Holographic Archetypes
Top Down & Bottom Up
Control of Personal & Collective Consciousness
by Iona Miller, 2012
Control of Personal & Collective Consciousness
by Iona Miller, 2012
Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research
Vol 3; Issue 3
JCER (ISSN: 2153-8212) is a publication in which scientists, philosophers and other learned scholars publish their research results and express their views on the nature, origin and mechanism of consciousness. In doing so, we hope that one day we will be able to arrive at a genuine science of consciousness.
http://www.jcer.com/
Vol 3; Issue 3
JCER (ISSN: 2153-8212) is a publication in which scientists, philosophers and other learned scholars publish their research results and express their views on the nature, origin and mechanism of consciousness. In doing so, we hope that one day we will be able to arrive at a genuine science of consciousness.
http://www.jcer.com/
Abstract: There is a pre-physical, unobservable domain of potentiality in quantum theory. It is the basis of fundamental interconnectedness and wholeness of Reality. The human body is not an object in space, but seamlessly welded to spacetime. 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. Archetypes are rooted in or emerge from the holographic source field as attractors, chaotic systems having fractal or reiterative structures that repeat at all levels of observation. They never settle 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.
Key Words: holography, archetype, personal, collective, control, fractals, complexity, consciousness.
Key Words: holography, archetype, personal, collective, control, fractals, complexity, consciousness.
"An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors." "Wisdom is knowing the great metaphors of meaning." --Carl Jung
"God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that." --Joseph Campbell
"God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that." --Joseph Campbell
Mind Control Countermeasures
What you "see" is not always what you "get." Reality may be hidden by nature's veil or a dramatic mask. Many people mistakenly take their own perceptions and visions literally without "seeing through" the various possibilities deeply buried within that are outside their belief system, knowledge or skill sets. Self-reports and self-concepts often differ widely from objective measures. Do archetypes help us con our own consciousness with myths of individuality? Are we unwitting undercover agents for social memes without realizing it?
We need to be not only conscious of the nature of our consciousness, but conscious of our fallibility, realizing that intuition is fallible if unsupported by rational criticism. Personal, sociopolitical and spiritual myths and memes drive false perceptions. If we have little access to our pre-conditioned decision-making process, the whole concept of 'consciousness' becomes questionable. But we are also subject on an a priori basis to the influence of genes, memes and archetypal schemes.
Psychodynamics of the Unconscious
Chaos theory, quantum and torsion physics, and analytical psychology provide portals for new awareness both of the processes of personal growth and of changes in world life. Modeling incorporates the five structures of consciousness—archaic, magical, mythic, mental, and integral. Complexity Theory describes the Universe as a complex of whole systems spontaneously generating out of a void and self-organizing at thresholds between chaos and stability
The archetype, a word used by Jung (1958) and elaborated by his follower Erich Neumann (1954), is a numinous (potent, powerful) unconscious psychic content -- the core of representations including those of states, and patterns of coordination of actions. Von Franz describes archetypes as "excited points in the field of the objective psyche" which behave like "relatively isolatable nuclei". We can imagine this as a precursor to the notion of archetypal "attractors" in choas theory. Chaos is not so much pathological as it is a state of maximum readiness for an emerging reorganized self-system. Individuals with schemas or working models bordering on chaos are likely to be those most flexible and resilient.
Archetypes are also highly connected to each other. They describe capacities for consciousness -- functions, attitudes and character pathologies. In itself an archetype has no specific form. Such innate organizing principles exist in a very deep layer of the brain, but it gives rise to images in the visual cortex which partially represent it. Our ancient instinctual apparatus included affection, inquisitiveness, self-preservation, competitiveness, fear and curiosity, i.e. these have archetypal existence. Archetypes were the forefathers of symbols, and are inherently symbolic.
Many concepts which are essential components of human (and group) thought originated as archetypes. Later on, both in time and in terms of cognitive activity, they put on the clothes of visual imagery and verbal identity. But they began in the limbic brain as archetypes. All people have the same archetypes, and they are the instruments of cultural evolution; but they express themselves differently in different cultural circumstances.
Lumsden and Wilson hypothesize that it takes about 1,000 years for a cultural element, or a propensity to express some culturally defined trait, to become established in the gene pool as an inherited trait. So Jung wasn't wrong in talking about 'endless repetitions of typical patterns of behavior', he just didn't understand the mechanism which would give them a genetic basis. Pre-linguistic memes and archetypes, such as rhythm, may have played a greater role in genetic evolution than he dared to propose.
Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) says: “When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation.” Perhaps so, but we might speculate that a meme is fertile or successful because they bind to archetypes, helping the effective expression of the archetype, rather than parasitizing the brain in any general sense.
Memes & Genes; Archetypes & Holograms
People construct all kinds of aberrant realities for themselves. A cognitive illusion, the self-attribution fallacy means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren't responsible. Our perceptions are hopelessly distorted, our best thinking is fuzzy. Self-image is perhaps the most distorted, yet most highly-defended aspect of being. When some elements appear in high-relief, others fade into a blur of intersubjective process. False perceptions, beliefs, and ideas obscure and obstruct our true potential.
Both the memes of holography and anamorphosis are relevant, the later skewing our illusory perspective. Viewing from a certain angle can create impossible images -- image warping, reflected aberrations. In post-modern relativism, there are holes in virtually every point of view. Under these circumstances, can we unravel the experiential qualities inherent in the field of reality itself?
Word choice and metaphor allow for the emergence of new memes, the replacement of memes, and the death of memes, via a concept that Douglas Hofstadter (1995) calls "conceptual slippage." Memes, like genes, only "code for" a norm or mean of reaction correlating to the memetic selection bias. Neither memes nor genes determine all aspects of the properties of the entities they constitute. Cultural inheritance is not particularly creative, so most "novelty" is merely the recombination or recycling of pre-existing memes in novel ways.
Memes are quantized information stored in and expressed from neurological structures or cultural substrates, Memes reside as neural net structures in our central nervous systems, but many emerge at a higher cultural level, expressed in a cultural ecology. Memes do not control behavior rigidly, but bias and constrain it to a norm of reaction. They are the replicators of cultural evolution, genealogical actors in ecological roles. Memes form ancestor descendent chains of populations that ramify, reticulate, and resonate with frequencies differing from biological phylogeny, but the differences appear to be within the extremes of the parameters of biology (Witkins).
What memes and genes do determine are the degrees of freedom. They bias and constrain the outcomes of the system. It's as if we live in holographic bubbles of encoded information. Penrose describes how every event is a decision point. Images are animated over events in the flow of energy, like the animated frames of a movie. The confusing aspect of consensual reality is each bubble shares information with other bubbles, which is the nature of the perceivable world that we share together.
There are so many models in physics. Susskind's "holographic principle", rooted in a certain kind of string theory is vastly different from earlier holographic models being based in quantum gravity. Over vast distances of the universe, 'now here', is seen as the future or past from elsewhere. Depending on how your velocity is maintaining your localized time, you can leap frog standard perceptual time and move to the future or past. Some claim the future is already out there as well as the past and the only real difference between now and then is the location from which the perception occurs.
Vacuum models of holographic realities have a different basis than the Standard Model, too. That's why when people use 'intentionality' to justify their wishful thinking with Copenhagen's 'observer effect', it is laughable, since the Standard model works great for mechanics, but it fails to explain the first thing about Reality. Both psychology and neurology recognize humans 'make' decisions long before the frontal cortex is aware of it.
The holographic principle explains the fundamental level at which all information is defined, but it also explains the source of all information, in the same way that quantum cosmology explains the source of everything in the universe. The source of everything is the void. All excited states of information arise from the vacuum state. The void is the empty background space the universe is created within.
The universe is like a bubble in the void. These theories tell us everything arises from the nothingness of empty space as a quantum fluctuation in the zero energy level of the void. All we can view are excited states of information arising from the void, encoded by virtual particle fluctuation. Separation of virtual particles from virtual antiparticles at the event horizon creates a kind of holographic virtual reality, as virtual particles appear to become real (Susskind 2008, 171).
Trance Lucence
We cannot see the "big picture", so any attempt we make to holographically conceive our existential condition is more of an anamorphosis, a distorted projection or perspective requiring the viewer to use special devices or occupy a specific vantage point to reconstitute the image. The word "anamorphosis" is derived from the Greek prefix ana-, meaning back or again, and the word morphe, meaning shape or form. It deals with perspective and mirroring that conjure up a multi-dimensional perspective.
Archetypes are imagined as such distorting lenses, conditioning our perception of reality which is socially constructed and confused. There are many theories, but few correspond with reality.
Is there some psychological equivalent to cold fusion that might allow a new energetic paradigm to emerge? Can anamorphosis be a metaphor of perspective correction? Is there only one way to true vision? Does the anamorphic fractal attenuate reality? The anamorphic is not the fractal, because the fractal is repeating a pattern. Depending on the view we select, we become phobic about other information. We are clearly limited by our terms.
Human life is all symbols, visible signs of invisible reality, intuitive ideas that cannot yet be formulated in any other or better way. We live in a mind soup of psychoconfabulation. Symbols wield the power of pattern recognition and association. Few objectively gain distance from the archetypal content of mind and emotions. 'Archetypal' means fundamental intrapsychic organizing principles, or the deepest levels of psychological structure, holographic embedding and resonant fields, common to the human psyche in general. Information results and arises from innate structure.
Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance occurs when we filter our perceptions to screen out (deny) threatening information we cannot deal with. It is magical thinking to take a symbol to be its referent or an analogy to represent an identity. Magical thinking comes from an instinctual search and recognition of patterns, and regards symbols not as representations but as handles attached firmly to real-life objects and outcomes. Out of context, symbols are ineffectual. Evocative "power" is one of the attractive aspects of the meme concept which is also a symbol and signifier of meanings that are context dependent.
There are three types of symbols: 1) Symbols that reflect intrinsic mental states; 2) Symbols that stand in for extrinsic (actual or objective) conditions or objects, and 3) Symbols that stand in relation to cultural artefacts, or constructs, or memes. Here the symbol and the object it represents are one and the same.
Ramachandran (1998) describes symbolic characterizations of differing descent groups. Distinctions between groups (largely kin-based distinctions) had considerable importance; prior to the development of language as such, which could be used to express such distinctions. It could be done through dress, or through totemic, ritual and mythic symbolic expression. But how can a mutation that benefits the group survive and spread if it occurs only in isolated individuals? The answer appears to be that the group 'sharpens' genetic evolution by choosing members who conform to a required standard while excluding those that don't. This would make evolution happen very quickly, at least within the currently available pool of variation, since excluded individuals would not survive or mate.
Fortes (The Structure of Unilineal Descent Groups) explains how different but related descent groups are distinguished: “Cults of gods and of ancestors, beliefs of a totemic nature, and purely magical customs and practices, some or all are associated with lineage organization . . . every significant structural differentiation has its specific ritual symbolism, so that one can, as it were, read off from the scheme of ritual differentiation the pattern of structural differentiation, and the configuration of norms of conduct that go with it.”
