BRIEF SYNOPSIS
by Iona Miller, ©2011-2012
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 god and goddesses that manipulated reality for their own mysterious ends.
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. 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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
HOLOGRAPHIC ARCHETYPES
Holographic Being * Holographic Memory * Holographic Ancestry
(c)2011, Iona Miller
Holographic Being * Holographic Memory * Holographic Ancestry
(c)2011, Iona Miller
"...[M]en have always talked about two kinds of reality: one that we see with our eyes and touch with our hands, and one that cannot be experienced with our senses. Here two different principles show. The Aristotelian will say: the archetypes are ideas derived from the experience with real fathers and mothers. The Platonist will say: fathers and mothers have only come into existence out of the archetypes, as those are the primal images, the pre-images of the manifestations, stored in a heavenly place, and it is from them that all forms come from. That is the origin of the term archetypos. Where truth lies, we cannot decide. We are forever encapsulated in our psychological experience. We are in the world of images. Whatever we say about the psychical, we always are talking out of an archetype. When Freud says that sexuality is the base and the beginning of all that happens, this too is an archetypal idea. It is the primitive idea par excellence, as in Adler's aspiration to power. We find these two ideas in the ancient philosophers, in the Gnostic / alchemical concepts: nature delights in nature, nature rules nature. This is also expressed in the symbol of the snake biting its own tale, the Ouroboros. So when we imagine we have said an absolute truth, we are mistaken; we have just expressed an archetype. What it boils down to in the end is that the archetype lives. It lives in Freud, Adler, and also in myself." - Jung in 'Children's Dreams: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1940'
"All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. This is particularly true of religious ideas, but the central concepts of science, philosophy, and ethics are no exception to this rule. In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas, created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality. For it is the function of consciousness not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us." ~"The Structure of the Psyche" (1927). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.342
Mind Control Countermeasures
What you "see" is not always what you "get." Many people mistakenly take their own visions literally without "seeing through" the various possibilities that are outside their belief system, knowledge or skill base. Deeper reality is not remote in the physical sense but in a psychological sense. The archetypes of the collective unconscious are arrayed behind the scenes of current worldwide conditions, of crisis and confusion. They mirror our own states back at us, whether we perceive them as such or interpret them plausibly or not. The noise of ordinary consciousness and beliefs drowns out the signal. Unconsciousness is the background of our ordinary awareness.
Our organism is very much at the center of such effects. 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. Pre-conceived concepts vie with structures, concepts with images. Like scientists who ignore assumed truths, we leapfrog over our beliefs and personality deficits, claiming idiosyncratic imagination is literal reality. It couldn't be further from the truth and symbolism is utterly lost. The metaphor that might heal us enslaves us.
Perhaps images like the holographic universe have an implicate order. Can we have a sense of the cosmos in the world without projecting myriad fantasies on it that we embrace literally? Has the world become so horrible it is unreasonable to be realistic? We may need to look at our drives and wishes, rather than the fantasy content. Psyche constructs reality. Our experience of so-called reality is always mediated by our image of it. 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.
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 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; 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.
Most fantasy-based individuals are at a complete loss to coherently explain their own conventional behavior much less anomalous events and their deep meaning, much less 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?
The subject matter often revolves around 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. Shameless self-promotion by personalities of such 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 projections and 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'. Miirror 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.
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.
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 language patterns, nomenclature, and internal coherence of meaning and representation.
In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. 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 it might even be possible to someday 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.
Holographic Archetypes
Like psychic DNA, the collective unconscious contains "inherited" psychic material that links us not only to other humans in the present but also to our ancestors from the past. According to Jung's theory, though each of us appears to function independently, in actuality we're all tapped into the same global mind. Symbols interact with and condition our biohologram. The Collective Unconscious is essentially a Hologram.
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. 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.
Over millennia, all the archetypes have emerged in stories, deities and cultural forms. One of the striking points of religious faith is that they aren't true. In early history people didn't know the ‘real' reasons things happened, so it's no surprise that their explanations were wrong. But then, why would we want to retrieve such superstitions?
Kuhn reminds us that even the most absurd or confused explanation of a phenomena can find acceptance in the absence of a competing idea. Once any explanation is offered for a phenomena, it has an explanation from that time on. Succeeding speculations might be able to explain the relevant phenomena better than its predecessors. Deities, as archetypal role models, are the opening gambit in the drama of understanding human subjectivity. Folk tales function the same way.
