochemical processes of empathy or falling in love, a complex feedback loop sustains a state of mind. But when we empathically transpose ourselves into someone else's position, we expose ourselves to that reality -- cognitively and emotionally. The unconscious complicates empathy, both ways. Mirror neurons might well play a role in bonding, language and self-awareness.
If the archetypes have a location, neurostructures instantiate them. It's not impossible that we can believe in God because we obviously have a brain center that specializes in fatherly images. Behavioral paradigms have been found to have neural representation, puberty being the best known of them. The archetypes are often, if not usually, found in the various deities worshiped in a culture, and they reinforce the roles people experience during the different phases of their lives, able to advise or give guidance about almost any situation.
Naively, we take too much as self-evident. But 'seeing' is not always 'believing', though many make this error or leap in logic and formulate their choices and future accordingly. Yet, there is only one way to learn what consciousness is. Experience. But we have no satisfactory explanatory edifice for consciousness. Would such a theory release in each of us our own inner knowledge of the creativity of our own consciousness, and its infinite possibilities?
The problem is trying to define a verb, a dynamic, as if it were a noun. Consciousness is present everywhere in spacetime, so has no need to “go” or “be sent” via a medium or carrier. Synchronous events, including intentional or directed healing, may work via coherence, an entanglement or resonance effect, but we should be careful not to mistake this field effect for the mind itself, which permeates and undergirds all.
We live in a chaotic universe to which we are seamlessly wed. We are a chaotic system ourselves, and chaotic systems exhibit holistic behavior. Holism sees the world in all its diversity as connected. A global wave of information (consciousness) is responsible for the extraordinary coherence that expresses as self-organization. We are one with the whole universe of phenomena and being in the deepest sense. The unifying force is consciousness.
But we do recognize the effect of consciousness. It functions to mediate states of consciousness, high and low psychobiological arousal. Consciousness is the subconscious lifted up by the physical body. When the body fails, the consciousness collapses back into the subconscious. All our thoughts come from the subconscious which can see our intentions but not our world. This relates somehow to intention being imaginary and not of the physical frictionized world (King).
Gerald Edelman postulates that the flows of information in the brain are mediated through ‘re-entrant' feedback loops. As evolution provides new cognitive functions, new re-entrant loops are established. Even language itself is an archetype -- a chaotic field of dynamic associations. A subtle net of tropes, grammar, symbols, and meaning, the program language begins in limbic resonance. Some phenomena generate their own specialty language patterns, nomenclature, and internal coherence of meaning and representation.
In a holographic universe, even time and space cab 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 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. This suggests that given the proper tools someday we might reach into the super holographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.
Or not. A fantasy of such penetration or phenomenon inside the head is not the same as that penetration.
Iona Miller, ©2011
All Rights Reserved