Any distinction between symbol and symbolized is spurious. The emotional projection of symbols, or "magical thinking" happens in psychosis, in cultures, and subcultures. Disgust is an emotion heavily caught up in symbolic and magical thinking. Yet, symbols can have biophysical and material effects. We trick ourselves into mobilization.
Magical thinking helps us feel more secure in an unpredictable world. By manipulating symbols, we imagine being able to manipulate the reality that a symbol represents, but it makes us vulnerable to manipulation, too. The psychology of superstition "works" better in a virtuality. Superstition provides the illusion of increased control. Symbols are captivating, indistinct, metaphoric and enigmatic portrayals of psychic reality. The content, i.e., the meaning of symbols, is far from obvious; instead, it is expressed in unique and individual terms while at the same time partaking of universal imagery. Our society is having to rethink such fundamental notions as money, security, growth and many other bases of our current worldview.
Symbols can be recognized as aspects of those images that control, order and give meaning to our lives. The source of symbols can be traced to the archetypes themselves which by way of symbols find more full expression. Symbols are thus one type of what Jung called "archetypal images," that is, the representation in consciousness of an underlying archetype. Again, the anamorphic is not the fractal, because the fractal is repeating a pattern.
When the dominant vision that holds a period of culture together cracks, consciousness regresses into earlier containers, seeking sources for survival which also offer sources of revival. Self-empowerment can be entangled with self-delusion. We can no longer distinguish clearly between neurosis of self and neurosis of world, psychopathology of self and psychopathology of world. Species-wide trauma is playing out on the world stage. We compulsively recreate individual and collective trauma, perhaps as a way to awaken ourselves. Such madness is its own ritual and revelation.
Paramedia ecologist, Bob Dobbs refers to the Android Meme, which he defines as “…the ability of human-invented technology…to acquire the intimacy of speech and intuition.” In other words, the Android Meme is technology that has the qualities of "being alive". The Android Meme joins with us in an unholy alliance of archetypal technology and human organism, as a cacophony of all media, all technology and all ideas of particular times, anthropomorphized, trying to make itself human.
There is no great architect of the Meme besides our compliance to feed it. Calling it archetypal he simply means there is no physical joining (like a true android who is made up of organism and implants) but rather, like mythic thinking, in the Jungian sense, where people mime/behave cues from technology when it becomes used by a million people and becomes environment (morphic resonance). Thus, the hologram or fractal is superseded by anamorphosis. He claims we're in the post-noosphere (post-spherical, post-news, post-information) and panicking in the anamorphic flux of our hyperdimensional being (chemical, astral, TV and chip bodies ) - our new medium. The body functions as a map.
The Astral Body, a huge storehouse of religious and spiritual energy, pervades all cultures as the belief there is more to our makeup than the Chemical Body. The third organ is the TV Body - the repository of historical one-way broadcasting. The fourth, the Chip Body, is the mutating warehouse of digital omni-directional media. The fifth is the Mystery Body - what we're still excavating and whose lineaments we cannot fully assess yet, if ever. We now know it's made up of the previous four bodies but we don't know what more we will discover about its constituents, affects, and effects. The Android Meme (living mediascape) is the resultant interplay, violent and ecstatic, of the first four bodies. We keep looking in the rearview mirror vainly trying to peer into the future (Dobbs).
Scientific Archetypes
Mind, consciousness, and awareness are so central to the process of reality, perhaps they are the very reason for reality. Concepts of matter, life, and mind have undergone major changes. Consciousness is not a material system and neither is Quantum Mechanics (QM), which reduces all information and energy down to its fundamental holographic nature. As energy flows, information is coherently organized into animated forms of information. Though we have assumptions and beliefs, we remain unsure of the primordial nature of reality.
Simply stated, it is impossible to take the 'meta' out of physics since it is impossible to take the observer out of physics. It is impossible to take the knower out of knowledge. All metaphysical discussions are inherently about the nature of the observer and the knower. There is no physical theory of the observer because consciousness cannot be explained physically. Everything our physical theories of the observable world describe is some physical thing observed by an observer.
The observer is inherent in our most basic scientific principles, like the principle of equivalence. All the scientific debate about the correct interpretation of quantum theory is about the nature of observation. Both physics and metaphysics place the observer at the center of this discussion. ...That physical world of images demands of us that we inquire into the nature of the consciousness of the observer present at that focal point of perception. ...The holographic nature of the world describes at the most fundamental level possible how all information and energy is encoded in the world. But what does that fundamental description of the world tell us about the fundamental nature of consciousness? What is the nature of the consciousness that perceives that holographic world?
The key insight of the holographic principle is that an accelerating frame of reference, with an observer present at the central point of view, can arise even within empty space. As the observer arises, an event horizon also arises, which is a far as the observer can see things in space due to the constancy of the speed of light (Penrose 2005, figure 27.16). Where does the point of view of the observer arise? Where does the two dimensional surface of the event horizon arise? They both arise in empty space. (Kowall)
Scientists have shown that the brain runs largely on autopilot; it acts first and asks questions later, often explaining behavior after the fact. If much of behavior is automatic, then how responsible are people for their actions? These are among the concerns of neuroscientist Dr. Michael S. Gazzaniga in his new book, Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain. The brain is a cacophony of competing voices. “The question, ultimately, was why?” Dr. Gazzaniga said. “Why, if we have these separate systems, is it that the brain has a sense of unity?”
Brain images are snapshots, for one thing; they capture a brain state at only one moment in time and say nothing about its function before or after. For another, the images vary widely among people with healthy brains -- that is, a “high” level of activity in one person may be normal in another. Can brain science tell exactly where automatic processes end and self-directed “responsible” ones end? Not now and not likely ever, Dr. Gazzaniga argues in his book. Social constructs like good judgment and free will are even further removed, and trying to define them in terms of biological processes is, in the end, a fool’s game.
Science has its own archetypal fascinations, expressed in theories and models. There is no consensus in physics. The idea of many worlds, many realities, many dreams appears already in Chinese and Indian text. Everett cites the well know "garden of forking path" from Borges. It is an ancestral theme of humanity, which comes easily to the mind when you remember your dreams. To really know how the brain works, neuroanatomy is the best guide. Psychological descriptions got us started, but a fundamental map and understanding require a deeper biological foundation and questioning our assumed truths.
We remain immersed within the interface of psyche and matter ~ that point where psyche matters. As in chaos theory, all the creative action is at the boundary of any field, the creative threshold, the leading edge. All contemporary models -- Transactional (quantum handshake), Many-Worlds (decoherence), M-Theory (strings), Copenhagen (wave-function collapse), Holographic (frequency domain; resolution), Implicate (hidden information), E8, and Torsion Physics -- are essentially philosophical, or colored by the psyche and philosophy of their originators. Imagination has to cross the boundaries of disciplines to somehow find links between the observable and unknowable. With gravity, time and spin, matter and psyche are in a constant state of redefinition.
Mathematician Chris King says string theory is facing a high noon - the absence of evidence for supersymmetry in the LHC, where none of the expected evidence for it has been forthcoming to date. String theories began bosonic and then included fermions by citing supersymmetry. Thus all fermionic string theories appear to be supersymmetric. Supersymmetry perfectly balances the energy infinity of the bosons against the negative energy infinity of the fermions by claiming a fermion partner for each boson, but the standard model doesn't look anything like supersymmetric. An alternative is that there are different numbers and arrangements of fermions that still balance the numbers and arrangements of the bosons, but this is right outside the string theory orbit at present.
Physicist Brian Greene, in a PBS show "The Fabric of the Cosmos" on the nature of space, recently let us in on a secret: We've all been deceived. Our perceptions of time and space have led us astray. Much of what we thought we knew about our universe—that the past has already happened and the future is yet to be, that space is just an empty void, that our universe is the only universe that exists—just might be wrong. Greene reveals space as a dynamic fabric that Brain. The brain is a cacophony of competing voices. “The question, ultimately, was why?” Dr. Gazzaniga said. “Why, if we have these separate systems, is it that the brain has a sense of unity?”
The unexplored microcosm of the Ground-state, the universe of the subquantal domain, may be the key to higher consciousness.The vacuum of Absolute Space is the central ingredient of 21st-century physics. It is the space between “particles”, inside and outside the atom. You breathe air that carries the vacuum between its molecules. It is technically metaphysical (nonobservable) -- beyond the realm of physics because it is virtual, rather than manifest. Paradoxically, the vacuum is both the absence of matter and the universal substance.
We still don't know where consciousness fits in the big picture. There is no consensus among theories of what constitutes FIGURE and what constitutes the most fundamental GROUND, and it seems they share the same essential nature. Our perceived ‘content’ is not distinct from the ‘context’ in which it arises. It is one whole cloth of bubbling space-time. Nothing more, nor less. We have looked into the Abyss of spacetime and found it laughing back. The core task is answering "What is consciousness? ", and having that answer also fit with and support questions and developed answers (descriptions) on "What is matter?" and "What is energy?" Clearly, the task is to settle on a new common denominator that unites the other aspects and elements.
There is the subject which is conscious and then there is the object of consciousness. If there were no object of consciousness, would there be a consciousness? A consciousness of nothing? Arthur Korrnberg discusses DNA in his book DNA Replication (pg.13). "The most important feature of the duplex model for DNA structure is the introduction of the principle of complimentarity. It provided the explanation for accurate replication of a very long chain. This inherent feature of DNA is the basis not only of its replication but also of its capacity to transmit information.
Complementarity has come to explain transcription and translation and thus the entire sequence of events in the expression of genetic functions. It is also the basis for exchange of DNA segments between chromosomes in several forms of recombination." Does the rest of the body follow DNA? As a matter of fact is there anything which combines with anything without an entity bringing the pair together".
Pitkanin & Gariaev suggest, frequency coding would be natural for quantum antenna interactions between ordinary DNA and its dark variant and also between dark variants of DNA, RNA, tRNA, and amino-acids. The reason is that dark nucleons represent the genetic code by entanglement and it is not possible to reduce the codon to a sequence of letters.
Ervin Laszlo points out regarding the finest level of observation, that because of “the quantum vacuum, the energy sea that underlies all of spacetime, it is no longer warranted to view matter as primary and space as secondary. It is to space or rather, to the cosmically extended "Dirac-sea" of the vacuum that we should grant primary reality.” Virtual particles pop in and out of existence like quantum foam. Mass is the consequence of interactions in the depth of this universal field. There is only this absolute matter-generating subquantal field.
Physicist, David Bohm believed all matter is unfolded out of what he eventually described as a holomovement, which meant that matter could also enfold and so return into the holomovement. Bohm considered quantum mechanics to be a process of unfolding and enfolding. He imagined the universe as an infinite sea of space and energy out of which matter could be unfolded, which he called explicating, and enfolded which he called implicating, which, in Bohm’s words, “together are a flowing, undivided wholeness".