Deities or archetypes may have evolved to smooth interpersonal relations by including an understanding of human types, along with rules for helping the different types relate with one another. They are reflections of ancient evolutionary pressures, with a dash of neuroanatomy. We still have the same pressures today so the ancient archetypes still "work", regardless of objective existence of gods and goddesses.
Burke (2003) describes how the underlying pattern or strange attraction between transference and holography extends to other processes both within and outside the field of psychology. Such processes include projection, projective identification, splitting, memory, biology, creative discovery, theology, synchronicity, chaos, and nonlocality. Identifying the similar patterns of these processes demonstrates the existence of an underlying holographic archetype in which essential qualities of the whole are present in each of the parts of the whole. The autonomy of the overall human is present in each conscious and unconscious component part of the human psyche.
Cognition, itself is a holographic archetype. Many essential qualities of the whole are reflected or contained in each of the parts that make up that whole. It is a subtle net of metaphor, analogy and simile. Holographic archetypes effectively echo their resonant patterns through literal and symbolic reflectaphors. The passing forms of the holographic archetype include the hologram, psychic structure, synchronicity, wisdom traditions, memory, the process of scientific discovery, chaos in physics, nonlocality and virtuality in physics.
As unconscious structuring principle, the archetype lies beyond normal consciousness and emerges suddenly and dynamically from the (holographic) psychoid field, with a powerful emotional charge that invests it with significance. Everything that happens is conditioned by the moment in which it happens. The universal field imposes the conditions. Matter is not inert but receptive to holistic patterning. If the mythic world taught our ancestors how to manipulate the empirical world, it also taught them to manipulate that mythic narrative itself for control purposes. Socioeconomic power enforces its mythic narrative.
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. Limbic action of complexes is a big part of the holistic dynamics of the psyche. Dreams report what goes on beneath the veil of conscious awareness. To the consciousness of the 'thinker', knowledge is thought. Period. Without thought, the consciousness of the 'thinker' collapses into psychosis.
With archetypes come 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, and self-delusion. 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.
Trances People Live
Identity is a characteristic of the primitive mentality and the real foundation of participation mystique, which is nothing but a relic of the infantile non-differentiation of subject and object, the primordial unconscious state. The further we go back into history, the more we see personality disappearing beneath the wrappings of collectivity. Any individual's existential condition is just a typical variation on the collective themes of the eternal human condition. Our particular individuality emerges from a collective mythic existence.
Individuals may have an unconscious identity with some era, person, group, or object. Participation mystique means a mystical connection in which one cannot clearly distinguish self from other, bound to it by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity or transference. Unfortunately, that is tantamount to giving part of yourself away. It is the mostly unconscious instinctive human tie to symbolic fantasy and mythic emanations leading to literalisms and concretism, the attempt to turn the imaginal into events.
Mythological motifs project themselves into situations and objects, including other persons. Everything unconscious about ourselves is projected. When the boundary between consciousness and the unconscious is blurred, either intentionally or unintentionally, the ego has a hard time differentiating between what belongs to itself and what belongs to the other. The two become identified with each other.
When a projection is strongly fixated, it may be next to impossible to separate one’s projected material from the person who is carrying the projection. Whether it is a person or an object, suddenly, all those things outside become carriers, unconsciously, of what resides within. Such illusory states left unconscious turn toxic and consuming. Denial leaves room for serious errors of fact. It is a warning against extreme conscious attitudes which inevitably get compensated by the Shadow. In the process Jung termed enantiodromia, projections can break or revert into their opposites as psyche seeks to equilibrate or rebalance itself.
Culture Vultures
Rightly or wrongly, every phenomena is subject to being named, labelled and interpreted, including the sense of self as the biological basis of consciousness. In the struggle to narrate its experience, the mind tends to label phenomena and to spontaneously generate ideation and imaginally fill in the gaps in awareness. Subcultures are dynamic marketplaces for knowledge construction, authenticating and authorizing claims within an overall belief structure. Such authority structures may be benign, toxic, exploitive or malignant.
It's only a small step from known psychological mechanisms that generate illusions to perceiving an entity 'out there' with the archetypal characteristics of a personality - e.g. the pater noster or any 'other', the Not-I, who interacts with us in the way we interact morally with others. This is where social selection really favors mirror neurons that can produce neurological tricks we interpret subjectively, according to our beliefs.