The whole universe of space and time is enfolded into each part. A fundamental order of potential energy enfolds space and time. There is hidden energy in these enfolded dimensions -- a unity of space, time and meaning potential. Scalars are time-reversed waves. The infolded (negative) time dimension of virtual photon flux (hyperspace) is zero-point. Time in physics can be interpreted as an archetype for all material objects. You can not grab a piece of time and hold it; it is everywhere but nowhere. Materiality in the physical world eventually unfolds and enfolds at all scales. Archetypes share this holographic enfolding and unfolding nature. At least, they can be modelled as such.
Psychological Archetypes
Jung's collective unconscious consists of archetypal infolded EM structures acting in common in an overall bio-quantum-potential for the entire species. The bio-potential in a single body is an overall quantum potential that links and joins all the atoms and cells of the body. The "spirit" of the biosystem, if you will, is its "living biopotential" - its living quantum potential. We already know that a potential is everywhere nonzero all the way out to infinity. So the spirit of the living system is - in the virtual state - everywhere and everywhen in the universe. The superhologram of spacetime means the entire universe is everywhere alive, with everything.
Archetypal forces operate under their own laws in various phases of human life and endeavors. The archetypes provide the potential form for experiences that are given individual content by the person’s actual experiences. They influence us on biochemical, personal, social, national and universal levels. They come in the ever-changing guises of phobias and Irrational fears, prejudices, complexes (interference by an archetype or group of archetypes with the conscious personality), and our runaway ego-trips. Complexes can be pathological, archetypes cannot, as entirely healthy expressions of nature The complex may form around any archetypal, that is, structurally important, component of the psyche.
Archetypes play through our self-narratives and culture in art, literature, and the movies we so frequently view. They are in all the stories we love. Our souls are attuned to listening for the multiplicity of viewpoints that comprise situations and events, bridging unconscious and consciousness. Complexes need not be pathological. They are merely collections of psychological material that function most efficiently when they are together. They usually group together because they all relate to a single archetype.
When seen objectively in stories, we can identify with or despise them, but when their effects are subjective, we are entirely "carried away," "beside ourselves". Sometimes, we choose them to feel special and create drama or novelty in our otherwise listless lives - we mistake them for love, for destiny, for the voice of God, for supernatural "signs" in an unenlightened, even superstitious manner. They lie behind religiosity, pathology, and romantic vs. mature love.
Archetypes also lie behind fascinations, crusades, and enchantments of individuals and nations. They produce the phenomena of "love at first sight" and create fads and set trends or styles in the recreation and fashion worlds. They can be contagious as in the case of cults, or political and religious movements. The great attraction of sports is also archetypal in nature.
People will go to war and fight to the death as fanatical "true believers" to defend some political or religious principle. The belief system is influenced by the myth behind it. Charismatic leaders capture the projections of leadership through expressing the subconscious desires of the crowd, or herd consciousness (like Adolph Hitler or Jim Jones). Activation of these archetypal powers opens the door for both good and evil, and creates an arena for the emergence of ethics and morals.
Irrational superstitious behavior goes hand in glove with errors of judgement and in some cases involves dissociation or personality disorders, including schizotypal, toxic narcissistic, and borderline personalities. Dissociation can be desirable, as in the case of flow, or pathological, as in dissociative identity disorder. Deeper reality is not remote in the physical sense but in a psychological sense. It is concealed by the very trance states and memes that compose it.
Often, we only recognize the trance state when it breaks, when the projection ends and we reassimilate that energy. The archetypal content should be respected and perhaps seen through various lenses, but it should never be dismissed as delusion or mere projection. If this happens then the whole cascade of chemistry that packs enormous energies and psychic forces can be prematurely deflated and turn into a self-destructive bomb in the bodymind of the awakener.
Psychic life depends on an unconscious infrastructure. Jung helped differentiate the inscape with his concept of archetypes which express the innate potentials of all dynamics beyond specific forms. Many of his ideas are central to understanding the human psyche or soul, and apply universally to all of mankind. What is of archetypal—that is, organizational and structural—importance to the personality will emerge.
Jung suggests the existence of a 3-layered psyche consisting of 1) the conscious (active part of the mind), 2) the personal unconscious (thinking over which we have little or no control), and 3) the collective unconscious (unevolved, animal-instinctive mental activity). Jung sees archetypes as unconscious regulators of psychic life that attempt to redress psychic imbalances. The unconscious iinteracts with consciousness in a compensatory way, which leads to intrapsychic self-regulation (Jung, 1966).
In Myth and the Body, Keleman states: "Our creation myth is also the myth of our biological evolution...there is another aspect to the creation and evolution myth..myth is about the birth and evolution of the body's inner subjectivity... embyrogenesis is cosmogenesis; the birth of the body is the birth of the inner emotional cosmos...from the moment of our conception, the organizing of past somatic images is available to us as a guide for being in the world of the present....The different bodies of our history-personal and impersonal-are in our dreams. Myth presents us ...with the body images of various ages and eons. The complex of somatic images gives our present somatic image an organization and dimension, a structure that has duration...Mostly we are in touch with the surface body, because perception is mostly a surface phenomenon. That doesn't mean that the other bodies aren't there.”
Resonant Filters
Psyche is the unified field of material and immaterial dynamics, the physical and metaphysical. There are as many archetypes as there are situations in life and nature. A constant non-perceptual pattern remains concealed behind archetypal variants. Originating in the collective unconscious, archetypes are experiential catalysts, often likened to psychodynamic Platonic Forms or "spiritual" DNA. They are constraint-based domains. They are the forces of history. They are life's filters.
Archetypes, according to Jung, are "active living dispositions, ideas in the Platonic sense, that preform and continually influence our thoughts and feelings and actions." They are not inherited ideas, but rather, as Jung says elsewhere, "inherited possibilities of ideas." The exact nature of these archetypes has been much discussed both within and outside of Jungian circles. What matters for our present purposes is just that the underlying archetypes (which by definition are beyond or beneath consciousness) are expressed in powerful, fascinating and numinous conscious images called "archetypal images". What needs to be insisted on, however, it that there is something still deeper behind archetypal images, something itself unknown, which expresses itself in the psyche. (Granrose)
Archetype-figures also appear in the personal unconscious as "complexes". Archetypes tend to personify themselves, through the cooperation of the active imagination, in order to penetrate personal consciousness. The unconscious, form-determining (archetypal) components of the personality, and the complexes of ideation and affect that form around them seem to act like inductive magnets for certain events and affects to which they correspond (Jung, 1960, 1969). Like strange attractors in chaos theory, they are self-organizing intrapsychic principles.
Archetypes express innate psychological dispositions, fundamental morphogenetic laws, which govern perception, and affective experience. They influence the formation of complexes, which develop around a particular archetypal (core) issue. The archetypes are the individual components or manifestations of the self; they determine particular intrapsychic structures. They manifest in the instinctual life of the body, its attractions, repulsions, fragmentations, and impasses, as well as ideas, "head trips," and spiritual urges. Archetypes give form to fertile chaos which functions as a multi-reined holographic control system. All of our experience is filtered through these conditioning "lenses." Nevertheless we aren't reducible to simple determinants.
We are embedded in a hologram of psychic dimensions. Interactive archetypal energies are embedded in and live through us, as biopsychosocial events. They represent our potentialities beyond time. But we think we are autonomous. In these state-specific altered realities we experience a qualitative range and subtlety of interconnectedness that would be frightening and crazy-making to our normal socio-conditioned repressed mode of being. We find the ground of being and interrelationship with mystery through mythic engagement.
Normally, we project our inner states out into the world. The mystic becomes emancipated from the persuasions of psychic content, while the schizophrenic becomes lost in them. Images arise from energy flux like biochemical resonant filters and harmonic levels of arousal, elevated energetic activation. Then we find synchronous information and events in the outer world to reinforce the energetic power of the archetypes we are preoccupied with. The shamanic journey consists of acute neurological events that evoke heavens and hells that lead to emergent self-organization. (Miller, 1993)
To avoid spiraling into prolonged metabolic and cognitive chaos we must accept these new levels of awareness and physiological condition as coming from “us” and not from an alien entity or God. We must claim responsibility for our Self as it incarnates at an accelerated pace and not project the cause of our condition onto external people, entities or events. As an integrated human we can still "have" our story, but we must keep it in its place by running it through a progressively rational interpretation. For it is this rationalizing process that integrates the archetypal imaginal world (reptilian/old mammalian brain) into the 21st Century prefrontal lobes.
Consensus reality is a conditioned trance state. To be "normal", when this violates our inner nature, is itself a form of pathology. Disruption of ego's metaprogramming (habituated dissociation) is not regression, but merely the removal of adaptive/repressive functioning in the present. This creates an entirely new consciousness that does share features with primordial states. This loss of the sense of the known self (ego) is a desireable effect of transformation processes.
By differentiating from the images, symbols, myths, stories and personal identity that we were so involved in before, consciousness becomes separated from its contents. We deepen oury own healing by remembering our own experience of trauma is simultaneously a microcosmic, personalized fractal reflecting the greater trauma resonating throughout the collective field. This realization allows us to not personalize the moment of feeling the trauma, or concretize ourselves as being traumatized, but allows us to give over to and embrace particularized experience.
Unless we are “affected” by the symbols, myths and archetypes that we use to give “story” to our lives, no psychic tension would arise to propel us out of “normal” consciousness. The foundations of myth arose in the trance states of early shamans and yogis, exploring the self-arising activity of the Central Nervous System. Intense concentration on the resting voltage of the CNS can lead to spontaneous realization of the meaning that pervades one's own biology. (Sansonese, The Body of Myth, p. 34-35).
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, 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.
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 (Miller, 2003). 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. Dr. Paul Henrickson says that 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.
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 post-Jungian 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.
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. (Miller, 1992)
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)
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. (Farias)
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 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 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.
Holographic Archetypes
There is a pre-physical, unobservable domain of potentiality in quantum theory. It is the basis of fundamental interconnectedness and wholeness of Reality. The human body is not an object in space, but seamlessly welded to spacetime. 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.
Our molecular system extends beyond the nervous system and is the bedrock of felt-sense, intuitive, subconscious and unconscious processes. The body has a mind of its own and speaks that mind in gut reactions, body language, dreams, psychosomatics, and literal symptoms. Jung suggested the gods have become diseases. That is, in our unconsciousness of them they have resorted to subverting our bodies in order to be responded to and heard. For example, our collective environmental issues become cancers.
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. Holographic archetypes are embedded in the very fabric of our being and that of our environment.
Archetypes are rooted in or emerge from the holographic source field as attractors, chaotic systems having fractal or reiterative structures that repeat at all levels of observation. They never settle 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.
All the objects of our world are three-dimensional images formed of standing and moving waves by electromagnetic and nuclear processes. This is the guiding matrix for self-assembly, and manipulating and organizing physical reality. It is how our DNA creates and projects our psychophysical structure. Holograms contain many dimensions of “compressed” information in a subtle network of interacting frequencies.
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.
Thus, the brain is an embedded hologram, interpreting a holographic universe. (Miller, Webb, Dickson, 1973) All existence consists of embedded holograms within holograms and their interrelatedness somehow gives rise to our existence and sensory images. (Bohm, 1980) When we consciously embody this intimate wisdom, our bodies become temples of the living spirit. We supercharge our potential.
DNA functions in a way that correlates with holographic projection. The code is transformed into physical matter guided by light and sound signals. DNA projects a blueprint for the organism that is translated from the electrodynamic to the molecular level. Further, research strongly suggests DNA functions as a biocomputer. Gariaev described how this DNA-wave biocomputer reads and writes genetic code and forms holographic pre-images of biostructures. We are more fundamentally electromagnetic, rather than chemical beings. DNA is also influenced by the environment, so genetic plasticity is expressed in epigenetics and meta-genetics that turn certain gene sequences on and off.
The Collective Unconscious is essentially a hologram. Nonlocal consciousness is not confined to specific points in space, including brains or bodies, nor to the present moment. 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. 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 emerged and recycled 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. Social networking feeds us stupefyingly moronic ideas. Once any explanation is offered for a phenomena, many take that as 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 and fads 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. http://zero-point.tripod.com/pantheon/pantheon.html
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.
Synchronicity explores the borderland between meaning and spacetime, where chance meets necessity, when external and internal circumstances align in meaningful coincidence. It links the observable and unknowable, the effect of the particular and specific with the universal. In this nonlocal effect, certain qualities manifest relatively simultaneously in different or proximate places. It is a parallelism that cannot be explained causally. Is it an invisible field effect linking multidimensional spaces?
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.
Psychoid Field
Consciousness rests upon and is organized by its archetypal forms and foundations. Dig far enough into an intense inner experience and you eventually come to the mythological, ageless themes that indicate an activated archetype. Just as an instinct is activated by a certain situation it bears an image of, so is an archetype. Also, its psychoid base puts it beyond both matter and psyche, though it has qualities of both. Although archetypes are energic power sources, they need libido from the ego for their images to rise into consciousness.
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, phobias, prejudices, complexes (interference by an archetype or group of archetypes with the conscious personality), our runaway ego-trips, 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. They continually play through us, stimulating beliefs, ideas, emotions and behavior. 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 manifests in dreams, fantasies, delusion and visions.
Truth is a revelation of what we already know but haven’t heard in words before. In truth we discover what we already know but haven’t confronted. Truth as a judgment is the product of our experience. In our belief systems, truth is what we accept of our history, what we accept as truth. We choose truth, which is revealed in direct proportion to our abilitiy to discard all we were previously told is true - presumptions, assumed truths, limited self image.
Pathologizing
Jung spoke of four functions: thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. We can usually deploy three of the them, but the fourth falls into our shadow. The inferior function is often where we act out any pathological tendencies. It has been called “the ever-bleeding wound of the conscious personality.” Our new attitudes and undiscovered self also emerge from this door, as well as the unexpected. Reality is always coming through an archtypal lens, a point of view, a language -- a fantasy.
Hillman warns there may well be more symptoms and psychopathology actually going on while transcending than while being immersed in pathologizing. Pathologizing forces the soul to a consciousness of itself as different from the ego and its life--a consciousness that obeys its own laws of metaphorical enactment in intimate relation with death. He cautions, "reflection in the mirror of the soul lets one see the madness of one's spiritual drive, and the importance of this madness." He feels, "The world, because of its breakdown, is entering a new moment of consciousness: by drawing attention to itself by means of its symptoms, it is becoming aware of itself as a psychic reality."
“The horizon of the psyche these days is shrunk to the personal, and the new psychology of humanism fosters the little self-important man at the great sea's edge, turning to himself to ask how he feels today, filling in his questionnaire, counting his personal inventory. He has abandoned intellect and interpreted his imagination in order to become with his "gut experiences" and "emotional problems"; his soul has become equated with these. His fantasy of redemption has shrunk to "ways of coping"; his stubborn pathology, that via regia to the soul's depths, is cast forth in Janovian screams like swine before Perls, disclosed in a closed Gestalt of group closeness, or dropped in an abyss of regression during the clamber up to Maslovian peaks.” (Hillman)
Compounding the typological issue of the inferior function is the fact that some people have recognized or unrecognized personality disorders, which characterize their beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Among these are toxic narcissism (NPD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), oppositional or antisocial personality, avoidant and dependant types, obsessive-compulsive (OCD), schizoid, schizotypal, histrionic, paranoid, passive-aggressive and self-defeating types, etc.
The severity of the disorder amplifies the severity of psychosocial stressors. Even sub-clinical tendencies toward these disorders can color the shadow behavior of an individual. Issues surrounding dependency, manipulation/control, and competition are magnified. These disorders run like fault lines, or paths of least resistence, through the psyche forming the underlying matrix of personality, rather than being a part of it.
All types can be subject to normal neurosis, pathologizing, mood disorders, personality disorders or mental illness, amplifying the problem areas of the type and characterizing the way they are acted out in acute events and enduring circumstances. They may be acted-in (denial, introjection, somatization, implosion) on the self or acted out (predation, projection, manipulation, power trips, sociopathy) in the personal, marital, social, or professional worlds.
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 equilibriate 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 occurences 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.
When society breaks down and consciousness regresses into earlier containers, we look behind us to revive sources for survival. 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 saleable 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 Conner).
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 or manipulative basis. Argumentation skills don't necessary lead to truth. Arguments can be utterly fallacious, "bait and switch" pseudo-philosophy, 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.
Some people think of physical life and also spiritual life. Much of the physical life IS strongly repeatable, but not all. But much of spiritual life is rarely repeatable and certainly not on our whim and control. So, some paradigm transition, some adjustment in 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?
Conclusions: Creativity and Healing
We can return to Nature and our own nature, collectively preparing a paradigm shift for a new shared reality and trajectory that integrates physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual coherence. The silent frictionless flow of living intelligence is beyond words and conceptual constructs.
We are a process of recursive self-generation. The holographic groundstate is our creative Source, directly discoverable in the immediacy of the emergent embodied moment. We are continuously in the deep embrace of the physical universe. It not only interpenetrates but is the very fabric of our being.
The healing response includes behavioral, mental and spiritual shifts or transformations. Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms. It means a connection with and comprehension of the complexities of life that is deeper than the conventional worldview of cause and effect. Many researchers view consciousness as the foundation of reality. We do not exist independently from the Universe; we are fused with it. But the exact nature of that seamless connection remains a Mystery.
What you "see" is not always what you "get." Reality may be hidden by nature's veil or a dramatic mask. Many people mistakenly take their own perceptions and visions literally without "seeing through" the various possibilities deeply buried within that are outside their belief system, knowledge or skill sets. Self-reports and self-concepts often differ widely from objective measures. Do archetypes help us con our own consciousness with myths of individuality? Are we unwitting undercover agents for social memes without realizing it?
We need to be not only conscious of the nature of our consciousness, but conscious of our fallibility, realizing that intuition is fallible if unsupported by rational criticism. Personal, sociopolitical and spiritual myths and memes drive false perceptions. If we have little access to our pre-conditioned decision-making process, the whole concept of 'consciousness' becomes questionable. But we are also subject on an a priori basis to the influence of genes, memes and archetypal schemes.
Psychodynamics of the Unconscious
Chaos theory, quantum and torsion physics, and analytical psychology provide portals for new awareness both of the processes of personal growth and of changes in world life. Modeling incorporates the five structures of consciousness—archaic, magical, mythic, mental, and integral. Complexity Theory describes the Universe as a complex of whole systems spontaneously generating out of a void and self-organizing at thresholds between chaos and stability
The archetype, a word used by Jung (1958) and elaborated by his follower Erich Neumann (1954), is a numinous (potent, powerful) unconscious psychic content -- the core of representations including those of states, and patterns of coordination of actions. Von Franz describes archetypes as "excited points in the field of the objective psyche" which behave like "relatively isolatable nuclei". We can imagine this as a precursor to the notion of archetypal "attractors" in choas theory. Chaos is not so much pathological as it is a state of maximum readiness for an emerging reorganized self-system. Individuals with schemas or working models bordering on chaos are likely to be those most flexible and resilient.
Archetypes are also highly connected to each other. They describe capacities for consciousness -- functions, attitudes and character pathologies. In itself an archetype has no specific form. Such innate organizing principles exist in a very deep layer of the brain, but it gives rise to images in the visual cortex which partially represent it. Our ancient instinctual apparatus included affection, inquisitiveness, self-preservation, competitiveness, fear and curiosity, i.e. these have archetypal existence. Archetypes were the forefathers of symbols, and are inherently symbolic.
Many concepts which are essential components of human (and group) thought originated as archetypes. Later on, both in time and in terms of cognitive activity, they put on the clothes of visual imagery and verbal identity. But they began in the limbic brain as archetypes. All people have the same archetypes, and they are the instruments of cultural evolution; but they express themselves differently in different cultural circumstances.
Lumsden and Wilson hypothesize that it takes about 1,000 years for a cultural element, or a propensity to express some culturally defined trait, to become established in the gene pool as an inherited trait. So Jung wasn't wrong in talking about 'endless repetitions of typical patterns of behavior', he just didn't understand the mechanism which would give them a genetic basis. Pre-linguistic memes and archetypes, such as rhythm, may have played a greater role in genetic evolution than he dared to propose.
Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) says: “When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation.” Perhaps so, but we might speculate that a meme is fertile or successful because they bind to archetypes, helping the effective expression of the archetype, rather than parasitizing the brain in any general sense.
Memes & Genes; Archetypes & Holograms
People construct all kinds of aberrant realities for themselves. A cognitive illusion, the self-attribution fallacy means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren't responsible. Our perceptions are hopelessly distorted, our best thinking is fuzzy. Self-image is perhaps the most distorted, yet most highly-defended aspect of being. When some elements appear in high-relief, others fade into a blur of intersubjective process. False perceptions, beliefs, and ideas obscure and obstruct our true potential.
Both the memes of holography and anamorphosis are relevant, the later skewing our illusory perspective. Viewing from a certain angle can create impossible images -- image warping, reflected aberrations. In post-modern relativism, there are holes in virtually every point of view. Under these circumstances, can we unravel the experiential qualities inherent in the field of reality itself?
Word choice and metaphor allow for the emergence of new memes, the replacement of memes, and the death of memes, via a concept that Douglas Hofstadter (1995) calls "conceptual slippage." Memes, like genes, only "code for" a norm or mean of reaction correlating to the memetic selection bias. Neither memes nor genes determine all aspects of the properties of the entities they constitute. Cultural inheritance is not particularly creative, so most "novelty" is merely the recombination or recycling of pre-existing memes in novel ways.
Memes are quantized information stored in and expressed from neurological structures or cultural substrates, Memes reside as neural net structures in our central nervous systems, but many emerge at a higher cultural level, expressed in a cultural ecology. Memes do not control behavior rigidly, but bias and constrain it to a norm of reaction. They are the replicators of cultural evolution, genealogical actors in ecological roles. Memes form ancestor descendent chains of populations that ramify, reticulate, and resonate with frequencies differing from biological phylogeny, but the differences appear to be within the extremes of the parameters of biology (Witkins).