Social order is organized around both faulty and plausible knowledge of reality. Ritual is a creative process used to construct meaning worlds. But they don't reliably produce intuitive experience with consensual meaning. Most often such experience and interpretations are idiosyncratic, cannot be validated, and are rooted purely in beliefs as assumed truths.
Most of this retrieved esoteric knowledge reflects superstitious ideas arising prior to the seventeenth century. Archaic consciousness of the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic lies buried within us, but to try to relive them today may mean being less than wholly present now. Such beliefs effectively 'teleport' one back in time into less sophisticated modes of ideation.
In archaic identity there is no differentiation between object and subject and no distinction between lived experience and what the subject believes he or she perceives about the world. Perceptual competence is self-assessed in grandiose terms without cognitive and emotional balance. Credibility is conferred by the untutored crowd based on otherwise unworthy persons, with charisma and emotional appeal. Orthodoxy of interpretation gives rise to organizations.
The recognition and withdrawal of projections usually provokes a state of disenchantment or, conversely, elation and inflation of the ego. However, these processes can also open the way to a practice of the symbolic life and of human relations without too much alienation or mystification in the therapeutic process. This is a ‘knowing’ of the things of life and their inherent mysteries through the experience of the mundane as well as the spiritual. It is an immersion in the mysteries of nature and the seeking of knowledge through mystical participation.
Neurological Attractors
The "sensed presence", including the God-image, arises when the right hemispheric sense of self falls out of phase with the left hemispheric self. The right ‘self' is experienced as an external presence. Commonly, a person feels that the sensed presence is not themselves at all, but an outside, ego-alien, being -- "Not-I." The two hemispheres can act independently, as shown in ‘split brain' studies, giving the person a partitioned awareness. The sensed presence might be likened to a temporary split brain, but limited to its senses of self (Persinger, 1993).
If the experience involves one of the amygdala more than the other, the result might be an emotionally intense experience. If one amygdala or the other really dominates the experience, then a terrifying demon, or a deeply comforting angel might be the result. If the experience involved the sensorimotor cortex, it could include feelings of movement, which can be extrapolated into sensations of flying, rising or falling.
If the experience includes the lower (ventral) portion of the temporal lobes, where long-term memories are stored (Squire, 1991), it might include exotic memories, such as ‘buried' childhood memories), ‘past life' memories, memories of encounters with aliens (Schnabel, 1994). These mysteries are seen to be truths which one had only forgotten, as their content is perceived through neural avenues that usually manifest memories. All these implicate the parahippocampal gyrus, the entorhinal cortex, and the perirhinal cortex, where long-term memories are accessed or consolidated (Miller, 1998). Several brain structures outside the limbic system further color excitation or inhibition of the functions below the limbic system, such as the thalamus (whose pulvinar nucleus can induce aura vision when stimulated), or the reticular formation, which has been implicated in the life reviews (Taylor, 1979).
The sensed presence is only one example of a whole class of experiences called visitor experiences, or just visitations (Persinger, 1989). It falls at one end of a spectrum. At the lower end we should expect to find the sensed presence, and at the other, we find a very affective being, such as God or Satan in a fully extrapolated environment, complete with heavenly or hellish sounds, smells, bodily sensations, etc. One approach to the phenomena develops self-delusions or cults, while the other develops psychologies or defines neurological pathways.
Naked Awareness
As the experience deepens in intensity, recruiting more and more brain structures, it can include visions, smells, tastes, vestibular feelings of falling or rising, parasthetic feelings of tingles, and energetic effects in the body. Visual components emerge as the temporal lobes spill over to the occipital lobes. The Presence becomes a figure of some kind; an angel, a ghost, the spirit of a beloved dead friend or relative, a guru, a God. Spiritual claims arise in a vacuum of other more plausible theories and are most often conditioned by unscientific cultural tropes. Paradoxically, junk science is often enlisted to support such claims.
The idea that we are naked before the moral deity is a real mirror neuron trick. If we can 'feel' them, they can feel us by the same mechanism is a faulty conclusion. Self-generated illusions aren't necessarily reciprocal, but they do form self-amplifying feedback loops and strange attractors, even Black Holes and "gravity wells" in the psyche. Experiences are just qualitative perceptions associated with feelings and attitudes about them -- sensations and abstractions. But observations of nature and cosmos can only be accurate if physical occurrances are correctly conceived and unconscious mental mechanisms understood.