What memes and genes do determine are the degrees of freedom. They bias and constrain the outcomes of the system. It's as if we live in holographic bubbles of encoded information. Penrose describes how every event is a decision point. Images are animated over events in the flow of energy, like the animated frames of a movie. The confusing aspect of consensual reality is each bubble shares information with other bubbles, which is the nature of the perceivable world that we share together.
There are so many models in physics. Susskind's "holographic principle", rooted in a certain kind of string theory is vastly different from earlier holographic models being based in quantum gravity. Over vast distances of the universe, 'now here', is seen as the future or past from elsewhere. Depending on how your velocity is maintaining your localized time, you can leap frog standard perceptual time and move to the future or past. Some claim the future is already out there as well as the past and the only real difference between now and then is the location from which the perception occurs.
Vacuum models of holographic realities have a different basis than the Standard Model, too. That's why when people use 'intentionality' to justify their wishful thinking with Copenhagen's 'observer effect', it is laughable, since the Standard model works great for mechanics, but it fails to explain the first thing about Reality. Both psychology and neurology recognize humans 'make' decisions long before the frontal cortex is aware of it.
The holographic principle explains the fundamental level at which all information is defined, but it also explains the source of all information, in the same way that quantum cosmology explains the source of everything in the universe. The source of everything is the void. All excited states of information arise from the vacuum state. The void is the empty background space the universe is created within.
The universe is like a bubble in the void. These theories tell us everything arises from the nothingness of empty space as a quantum fluctuation in the zero energy level of the void. All we can view are excited states of information arising from the void, encoded by virtual particle fluctuation. Separation of virtual particles from virtual antiparticles at the event horizon creates a kind of holographic virtual reality, as virtual particles appear to become real (Susskind 2008, 171).
Trance Lucence
We cannot see the "big picture", so any attempt we make to holographically conceive our existential condition is more of an anamorphosis, a distorted projection or perspective requiring the viewer to use special devices or occupy a specific vantage point to reconstitute the image. The word "anamorphosis" is derived from the Greek prefix ana-, meaning back or again, and the word morphe, meaning shape or form. It deals with perspective and mirroring that conjure up a multi-dimensional perspective.
Archetypes are imagined as such distorting lenses, conditioning our perception of reality which is socially constructed and confused. There are many theories, but few correspond with reality.
Is there some psychological equivalent to cold fusion that might allow a new energetic paradigm to emerge? Can anamorphosis be a metaphor of perspective correction? Is there only one way to true vision? Does the anamorphic fractal attenuate reality? The anamorphic is not the fractal, because the fractal is repeating a pattern. Depending on the view we select, we become phobic about other information. We are clearly limited by our terms.
Human life is all symbols, visible signs of invisible reality, intuitive ideas that cannot yet be formulated in any other or better way. We live in a mind soup of psychoconfabulation. Symbols wield the power of pattern recognition and association. Few objectively gain distance from the archetypal content of mind and emotions. 'Archetypal' means fundamental intrapsychic organizing principles, or the deepest levels of psychological structure, holographic embedding and resonant fields, common to the human psyche in general. Information results and arises from innate structure.
Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance occurs when we filter our perceptions to screen out (deny) threatening information we cannot deal with. It is magical thinking to take a symbol to be its referent or an analogy to represent an identity. Magical thinking comes from an instinctual search and recognition of patterns, and regards symbols not as representations but as handles attached firmly to real-life objects and outcomes. Out of context, symbols are ineffectual. Evocative "power" is one of the attractive aspects of the meme concept which is also a symbol and signifier of meanings that are context dependent.
There are three types of symbols: 1) Symbols that reflect intrinsic mental states; 2) Symbols that stand in for extrinsic (actual or objective) conditions or objects, and 3) Symbols that stand in relation to cultural artefacts, or constructs, or memes. Here the symbol and the object it represents are one and the same.
Ramachandran (1998) describes symbolic characterizations of differing descent groups. Distinctions between groups (largely kin-based distinctions) had considerable importance; prior to the development of language as such, which could be used to express such distinctions. It could be done through dress, or through totemic, ritual and mythic symbolic expression. But how can a mutation that benefits the group survive and spread if it occurs only in isolated individuals? The answer appears to be that the group 'sharpens' genetic evolution by choosing members who conform to a required standard while excluding those that don't. This would make evolution happen very quickly, at least within the currently available pool of variation, since excluded individuals would not survive or mate.
Fortes (The Structure of Unilineal Descent Groups) explains how different but related descent groups are distinguished: “Cults of gods and of ancestors, beliefs of a totemic nature, and purely magical customs and practices, some or all are associated with lineage organization . . . every significant structural differentiation has its specific ritual symbolism, so that one can, as it were, read off from the scheme of ritual differentiation the pattern of structural differentiation, and the configuration of norms of conduct that go with it.”
Any distinction between symbol and symbolized is spurious. The emotional projection of symbols, or "magical thinking" happens in psychosis, in cultures, and subcultures. Disgust is an emotion heavily caught up in symbolic and magical thinking. Yet, symbols can have biophysical and material effects. We trick ourselves into mobilization.
Magical thinking helps us feel more secure in an unpredictable world. By manipulating symbols, we imagine being able to manipulate the reality that a symbol represents, but it makes us vulnerable to manipulation, too. The psychology of superstition "works" better in a virtuality. Superstition provides the illusion of increased control. Symbols are captivating, indistinct, metaphoric and enigmatic portrayals of psychic reality. The content, i.e., the meaning of symbols, is far from obvious; instead, it is expressed in unique and individual terms while at the same time partaking of universal imagery. Our society is having to rethink such fundamental notions as money, security, growth and many other bases of our current worldview.
Symbols can be recognized as aspects of those images that control, order and give meaning to our lives. The source of symbols can be traced to the archetypes themselves which by way of symbols find more full expression. Symbols are thus one type of what Jung called "archetypal images," that is, the representation in consciousness of an underlying archetype. Again, the anamorphic is not the fractal, because the fractal is repeating a pattern.
When the dominant vision that holds a period of culture together cracks, consciousness regresses into earlier containers, seeking sources for survival which also offer sources of revival. Self-empowerment can be entangled with self-delusion. We can no longer distinguish clearly between neurosis of self and neurosis of world, psychopathology of self and psychopathology of world. Species-wide trauma is playing out on the world stage. We compulsively recreate individual and collective trauma, perhaps as a way to awaken ourselves. Such madness is its own ritual and revelation.
Paramedia ecologist, Bob Dobbs refers to the Android Meme, which he defines as “…the ability of human-invented technology…to acquire the intimacy of speech and intuition.” In other words, the Android Meme is technology that has the qualities of "being alive". The Android Meme joins with us in an unholy alliance of archetypal technology and human organism, as a cacophony of all media, all technology and all ideas of particular times, anthropomorphized, trying to make itself human.
There is no great architect of the Meme besides our compliance to feed it. Calling it archetypal he simply means there is no physical joining (like a true android who is made up of organism and implants) but rather, like mythic thinking, in the Jungian sense, where people mime/behave cues from technology when it becomes used by a million people and becomes environment (morphic resonance). Thus, the hologram or fractal is superseded by anamorphosis. He claims we're in the post-noosphere (post-spherical, post-news, post-information) and panicking in the anamorphic flux of our hyperdimensional being (chemical, astral, TV and chip bodies ) - our new medium. The body functions as a map.
The Astral Body, a huge storehouse of religious and spiritual energy, pervades all cultures as the belief there is more to our makeup than the Chemical Body. The third organ is the TV Body - the repository of historical one-way broadcasting. The fourth, the Chip Body, is the mutating warehouse of digital omni-directional media. The fifth is the Mystery Body - what we're still excavating and whose lineaments we cannot fully assess yet, if ever. We now know it's made up of the previous four bodies but we don't know what more we will discover about its constituents, affects, and effects. The Android Meme (living mediascape) is the resultant interplay, violent and ecstatic, of the first four bodies. We keep looking in the rearview mirror vainly trying to peer into the future (Dobbs).
Scientific Archetypes
Mind, consciousness, and awareness are so central to the process of reality, perhaps they are the very reason for reality. Concepts of matter, life, and mind have undergone major changes. Consciousness is not a material system and neither is Quantum Mechanics (QM), which reduces all information and energy down to its fundamental holographic nature. As energy flows, information is coherently organized into animated forms of information. Though we have assumptions and beliefs, we remain unsure of the primordial nature of reality.
Simply stated, it is impossible to take the 'meta' out of physics since it is impossible to take the observer out of physics. It is impossible to take the knower out of knowledge. All metaphysical discussions are inherently about the nature of the observer and the knower. There is no physical theory of the observer because consciousness cannot be explained physically. Everything our physical theories of the observable world describe is some physical thing observed by an observer.
The observer is inherent in our most basic scientific principles, like the principle of equivalence. All the scientific debate about the correct interpretation of quantum theory is about the nature of observation. Both physics and metaphysics place the observer at the center of this discussion. ...That physical world of images demands of us that we inquire into the nature of the consciousness of the observer present at that focal point of perception. ...The holographic nature of the world describes at the most fundamental level possible how all information and energy is encoded in the world. But what does that fundamental description of the world tell us about the fundamental nature of consciousness? What is the nature of the consciousness that perceives that holographic world?
The key insight of the holographic principle is that an accelerating frame of reference, with an observer present at the central point of view, can arise even within empty space. As the observer arises, an event horizon also arises, which is a far as the observer can see things in space due to the constancy of the speed of light (Penrose 2005, figure 27.16). Where does the point of view of the observer arise? Where does the two dimensional surface of the event horizon arise? They both arise in empty space. (Kowall)
Scientists have shown that the brain runs largely on autopilot; it acts first and asks questions later, often explaining behavior after the fact. If much of behavior is automatic, then how responsible are people for their actions? These are among the concerns of neuroscientist Dr. Michael S. Gazzaniga in his new book, Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain. The brain is a cacophony of competing voices. “The question, ultimately, was why?” Dr. Gazzaniga said. “Why, if we have these separate systems, is it that the brain has a sense of unity?”
Brain images are snapshots, for one thing; they capture a brain state at only one moment in time and say nothing about its function before or after. For another, the images vary widely among people with healthy brains -- that is, a “high” level of activity in one person may be normal in another. Can brain science tell exactly where automatic processes end and self-directed “responsible” ones end? Not now and not likely ever, Dr. Gazzaniga argues in his book. Social constructs like good judgment and free will are even further removed, and trying to define them in terms of biological processes is, in the end, a fool’s game.
Science has its own archetypal fascinations, expressed in theories and models. There is no consensus in physics. The idea of many worlds, many realities, many dreams appears already in Chinese and Indian text. Everett cites the well know "garden of forking path" from Borges. It is an ancestral theme of humanity, which comes easily to the mind when you remember your dreams. To really know how the brain works, neuroanatomy is the best guide. Psychological descriptions got us started, but a fundamental map and understanding require a deeper biological foundation and questioning our assumed truths.
We remain immersed within the interface of psyche and matter ~ that point where psyche matters. As in chaos theory, all the creative action is at the boundary of any field, the creative threshold, the leading edge. All contemporary models -- Transactional (quantum handshake), Many-Worlds (decoherence), M-Theory (strings), Copenhagen (wave-function collapse), Holographic (frequency domain; resolution), Implicate (hidden information), E8, and Torsion Physics -- are essentially philosophical, or colored by the psyche and philosophy of their originators. Imagination has to cross the boundaries of disciplines to somehow find links between the observable and unknowable. With gravity, time and spin, matter and psyche are in a constant state of redefinition.
Mathematician Chris King says string theory is facing a high noon - the absence of evidence for supersymmetry in the LHC, where none of the expected evidence for it has been forthcoming to date. String theories began bosonic and then included fermions by citing supersymmetry. Thus all fermionic string theories appear to be supersymmetric. Supersymmetry perfectly balances the energy infinity of the bosons against the negative energy infinity of the fermions by claiming a fermion partner for each boson, but the standard model doesn't look anything like supersymmetric. An alternative is that there are different numbers and arrangements of fermions that still balance the numbers and arrangements of the bosons, but this is right outside the string theory orbit at present.
Physicist Brian Greene, in a PBS show "The Fabric of the Cosmos" on the nature of space, recently let us in on a secret: We've all been deceived. Our perceptions of time and space have led us astray. Much of what we thought we knew about our universe—that the past has already happened and the future is yet to be, that space is just an empty void, that our universe is the only universe that exists—just might be wrong. Greene reveals space as a dynamic fabric that Brain. The brain is a cacophony of competing voices. “The question, ultimately, was why?” Dr. Gazzaniga said. “Why, if we have these separate systems, is it that the brain has a sense of unity?”
The unexplored microcosm of the Ground-state, the universe of the subquantal domain, may be the key to higher consciousness.The vacuum of Absolute Space is the central ingredient of 21st-century physics. It is the space between “particles”, inside and outside the atom. You breathe air that carries the vacuum between its molecules. It is technically metaphysical (nonobservable) -- beyond the realm of physics because it is virtual, rather than manifest. Paradoxically, the vacuum is both the absence of matter and the universal substance.
We still don't know where consciousness fits in the big picture. There is no consensus among theories of what constitutes FIGURE and what constitutes the most fundamental GROUND, and it seems they share the same essential nature. Our perceived ‘content’ is not distinct from the ‘context’ in which it arises. It is one whole cloth of bubbling space-time. Nothing more, nor less. We have looked into the Abyss of spacetime and found it laughing back. The core task is answering "What is consciousness? ", and having that answer also fit with and support questions and developed answers (descriptions) on "What is matter?" and "What is energy?" Clearly, the task is to settle on a new common denominator that unites the other aspects and elements.
There is the subject which is conscious and then there is the object of consciousness. If there were no object of consciousness, would there be a consciousness? A consciousness of nothing? Arthur Korrnberg discusses DNA in his book DNA Replication (pg.13). "The most important feature of the duplex model for DNA structure is the introduction of the principle of complimentarity. It provided the explanation for accurate replication of a very long chain. This inherent feature of DNA is the basis not only of its replication but also of its capacity to transmit information.
Complementarity has come to explain transcription and translation and thus the entire sequence of events in the expression of genetic functions. It is also the basis for exchange of DNA segments between chromosomes in several forms of recombination." Does the rest of the body follow DNA? As a matter of fact is there anything which combines with anything without an entity bringing the pair together".
Pitkanin & Gariaev suggest, frequency coding would be natural for quantum antenna interactions between ordinary DNA and its dark variant and also between dark variants of DNA, RNA, tRNA, and amino-acids. The reason is that dark nucleons represent the genetic code by entanglement and it is not possible to reduce the codon to a sequence of letters.
Ervin Laszlo points out regarding the finest level of observation, that because of “the quantum vacuum, the energy sea that underlies all of spacetime, it is no longer warranted to view matter as primary and space as secondary. It is to space or rather, to the cosmically extended "Dirac-sea" of the vacuum that we should grant primary reality.” Virtual particles pop in and out of existence like quantum foam. Mass is the consequence of interactions in the depth of this universal field. There is only this absolute matter-generating subquantal field.
Physicist, David Bohm believed all matter is unfolded out of what he eventually described as a holomovement, which meant that matter could also enfold and so return into the holomovement. Bohm considered quantum mechanics to be a process of unfolding and enfolding. He imagined the universe as an infinite sea of space and energy out of which matter could be unfolded, which he called explicating, and enfolded which he called implicating, which, in Bohm’s words, “together are a flowing, undivided wholeness".
The whole universe of space and time is enfolded into each part. A fundamental order of potential energy enfolds space and time. There is hidden energy in these enfolded dimensions -- a unity of space, time and meaning potential. Scalars are time-reversed waves. The infolded (negative) time dimension of virtual photon flux (hyperspace) is zero-point. Time in physics can be interpreted as an archetype for all material objects. You can not grab a piece of time and hold it; it is everywhere but nowhere. Materiality in the physical world eventually unfolds and enfolds at all scales. Archetypes share this holographic enfolding and unfolding nature. At least, they can be modelled as such.
Psychological Archetypes
Jung's collective unconscious consists of archetypal infolded EM structures acting in common in an overall bio-quantum-potential for the entire species. The bio-potential in a single body is an overall quantum potential that links and joins all the atoms and cells of the body. The "spirit" of the biosystem, if you will, is its "living biopotential" - its living quantum potential. We already know that a potential is everywhere nonzero all the way out to infinity. So the spirit of the living system is - in the virtual state - everywhere and everywhen in the universe. The superhologram of spacetime means the entire universe is everywhere alive, with everything.
Archetypal forces operate under their own laws in various phases of human life and endeavors. The archetypes provide the potential form for experiences that are given individual content by the person’s actual experiences. They influence us on biochemical, personal, social, national and universal levels. They come in the ever-changing guises of phobias and Irrational fears, prejudices, complexes (interference by an archetype or group of archetypes with the conscious personality), and our runaway ego-trips. Complexes can be pathological, archetypes cannot, as entirely healthy expressions of nature The complex may form around any archetypal, that is, structurally important, component of the psyche.
Archetypes play through our self-narratives and culture in art, literature, and the movies we so frequently view. They are in all the stories we love. Our souls are attuned to listening for the multiplicity of viewpoints that comprise situations and events, bridging unconscious and consciousness. Complexes need not be pathological. They are merely collections of psychological material that function most efficiently when they are together. They usually group together because they all relate to a single archetype.
When seen objectively in stories, we can identify with or despise them, but when their effects are subjective, we are entirely "carried away," "beside ourselves". Sometimes, we choose them to feel special and create drama or novelty in our otherwise listless lives - we mistake them for love, for destiny, for the voice of God, for supernatural "signs" in an unenlightened, even superstitious manner. They lie behind religiosity, pathology, and romantic vs. mature love.
Archetypes also lie behind fascinations, crusades, and enchantments of individuals and nations. They produce the phenomena of "love at first sight" and create fads and set trends or styles in the recreation and fashion worlds. They can be contagious as in the case of cults, or political and religious movements. The great attraction of sports is also archetypal in nature.
People will go to war and fight to the death as fanatical "true believers" to defend some political or religious principle. The belief system is influenced by the myth behind it. Charismatic leaders capture the projections of leadership through expressing the subconscious desires of the crowd, or herd consciousness (like Adolph Hitler or Jim Jones). Activation of these archetypal powers opens the door for both good and evil, and creates an arena for the emergence of ethics and morals.
Irrational superstitious behavior goes hand in glove with errors of judgement and in some cases involves dissociation or personality disorders, including schizotypal, toxic narcissistic, and borderline personalities. Dissociation can be desirable, as in the case of flow, or pathological, as in dissociative identity disorder. Deeper reality is not remote in the physical sense but in a psychological sense. It is concealed by the very trance states and memes that compose it.
Often, we only recognize the trance state when it breaks, when the projection ends and we reassimilate that energy. The archetypal content should be respected and perhaps seen through various lenses, but it should never be dismissed as delusion or mere projection. If this happens then the whole cascade of chemistry that packs enormous energies and psychic forces can be prematurely deflated and turn into a self-destructive bomb in the bodymind of the awakener.
Psychic life depends on an unconscious infrastructure. Jung helped differentiate the inscape with his concept of archetypes which express the innate potentials of all dynamics beyond specific forms. Many of his ideas are central to understanding the human psyche or soul, and apply universally to all of mankind. What is of archetypal—that is, organizational and structural—importance to the personality will emerge.
Jung suggests the existence of a 3-layered psyche consisting of 1) the conscious (active part of the mind), 2) the personal unconscious (thinking over which we have little or no control), and 3) the collective unconscious (unevolved, animal-instinctive mental activity). Jung sees archetypes as unconscious regulators of psychic life that attempt to redress psychic imbalances. The unconscious iinteracts with consciousness in a compensatory way, which leads to intrapsychic self-regulation (Jung, 1966).
In Myth and the Body, Keleman states: "Our creation myth is also the myth of our biological evolution...there is another aspect to the creation and evolution myth..myth is about the birth and evolution of the body's inner subjectivity... embyrogenesis is cosmogenesis; the birth of the body is the birth of the inner emotional cosmos...from the moment of our conception, the organizing of past somatic images is available to us as a guide for being in the world of the present....The different bodies of our history-personal and impersonal-are in our dreams. Myth presents us ...with the body images of various ages and eons. The complex of somatic images gives our present somatic image an organization and dimension, a structure that has duration...Mostly we are in touch with the surface body, because perception is mostly a surface phenomenon. That doesn't mean that the other bodies aren't there.”
Resonant Filters
Psyche is the unified field of material and immaterial dynamics, the physical and metaphysical. There are as many archetypes as there are situations in life and nature. A constant non-perceptual pattern remains concealed behind archetypal variants. Originating in the collective unconscious, archetypes are experiential catalysts, often likened to psychodynamic Platonic Forms or "spiritual" DNA. They are constraint-based domains. They are the forces of history. They are life's filters.
Archetypes, according to Jung, are "active living dispositions, ideas in the Platonic sense, that preform and continually influence our thoughts and feelings and actions." They are not inherited ideas, but rather, as Jung says elsewhere, "inherited possibilities of ideas." The exact nature of these archetypes has been much discussed both within and outside of Jungian circles. What matters for our present purposes is just that the underlying archetypes (which by definition are beyond or beneath consciousness) are expressed in powerful, fascinating and numinous conscious images called "archetypal images". What needs to be insisted on, however, it that there is something still deeper behind archetypal images, something itself unknown, which expresses itself in the psyche. (Granrose)
Archetype-figures also appear in the personal unconscious as "complexes". Archetypes tend to personify themselves, through the cooperation of the active imagination, in order to penetrate personal consciousness. The unconscious, form-determining (archetypal) components of the personality, and the complexes of ideation and affect that form around them seem to act like inductive magnets for certain events and affects to which they correspond (Jung, 1960, 1969). Like strange attractors in chaos theory, they are self-organizing intrapsychic principles.