Esoteric knowledge is "acquired" in a moment of intuition when sensory perception and thought combine. Knowledge is an important part of religion that also gives rise to incompatible concepts and understanding, rooted in historically diverse traditions, cultures, paradigms and frames. Esotericism, a medieval repository of alternative ideas, seeks congruence of material and spiritual ideas attached to natural phenomena. It is a subjective hermeneutic interpretation. Traditional worldviews are challenged by other ways of perceiving reality.
So even if everyone 'sees' God it doesn't mean a figurative or 'non-figurative' God exists. Of course we also have the genetic argument that religious belief is selected for because it fosters larger more dominant societies. Again this is no reason for God to exist. It also doesn't mean individual experiences aren't "real" - but they can be caused by a variety of brain variations such as full-blown or sub-clinical temporal lobe epilepsy (TLTs, or temporal lobe transients) or peculiar EM wave interaction or intrusions from the environment, as demonstrated by Dr. Michael Persinger's ongoing "God Helmet" experiments at Laurentian University.
He theorizes that the sensation described as "having a religious experience" is merely a side effect of our bicameral brain's feverish activities. Simplified, the mind generates a "sensed presence" when the right hemisphere of the brain, the seat of emotion, is stimulated in the cerebral region which controls notions of self, and then the left hemisphere, the seat of language, is called upon to make sense of this nonexistent "entity."
Do We Have to Believe What We Believe? Literally?
We can also program ourselves into a variety of beliefs by immersing ourselves in subcultures of such beliefs until we "see the light" according to that dogma or groupthink. Critical thinking is replaced by "true belief." This is the basis of cult conversion and propaganda campaigns, changing values and focus by influence strategies and covert hypnosis, creating a lived trance that is a "foregone collusion."
Naked awareness is a core experience that presents mystically, as numinous. We fool ourselves with a trick of our own mind, when the truth of primordial ground or fuller Awareness lies below all such contrived or confabulated notions, or any 'content' of mind. Intention without intelligence is useless. Intentionality is striving for the future. History rewritten by amateurs or the 'lowest common denominator' is no better than a politically motivated version, and possibly even more fantastical.
To remain balanced and integrated, we have to also be rational about consciousness through experience, even though the only way to become experts about consciousness is by studying and exploring our own different consciousness experiences and states. Everybody knows we can change the focus of our own attention. Structural coding includes informational, energetic and material factors. But it's still scientific heresy to say all energy contains consciousness, and virtually no one can speculate about what 'level' of consciousness that might be.
Confabulation occurs in particular when people study and retrieve their individual notions of the spiritual practices and histories of by-gone eras, which brings "old wine in new bottles" (OWINB), old superstitions into the attention and worldview of the person. You cannot know a culture without living in it, and pretending you did is even more ineffectual. You can hopelessly interweave it with commonly accepted facts, dressing it in the Emperor's clothes of plausibility. Robert Anton Wilson called such retrievals "reality wormholes", and cautioned against taking them literally. Joining with others in "movements" just amplifies and co-opts personal experience into a sociopolitical agenda.
Any mega-trend, the latest vogue or version of "OWINB", by the recently 'initiated' but somehow 'blessed' may contaminate the individuation process and experience with "imported" notions and interpretations, rather than allowing organic emergence as individuation. 'Initiation' is, after all, only a "beginning", more about 'becoming' than 'being'. It implies you are less-than-whole, even though you always carry your own potential and are inescapably holistically connected. Yet, you can become more aware of rather than unconscious of such states, experientially.
Mind vs. Its Contents
Marshall McLuhan also noticed such thinking patterns in social cycles. Thus, such thinking is an archaic cultural artifact, not a fact confirming process. Retrievals are revivals of systems that failed to sustain themselves the first time around, becoming obsolete for a variety of reasons. Rather than a step forward, retrievals of obsolete forms, processes and beliefs are a step backward, a step into another limited figurative form, a step away from the "now."
Archetypal dynamics originating within can push us toward external imports of attitudes and beliefs, by promising social secondary gains -- fitting in, "belonging", or whatever infantile needs remain from our childhoods. But all that is 'natural' is not necessarily healthful to our adjustment or psychophysical well-being.
McLuhan's "cool" style explores rather than explains, it requires participation and engagement, and it will only frustrate or annoy those who approach it as detached observers wanting evidence and facts to support the many claims. McLuhan's often misunderstood heuristics has aphorisms, like "figure/ground," the role of cliches, and the laws of media, and McLuhan's analytical and predictive tools. His four effects include: enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval, and reversal. Retrieval is to obsolescence as enhancement is to reversal.