Archetypes express innate psychological dispositions, fundamental morphogenetic laws, which govern perception, and affective experience. They influence the formation of complexes, which develop around a particular archetypal (core) issue. The archetypes are the individual components or manifestations of the self; they determine particular intrapsychic structures. They manifest in the instinctual life of the body, its attractions, repulsions, fragmentations, and impasses, as well as ideas, "head trips," and spiritual urges. Archetypes give form to fertile chaos which functions as a multi-reined holographic control system. All of our experience is filtered through these conditioning "lenses." Nevertheless we aren't reducible to simple determinants.
We are embedded in a hologram of psychic dimensions. Interactive archetypal energies are embedded in and live through us, as biopsychosocial events. They represent our potentialities beyond time. But we think we are autonomous. In these state-specific altered realities we experience a qualitative range and subtlety of interconnectedness that would be frightening and crazy-making to our normal socio-conditioned repressed mode of being. We find the ground of being and interrelationship with mystery through mythic engagement.
Normally, we project our inner states out into the world. The mystic becomes emancipated from the persuasions of psychic content, while the schizophrenic becomes lost in them. Images arise from energy flux like biochemical resonant filters and harmonic levels of arousal, elevated energetic activation. Then we find synchronous information and events in the outer world to reinforce the energetic power of the archetypes we are preoccupied with. The shamanic journey consists of acute neurological events that evoke heavens and hells that lead to emergent self-organization. (Miller, 1993)
To avoid spiraling into prolonged metabolic and cognitive chaos we must accept these new levels of awareness and physiological condition as coming from “us” and not from an alien entity or God. We must claim responsibility for our Self as it incarnates at an accelerated pace and not project the cause of our condition onto external people, entities or events. As an integrated human we can still "have" our story, but we must keep it in its place by running it through a progressively rational interpretation. For it is this rationalizing process that integrates the archetypal imaginal world (reptilian/old mammalian brain) into the 21st Century prefrontal lobes.
Consensus reality is a conditioned trance state. To be "normal", when this violates our inner nature, is itself a form of pathology. Disruption of ego's metaprogramming (habituated dissociation) is not regression, but merely the removal of adaptive/repressive functioning in the present. This creates an entirely new consciousness that does share features with primordial states. This loss of the sense of the known self (ego) is a desireable effect of transformation processes.
By differentiating from the images, symbols, myths, stories and personal identity that we were so involved in before, consciousness becomes separated from its contents. We deepen oury own healing by remembering our own experience of trauma is simultaneously a microcosmic, personalized fractal reflecting the greater trauma resonating throughout the collective field. This realization allows us to not personalize the moment of feeling the trauma, or concretize ourselves as being traumatized, but allows us to give over to and embrace particularized experience.
Unless we are “affected” by the symbols, myths and archetypes that we use to give “story” to our lives, no psychic tension would arise to propel us out of “normal” consciousness. The foundations of myth arose in the trance states of early shamans and yogis, exploring the self-arising activity of the Central Nervous System. Intense concentration on the resting voltage of the CNS can lead to spontaneous realization of the meaning that pervades one's own biology. (Sansonese, The Body of Myth, p. 34-35).
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, 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.
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 (Miller, 2003). 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. Dr. Paul Henrickson says that 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.
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 post-Jungian 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.
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. (Miller, 1992)
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)
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. (Farias)
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 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 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.
Holographic Archetypes
There is a pre-physical, unobservable domain of potentiality in quantum theory. It is the basis of fundamental interconnectedness and wholeness of Reality. The human body is not an object in space, but seamlessly welded to spacetime. 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.
Our molecular system extends beyond the nervous system and is the bedrock of felt-sense, intuitive, subconscious and unconscious processes. The body has a mind of its own and speaks that mind in gut reactions, body language, dreams, psychosomatics, and literal symptoms. Jung suggested the gods have become diseases. That is, in our unconsciousness of them they have resorted to subverting our bodies in order to be responded to and heard. For example, our collective environmental issues become cancers.
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. Holographic archetypes are embedded in the very fabric of our being and that of our environment.
Archetypes are rooted in or emerge from the holographic source field as attractors, chaotic systems having fractal or reiterative structures that repeat at all levels of observation. They never settle 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.
All the objects of our world are three-dimensional images formed of standing and moving waves by electromagnetic and nuclear processes. This is the guiding matrix for self-assembly, and manipulating and organizing physical reality. It is how our DNA creates and projects our psychophysical structure. Holograms contain many dimensions of “compressed” information in a subtle network of interacting frequencies.
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.
Thus, the brain is an embedded hologram, interpreting a holographic universe. (Miller, Webb, Dickson, 1973) All existence consists of embedded holograms within holograms and their interrelatedness somehow gives rise to our existence and sensory images. (Bohm, 1980) When we consciously embody this intimate wisdom, our bodies become temples of the living spirit. We supercharge our potential.
DNA functions in a way that correlates with holographic projection. The code is transformed into physical matter guided by light and sound signals. DNA projects a blueprint for the organism that is translated from the electrodynamic to the molecular level. Further, research strongly suggests DNA functions as a biocomputer. Gariaev described how this DNA-wave biocomputer reads and writes genetic code and forms holographic pre-images of biostructures. We are more fundamentally electromagnetic, rather than chemical beings. DNA is also influenced by the environment, so genetic plasticity is expressed in epigenetics and meta-genetics that turn certain gene sequences on and off.
The Collective Unconscious is essentially a hologram. Nonlocal consciousness is not confined to specific points in space, including brains or bodies, nor to the present moment. 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. 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 emerged and recycled 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. Social networking feeds us stupefyingly moronic ideas. Once any explanation is offered for a phenomena, many take that as 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 and fads 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. http://zero-point.tripod.com/pantheon/pantheon.html
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.
Synchronicity explores the borderland between meaning and spacetime, where chance meets necessity, when external and internal circumstances align in meaningful coincidence. It links the observable and unknowable, the effect of the particular and specific with the universal. In this nonlocal effect, certain qualities manifest relatively simultaneously in different or proximate places. It is a parallelism that cannot be explained causally. Is it an invisible field effect linking multidimensional spaces?
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.
Psychoid Field
Consciousness rests upon and is organized by its archetypal forms and foundations. Dig far enough into an intense inner experience and you eventually come to the mythological, ageless themes that indicate an activated archetype. Just as an instinct is activated by a certain situation it bears an image of, so is an archetype. Also, its psychoid base puts it beyond both matter and psyche, though it has qualities of both. Although archetypes are energic power sources, they need libido from the ego for their images to rise into consciousness.
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, phobias, prejudices, complexes (interference by an archetype or group of archetypes with the conscious personality), our runaway ego-trips, 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. They continually play through us, stimulating beliefs, ideas, emotions and behavior. 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 manifests in dreams, fantasies, delusion and visions.
Truth is a revelation of what we already know but haven’t heard in words before. In truth we discover what we already know but haven’t confronted. Truth as a judgment is the product of our experience. In our belief systems, truth is what we accept of our history, what we accept as truth. We choose truth, which is revealed in direct proportion to our abilitiy to discard all we were previously told is true - presumptions, assumed truths, limited self image.
Pathologizing
Jung spoke of four functions: thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. We can usually deploy three of the them, but the fourth falls into our shadow. The inferior function is often where we act out any pathological tendencies. It has been called “the ever-bleeding wound of the conscious personality.” Our new attitudes and undiscovered self also emerge from this door, as well as the unexpected. Reality is always coming through an archtypal lens, a point of view, a language -- a fantasy.
Hillman warns there may well be more symptoms and psychopathology actually going on while transcending than while being immersed in pathologizing. Pathologizing forces the soul to a consciousness of itself as different from the ego and its life--a consciousness that obeys its own laws of metaphorical enactment in intimate relation with death. He cautions, "reflection in the mirror of the soul lets one see the madness of one's spiritual drive, and the importance of this madness." He feels, "The world, because of its breakdown, is entering a new moment of consciousness: by drawing attention to itself by means of its symptoms, it is becoming aware of itself as a psychic reality."
“The horizon of the psyche these days is shrunk to the personal, and the new psychology of humanism fosters the little self-important man at the great sea's edge, turning to himself to ask how he feels today, filling in his questionnaire, counting his personal inventory. He has abandoned intellect and interpreted his imagination in order to become with his "gut experiences" and "emotional problems"; his soul has become equated with these. His fantasy of redemption has shrunk to "ways of coping"; his stubborn pathology, that via regia to the soul's depths, is cast forth in Janovian screams like swine before Perls, disclosed in a closed Gestalt of group closeness, or dropped in an abyss of regression during the clamber up to Maslovian peaks.” (Hillman)
Compounding the typological issue of the inferior function is the fact that some people have recognized or unrecognized personality disorders, which characterize their beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Among these are toxic narcissism (NPD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), oppositional or antisocial personality, avoidant and dependant types, obsessive-compulsive (OCD), schizoid, schizotypal, histrionic, paranoid, passive-aggressive and self-defeating types, etc.
The severity of the disorder amplifies the severity of psychosocial stressors. Even sub-clinical tendencies toward these disorders can color the shadow behavior of an individual. Issues surrounding dependency, manipulation/control, and competition are magnified. These disorders run like fault lines, or paths of least resistence, through the psyche forming the underlying matrix of personality, rather than being a part of it.
All types can be subject to normal neurosis, pathologizing, mood disorders, personality disorders or mental illness, amplifying the problem areas of the type and characterizing the way they are acted out in acute events and enduring circumstances. They may be acted-in (denial, introjection, somatization, implosion) on the self or acted out (predation, projection, manipulation, power trips, sociopathy) in the personal, marital, social, or professional worlds.
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 equilibriate 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 occurences 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.
When society breaks down and consciousness regresses into earlier containers, we look behind us to revive sources for survival. 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 saleable 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 Conner).
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 or manipulative basis. Argumentation skills don't necessary lead to truth. Arguments can be utterly fallacious, "bait and switch" pseudo-philosophy, 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.
Some people think of physical life and also spiritual life. Much of the physical life IS strongly repeatable, but not all. But much of spiritual life is rarely repeatable and certainly not on our whim and control. So, some paradigm transition, some adjustment in 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?
Conclusions: Creativity and Healing
We can return to Nature and our own nature, collectively preparing a paradigm shift for a new shared reality and trajectory that integrates physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual coherence. The silent frictionless flow of living intelligence is beyond words and conceptual constructs.
We are a process of recursive self-generation. The holographic groundstate is our creative Source, directly discoverable in the immediacy of the emergent embodied moment. We are continuously in the deep embrace of the physical universe. It not only interpenetrates but is the very fabric of our being.