You can intervene in this cycle and catch yourself in the act of programming your own beliefs and short-circuit the process. The problem occurs when people try to turn their imaginal events, which are neither real nor unreal into concrete events, and then create 'movements' of them which invariably become riddled with polyglot or ecclectic dogma...a mishmash of misperception, then convince themselves there is "reality" in it. The subtext is, it challenges the natural authority of people.
This toxic narrative is particularly so among those "selling spirituality." First they create an existential 'problem' in your head or define one in the social landscape in some fantastical way, then provide a psychosocial solution -- usually in "kool aid" form. If only this or that were so, it would not be so horrible. Chomsky points out, "but it's hard to be a decent person when you have your boot on someone's neck. In a patriarchal family, the abusive father doesn't think he's doing anything wrong. If you oppress people, you have to have a reason for doing it; in order to look yourself in the mirror, you have to make up a story."
In the '60s, McLuhan predicted computers would break down barriers of global communication and “enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a salable kind.” He also predicted a rise in the cult of personality.
Sophistry or Sophistication?
Sophistry or Sophism in the modern definition is a specious argument used for deceiving someone. In ancient Greece, sophists were a category of teachers who specialized in using the tools of philosophy and rhetoric for the purpose of teaching aretê — excellence, or virtue — predominantly to young statesmen and nobility. The practice of charging money for education (and providing wisdom only to those who can pay) led to the condemnations made by Plato (through Socrates in his dialogues). Plato regarded their profession itself as being 'specious' or 'deceptive', hence the modern meaning of the term.
Plato is largely responsible for the modern view of the "sophist" as a greedy instructor who uses rhetorical sleight-of-hand and ambiguities of language in order to deceive, or to support fallacious reasoning. In this view, the sophist is not concerned with truth and justice, but instead seeks power. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all challenged the philosophical foundations of sophism.
Some scholars, such as Ugo Zilioli argue that the sophists held a relativistic view on cognition and knowledge. However, this may involve the Greek word "doxa," which means "culturally shared belief" rather than "individual opinion." Their philosophy contains criticism of religion, law, and ethics. Though many sophists were apparently as religious as their contemporaries, some held atheistic or agnostic views (for example, Protagoras and Diagoras of Melos). Plato and Aristotle regarded philosophy as distinct from sophistry, the latter being regarded as specious and rhetorical, a practical discipline. Thus, by the time of the Roman Empire, a sophist was simply a teacher of rhetoric or a popular public speaker. To mistake such for wisdom would be an error of class.
The term originated from Greek σόφισμα, sophisma, from σοφίζω, sophizo "I am wise"; confer σοφιστής, sophistēs, meaning "wise-ist, one who does wisdom, one who makes a business out of wisdom" and σοφός, sophós means "wise man". But you must remain alert for who these things serve, what hidden agenda on the part of the self-appointed mage is in motion? The shadow is the stage assistant of the magician and Trickster. Magickal assistants have many ancient names -- gods, angels -- daemons, but the "shadow" is an obvious extension of the person.
Trickster anthropology includes theorizing ontological ambiguity, transgression and transformation. Anthropology now talk of flows, communities of practice, and mobile cultural geographies in what appears to be a radical shift of object, from social structures and a standardizing view of collectivities, to individuals, processes, entities and agencies.
Anthropologists of religion have long grappled with the figure of the 'trickster' - the playful, deceitful, shape-shifting archetypical spirit whose resistance to categorical stasis and ontological certainty is a reminder that cosmology can often escape human determination and containment. Through diverse ethnographic instances and contexts, we explore the idea of 'anthropological tricksters' in the more encompassing domains of politics, kinship, and social identity, where ambiguity may not be just transitive but indeed constitutive. The field is exploring novel ways of recording and theorizing ontological transgressiveness and transformation.
see http://www.scribd.com/doc/70353722/The-Shadow-as-a-Magical-Assistant
Sophistry is part of the speculative basis of language based subcultures -- persuasion and rhetoric with a dash of charisma. Such persons may believe wholeheartedly in their own self-delusion and zealously try infecting others with it. But why? The question remains, but often has a narcissistic basis. Argumentation skills don't necessary lead to truth. Arguments can be utterly fallacious, "bait and switch" pseudophilosophy, or a confidence trick. Deiliberately flawed reasoning and arguments may even be less harmful than those unconsciously produced by those with self-deluded good intentions based in fraudulent assumed truths. The effect of both on others is still exploitative.
Bread & Circuits
The situation is compounded by netlife: From magicians and mediums to immersive media, and from the circus to cyborgs, the celebration and/or mistrust of illusion has been a central theme across a range of cultures. Notions of fakery and deception remind us that our identities that are performative. The figure of the ‘mark’ of the fairground scam remains culturally ubiquitous, perhaps more so than ever, in an era of (post) mechanical reproduction.
Is new technology a flight from the real or merely a continuation of older cultural forms? Is it necessary, or even possible, to define reality in relation to the illusory? What realms of ‘otherness’ remain to be embraced? We can discuss staged illusions across a spectrum of historical, geographical and cultural contexts, including: 3D cinema, the paranormal, the music hall, digital trickery, the fairground, magicians and illusionists, theatre, science, the museum, the magic of cinema, the gothic, digital gaming, role play, social networking, the circus, advertising, illusory bodies and genders, theme parks and digital animation. The unknowable isn't always the spiritual.
CosmoSpolitan?
Each age has its quest for the Holy Grail, however you define it. The New Age dogmas may be even more difficult to escape than the conventional ones whose boundaries are well known. Supernatural beings don't influence us, rather it is the human who allows himself to be influenced by others.
You can make yourself believe anything, moreso, by repeated exposure to such notions and engaging in self-confirmatory searching for material and individuals that support those erroneous conclusions based on partial information or even disinformation. This is the basis of mind control in cults. Groupthink repels rather than persuades the spiritually mature because it is the opposite of self-actualization and self-realization which is true gnosis, or self-knowledge.
It is in the interpretation of such phenomena that people depart from 'reality' into self-delusion, religious and otherwise. Does consciousness supervene on all identical worldlines and where the multiverse differentiates (or as bundles of worlds divide), where the first person experience is indeterminate. Secondly, does local causality then apply?
"Space" as the master trope of this century, and in the domain of 21st century (post) humanists, is a concept gaining significant attention in rhetoric and composition. Even a lifetime of compulsive dissent may be totally off-track, supporting nothing more than a false personality rather than health and well-being. We voice great moral indignation about other people's atrocities but not our own. Thomas Aquinas called it intentional ignorance - when something is not nice to think about.
What some people often miss is, in the emerging, more unified paradigm, that which we usually think of as "objective" (and/or "objective truth"), really turns out to also be instances of very strongly repeatable subjectivity. This sort of reveals what is coming at us and that what we really experience are forms of strongly repeating, stochastically repeating and the rare-to-never repeating instances of subjectivity.
After a fashion everyone gets to strongly, stochastically and rarely repeatable subjectivity, and our much loved objective certainty shimmers away. So, we feel a chill run through us, or we encounter a sense or a presence. And, we KNOW that it is of the rarely repeatable category. A fully cloaked being sitting on the bed and scaring the whiskers off the cat, or Christ in his full, compassionate sensitivity, but also hidden from direct view.
One may notice that even now some people think of physical life and also spiritual life. Much of the physical life IS strongly repeatable, but not all. And much of the spiritual life is rarely repeatable and certainly not on our whim and control. So, some paradigm transition, some adjustment in the world-modeling is deeply warranted.
Do we just take a load off and tune in, structurally code into the strong, stochastic and rare flavors of repeatable subjectivity? Do we remain fascinated with following the high weirdness of our faulty perceptions or try to see through the dynamics of the process in motion? In this sense, archetypes and anomalous phenomena function like magicians of the psyche, deluding us with misdirection. Does the paranormal contradict scientific explanation or merely elude it?
If the archetypes have a location; neurostructures that instantiate them, it's not impossible that we can believe in god because we have a brain center that specializes in fatherly images seems not unreasonable. 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.
Particularly clever stratagems would be remembered..Over millennia, all the archetypes have been made explicit in stories, deities and cultural forms.One of the most salient aspects of many points of religious faith is that they aren't true. In our early history people didn't know the ‘real' reasons things happened, and so it's no surprise that their explanations were wrong. So, why would we want to retrieve such superstitions?
According to Philosopher/historian of science, T.S. Kuhn, even the most absurd or confused explanation of a phenomena can find acceptance in the absence of a competing idea. Once any explanation is offered for a phenomena, it has an explanation from that time on. Each succeeding speculation is better able to explain the relevant phenomena better than its predecessors.The deities are the opening gambit in the drama of understanding human subjectivity, and many of the lessons they offer are still the best lessons available, especially for children, or the uneducated, which represents most of the people on earth. Folk tales function the same way.