The healing response includes behavioral, mental and spiritual shifts or transformations. Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms. It means a connection with and comprehension of the complexities of life that is deeper than the conventional worldview of cause and effect. Many researchers view consciousness as the foundation of reality. We do not exist independently from the Universe; we are fused with it. But the exact nature of that seamless connection remains a Mystery.
References
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Cassaniti, Julia and T.M. Luhrmann (2011), “Encountering the supernatural: A phenomenological account of mind.” Religion and Society.
Cassaniti, Julia and T.M. Luhrmann (2005), “Hallucinations and sensory overrides.” Annual Review of Anthropology. Vol. 40.
Cassaniti, Julia and T.M. Luhrmann, "The Art of Hearing God: Absorption, Dissociation, and Contemporary American Spirituality." Spiritus, vol. 5: 133-157.
Chodorow, Joan. Dance Therapy and Depth Psychology, The Moving Imagination. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Chomsky, N (1972) Language and Mind, enlarged edition, Harcourt Brace, Orlando, Florida Dawkins, R (1989) The Selfish Gene, OUP, Oxford (new edition; first published 1976).
Conner, Robert, Shadow as a magical assistant, http://www.scribd.com/doc/70353722/The-Shadow-as-a-Magical-Assistant
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http://www.scribd.com/doc/72109533/JCER-V2-8-The-Possibility-of-Metaphysical-Knowledge-and-Insight
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Grof, Stan, Archetypes, Mythic Imagination and Modern Society, http://www.stanislavgrof.com/pdf/ITA_Palm_Springs-archetypes_rev.pdf
Haule, John Ryan (2011), Jung in the 21st Century: Synchronicity and science. Routledge (New York).
Hawkins, M (1997) Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860 – 1945, CUP, Cambridge, UK.
Hogenson, G B (1998) Response to Pietikainen and Stevens, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 43(3)
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Ramachandran, V S, and Blakeslee, S (1998) Phantoms in the Brain: Human Nature and the Architecture of the Mind, Fourth Estate Limited, London.
Ridley, M. (2003) Nature Via Nurture, Fourth Estate, London.
Sansonese, J. Nigro, The Body of Myth: Mythology, Shamanic Trance, and the Sacred Geography of the Body, Inner Traditions; 1ST edition (June 1, 1994)
Schnabel, Jim, "Chronic Claims of Alien Abduction and Some Other Traumas as Self-Victimization Syndromes" Dissociation, Vol.VIII, No.1, March1994
Squire, Larry R. & Zola-Morgan, Stuart "The Medial Temporal Lobe Memory System" Science, vol 253, Sept. 20, 1991: 1380-1386
Taylor, Gordon R., "The Natural History of The Mind", Penguin Publications, 1979, Pg. 75
Von Franz, M-L (1972) Creation Myths, Spring, Dallas.
Von Franz, M-L (1980) Projection and Recollection, Open Court, La Salle, IL.
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Bohm, David (1980), Wholeness and the Implicate Order, London: Routledge.
Burke, J. (2003). Strange Attractors: Transference, Holography, and an Archetype (Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2003).
Cassaniti, Julia and T.M. Luhrmann (2011), “Encountering the supernatural: A phenomenological account of mind.” Religion and Society.
Cassaniti, Julia and T.M. Luhrmann (2005), “Hallucinations and sensory overrides.” Annual Review of Anthropology. Vol. 40.
Cassaniti, Julia and T.M. Luhrmann, "The Art of Hearing God: Absorption, Dissociation, and Contemporary American Spirituality." Spiritus, vol. 5: 133-157.
Chodorow, Joan. Dance Therapy and Depth Psychology, The Moving Imagination. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Chomsky, N (1972) Language and Mind, enlarged edition, Harcourt Brace, Orlando, Florida Dawkins, R (1989) The Selfish Gene, OUP, Oxford (new edition; first published 1976).
Conner, Robert, Shadow as a magical assistant, http://www.scribd.com/doc/70353722/The-Shadow-as-a-Magical-Assistant
Corbett, Lionel, Kohut and Jung: A Comparison of Theory and Therapy, 1989, in Self Psychology: Comparisons and Contrasts, eds. Douglas W. Detrick, Susan B. Detrick, Hillsdale, NJ, The Analytic Press.
Donald, M. (1991) Origins of the Modern Mind, Harvard University Press, USA.
Descartes, R (1988) Reply to Objections, V, in The Philosophical Writings Of Descartes in 3 vols, eds. Cottingham, J, Stoothoff, R, Kenny, A, and Murdoch, D, Cambridge University Press (originally published in French in 1641).
Dobbs, Bob, The Android Meme, http://theandroidmeme.blogspot.com/2010/12/bob-dobbs-anamorphic-fractal.html
Ellis, Robert, Taking the ‘Meta’ Out of Physics, JCER V2(8) 1086-1113.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/72109533/JCER-V2-8-The-Possibility-of-Metaphysical-Knowledge-and-Insight
Farias, Miguel, “A psychological study of new age practices and beliefs”, Journal of Alternative Spiritualities & New Age Beliefs, http://www.asanas.org.uk/files/jasanas002.pdf
Fortes, M., The Structure of Unilinear Descent Groups, American Anthropologist, 55:17:41
Granrose, John, The Archetype of the Magician, http://www.voidspace.org.uk/psychology/wizard_archetype.shtml
Gray, R M (1996) Archetypal Explorations, Routledge, London.
Grof, Stan, Archetypes, Mythic Imagination and Modern Society, http://www.stanislavgrof.com/pdf/ITA_Palm_Springs-archetypes_rev.pdf
Haule, John Ryan (2011), Jung in the 21st Century: Synchronicity and science. Routledge (New York).
Hawkins, M (1997) Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860 – 1945, CUP, Cambridge, UK.
Hogenson, G B (1998) Response to Pietikainen and Stevens, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 43(3)
Jung, C. G. (1958) The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Princeton University Press, USA.
Jung, C.G. (1960), the psychogenesis of mental disease. In: The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 3, ed. H. Read, M. Fordham & G. Adler (trans. R. Hull). Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press/Bollingen Series XX.
Jung, C. G. (1966) The practice of psychotherapy. In: The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 16, ed. H. Read, M. Fordham & G. Adler (trans. R. Hull). Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press/Bollingen Series XX.
Jung, C. G. (1969), The archetypes and the collective unconscious. In: The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9i, ed. H. Read, M. Fordham & G. Adler (trans. R. Hull). Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press/Bollingen Series XX.
Kelleman, Stanley, Myth and the Body, Center Pr (July 1, 1999).
King, Chris, Fractal Neurodyamics and Quantum Chaos: Resolving the Mind-Brain Paradox Through Novel Biophysics in Mac Cormac Earl, Stamenov Maxin (eds) Fractals Of Brain, Fractals of Mind , Advances in Consciousness Research 7, John Betjamins 179-232.
Koch, C (2004) The Quest For Consciousness; A Neurobiological Approach, Roberts and Company, Englewood, Colorado.
Kornberg, Arthur (2005). DNA Replication, University Science Books; 2 edition
Kowall, James (2011), What is Reality in a Holographic World? Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research 2(8): pp. 1192-1282.
Laszlo, Ervin, (1996) Subtle Connections: Psi, Grof, Jung, and the Quantum Vacuum. Dynamical Psychology, http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/1996/subtle.html
Levy, Paul, The Wounded Healer, http://www.lightparty.com/Spirituality/WoundedHealer.html
Luhrmann, Tanya Marie Professor, "Magic",
http://freq.uenci.es/2011/10/27/magic/
Lumsden, C J and Wilson, E O (1981) Genes, Mind and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
McDowell, M J (2001) The Three Gorillas: An Archetype Orders A Dynamic System, The Journal of Analytical Psychology, 46(4).
Miller, Iona, Iona Miller, (1992). “Chaos As the Universal Solvent”, Psychedelics Reimagined, Thomas Lyttle, Ed.
Miller, Iona and Graywolf Swinney, (1993) Chaos Consciousness in Psychotherapy: An Experiential Approach and Application to Dreamwork, Creativity, and Healing, Chaosophy ’93, Asklepia.
http://www.asklepia.org/chaosophy/chaosophy2.html#top
Miller, Iona (2003) “Fear and Loathing in the Temporal Lobes”. neurotheology.50megs.com/whats_new_9.html
Miller, R.A., Webb, B. Dickson, D. (1975), "A Holographic Concept of Reality," Psychoenergetic Systems Journal Vol. 1, 1975. 55-62. Gordon & Breach Science Publishers Ltd., Great Britain.
Mitroff, I I and Bennis, W (1989) The Unreality Industry, Carol Publishing Group, New York.
Neumann, E (1956) Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine, tr Ralph Manheim, Bollingen Foundation, New York (originally published in German in 1954).
Neumann, E (1954) The Origins and History of Consciousness, tr R F C Hull, Routledge & Kegan Paul, UK (originally published in German in 1949).
Persinger, M. And Johnson (1993), The sensed-presence may be facilitated by interhemispheric intercalation. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1994, 79, 351-354. http://www.i-doser.com/images/binauralsandsensedpresence.pdf
Persinger, Michael A. Geophysical variables and behavior: LV. "Predicting the Details of Visitor Experiences and thePersonality of Experients: the Temporal Lobe Factor. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1989, 68, 55-65
Persinger, M. A. "Vectorial Cerebral Hemisphericity as Differential Sources for the Sensed Presence, Mystical Experiences and Religious Conversions." Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1993, 76, 915-930.
Piaget, J (1973) The Child and Reality; Problems of Genetic Psychology, tr A Rosin, Viking Press, USA (originally published in French in 1972).
Pitkanin, Matti and Gariaev, Peter, “Quantum Odel for Remote Replication”, DNADJ Vol. 1(3) 298-307.
Ramachandran, V S, and Blakeslee, S (1998) Phantoms in the Brain: Human Nature and the Architecture of the Mind, Fourth Estate Limited, London.
Ridley, M. (2003) Nature Via Nurture, Fourth Estate, London.
Sansonese, J. Nigro, The Body of Myth: Mythology, Shamanic Trance, and the Sacred Geography of the Body, Inner Traditions; 1ST edition (June 1, 1994)
Schnabel, Jim, "Chronic Claims of Alien Abduction and Some Other Traumas as Self-Victimization Syndromes" Dissociation, Vol.VIII, No.1, March1994
Squire, Larry R. & Zola-Morgan, Stuart "The Medial Temporal Lobe Memory System" Science, vol 253, Sept. 20, 1991: 1380-1386
Taylor, Gordon R., "The Natural History of The Mind", Penguin Publications, 1979, Pg. 75
Von Franz, M-L (1972) Creation Myths, Spring, Dallas.
Von Franz, M-L (1980) Projection and Recollection, Open Court, La Salle, IL.
Witkins, John S., (1998) What’s in a Meme? Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, 2 http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/1998/vol2/wilkins_js.html
Zausner, Tobi, “Transcending the Self through Art”, JCER V2(7). www.jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/download/173/182