Deities or archetypes may have evolved to smooth interpersonal relations by including an understanding of human types, along with rules for helping the different types relate with one another. If the deities are just reflections of ancient evolutionary pressures, with a dash of neuroanatomy thrown in, we still have same pressures today so the ancient archetypes still "work", irregardless of any objective existence of gods and goddesses.
QUANTUM ABCs
by Nick Herbert
http://quantumtantra.blogspot.com/
Physics in the style of Dr. Suess
A is for Atom: its electrons in shells
B is for Bosons, Niels Bohr and John Bell
C for Colliders: Fermilab, Stanford and CERN
D: Dirac's bra-ket notation all students must learn
E is entanglement, eigenstate, emission
F is for Fermions, Feynman and fission
G is for Glauber, Gauss, GHZ
H is for Heisenberg's uncertainty
I: Interference twixt quantum wavefunctions
J is for superconducting Josephson junctions
K mesons give direction to time in decays
L: prince Louis de Broglie said matter is waves
M: Maxwell a Scotsman wrote equations for light
N: quantum No-cloning Rule--try as you might
O: quantum Optics deals with photonic transactions
P: German Max Planck finds the quantum of action
Q: Quantum Reality: a physics book written by Nick
R: matter's deep Randomness makes the Universe tick
S: Austrian Schrödinger, famed for his Cat
T: quantum Teleportation: not fiction but fact
U is for Universe: the whole kitchen sink
V is for Vacuum: it's more than you think
W transmits weak force along with the Z
X stands for position; momentum is "p"
Yang and Lee deny parity in beta decay
Z is for Zeilinger, Zurek and Zeh
Now you know your ABCs
You're halfway to a PhD
Study hard for your exams
And never eat green eggs and ham
Carl Jung and Science:
We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a "metamorphosis of the gods," i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science. ~The Undiscovered Self p 110
• This grasping of the whole is obviously the aim of science as well, but it is a goal that necessarily lies very far off because science, whenever possible, proceeds experimentally and in all cases statistically. Experiment, however, consists in asking a definite question which excludes as far as possible anything disturbing and irrelevant. It makes conditions, imposes them on Nature, and in this way forces her to give an answer to a question devised by man. She is prevented from answering out of the fullness of her possibilities since these possibilities are restricted as far as partible. For this purpose there is created in the laboratory a situation which is artificially restricted to the question which compels Nature to give an unequivocal answer. The workings of Nature in her unrestricted wholeness are completely excluded. If we want to know what these workings are, we need a method of inquiry which imposes the fewest possible conditions, or if possible no conditions at all, and then leave Nature to answer out of her fullness. ~Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle p. 35
My interests drew me in different directions. On the one hand I was powerfully attracted by science, with its truths based on facts; on the other hand I was fascinated by everything to do with comparative religion. [...] In science I missed the factor of meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism. ~Memories, Dreams, Reflections p. 72
• All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. This is particularly true of religious ideas, but the central concepts of science, philosophy, and ethics are no exception to this rule. In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas, created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality. For it is the function of consciousness not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us. ~"The Structure of the Psyche" (1927). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.342
"Science is not... a perfect instrument, but it is a superb and invaluable tool that works harm only when taken as an end in itself." (from "Commentary to The Secret of the Golden Flower", 1929)
• If we do not fashion for ourselves a picture of the world, we do not see ourselves either, who are the faithful reflections of that world. Only when mirrored in our picture of the world can we see ourselves in the round? Only in our creative acts do we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete. Never shall we put any face on the world other than our own, and we have to do this precisely in order to find ourselves. For higher than science or art as an end in itself stands man, the creator of his instruments. ~"Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung" (1928). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.737
Every science is a function of the mind, and all knowledge is rooted in it. The mind is the greatest of all cosmic wonders. - "On the Nature of the Psyche" (1947). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.357
• Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it. It may help us to escape all criticism; we may even be able to deceive ourselves in the belief of our obvious righteousness. But deep down, below the surface of the average man's conscience, he hears a voice whispering, "There is something not right," no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or by the moral code. Carl G. Jung, in the introduction to Frances G. Wickes' "Analysis der Kinderseele" (The Inner World of Childhood), 1931