Things are not what they seem — just space and wave motions.The universe floats on a vast sea of light, whose invisible power provides the resistance that gives matter its dynamics and feeling of solidity. All matter is interconnected by quantum waves, a dynamic coherent whole in-formation.

There is evidence for the holographic nature of nonstandard fields that have been proposed in recent years — the zero-point field (a candidate for the unified field [2]), the psi field of psychic phenomena, Ervin Laszlo’s Akashic field [3], and the morphic field proposed by Rupert Sheldrake [4].

The notion of resonance has been proposed for individual tuning to Jung’s collective unconscious. If a holographic image has many different holograms embedded within it, shining a laser of a specific frequency upon it will cause only those holograms made with lasers of the same frequency to stand out. That’s because things with the same vibration naturally resonate and reinforce one another — just as two musical strings at the same pitch resonate with one another. Ressonance may also explain how each of us interact with psi or Akashic fields… picking up only that with which we personally “resonate.”

Fields of Meaning

Is the co-occurrence of events within the same field of meaning a fundamental reason why things tend to happen? Does each individual’s resonant frequency, determined by their life experience, physical body, and energy body, limits what they can perceive? Such models may just eventually be shown to be belief systems of our era, whose roots we recognize from Theosophy.

The precise nature of such resonance, frequency or vibration has not been scientifically described, but merely suggested as jargon for what we don’t and perhaps cannot know. This is not to say that disease and other psychobiological process do not share an electromagnetic signature, but it is far from a total description.

Furthermore, such notion are popular because they “confirm” certain belief sets, which include personal and collective memes. They are part of the self-confirmatory search that reassures us we not only comprehend our experience, but are somehow “blessed” within that process, which may just be self-delusion. We continue to reach toward Truth, toward wholeness, both as Quest and palliative, still “placating” the gods.

Nevertheless, speculative models may point us in the right direction — toward ever-more primordial subquantal levels of observation, beyond the kaleidoscope of the “content” of our consciousness toward its fundamental nature. Nevertheless, such narratives are being constructed in heterodox physics and enjoy wide acceptance from people who comprehend them or not. At least they open our speculative thinking, taking us from the known toward the Unknown.

Such models have been applied to healing and disease processes and linked to placebo efect and the meaning of disease. Jung made the strong statement that “the gods [archetypes] have become diseases” due to their relativization in society. The fundamentally psychosomatic nature of disease manifests in both the psyche (mind) and soma (body).

“We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal spectres, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed by autonomous as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or disorders of the brains of politicians and journalists who unwillingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.” (Jung, Cw 13, par. 54)

A physical or psychological breakdown allows us to leave the track of prouction and social obligation to focus on healing. Hillman clariified, suggesting, “Soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena like the imagination of artists or alchemy or “primitives,” or of course, disguised as psychopathology. That’s what Jung meant when he said the Gods have become diseases: the only way back for them in a Christian world is via the outcast.” Do we have to be broken before we heed the call of our spiritual center, the holistic field of the imaginal?

Perhaps this is analogous to Jung’s realization in his Red Book era in the statement the “entanglement is your madness.” The personality disorders should be included in his notion of conversion. Operating beyond our consciousness, the gods return confounded with the shadow as pathologies, and with the self as overblown metaphysical notions and pseudo-scientific theories.

The main difference between depth psychologies and quantum physics [as well as esoterics] is that psychologists base their approach in the metaphorical rather than literal nature of reality. To take such material literally is considered a gross error, a misnavigation of the imaginal. This is an often overlooked but major difference in worldview and approach to phenomenological experience.

Systems philosopher and integral theorist Dr. Ervin Laszlo says the universe is an information field which is not only ‘the original source of all things’ in time and space but is also ‘the constant and enduring memory of the universe’. An interconnecting cosmic field links man and matter and continually affects everything and everyone. ‘It literally conveys all the information of life itself.’

Past, present and future flow together in the zero-point energy field. Linear time is an artifact of our nervous system. Healer Edgar Cayce believed the Akashic Records contained a history of every soul from the dawn of creation, connecting us to each other. The records are impressed or encoded into energy/information. Our choices continually rewrite them, modulating thoughts and emotion. The Akashic records (information domain) not only store everything in the past of an individual but also contain all the future possibilities and potentials for our lives. Einstein put it concisely: “Space and time are modes in which we think, not conditions in which we live.”

Meta-Nexus

“We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn’t any place to publish, in a dignified manner,what you actually did in order to get to do the work.” — Richard Feynman In his Nobel Lecture, 1966

“Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception.” –Schrödinger

“This feeling for the infinite can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. In knowing ourselves to be ultimately limited we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!” ~ C. G. Jung

Thinking Big requires a new approach to the way we pursue knowledge about our universe, our lives, and our species. We’re still asking life’s Big Questions and tackling humanity’s Big Problems, but in the context of Big History — a revisionist blend of cosmology, physics, chemistry, geology, biology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and history. Such a meta-disciplinary approach attempts a single, unifying, compelling narrative that continues unfolding meaning, purpose, and insight.

But, all we ever really talk about is ourselves and our own processes. Pioneered by William James, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Gustav Jung, Depth Psychology is the study of how we dialogue with the Unconscious via symbols, dreams, myth, art, nature. By paying attention to the messages that show up from beyond our conscious egos, we can be guide to greater understanding, transformation, and integration with the world around us, inner and outer.

Ultimately, “explanations” fail as paradigms of human behavior, being only approximate models and theories that shift with time and related sciences. But our drive to do so remains. No matter what we call them, archetypes, gods and demons still exist as “real” in the human mind, in all their grandeur and monstrosity. The idea that all life or all consciousness is interconnected is one of the most enduring spiritual traditions. Objective evidence of this fantastic notion has only surfaced in recent decades. But evidence-based truth is undergird with self-evident truth often expressed in metaphors.

Our historically-conditioned culture is undergoing a collective transformation process. The collective persona has broken down utterly, shattering the social mask that covered the weaknesses and corruption of the collective shadow, which is now undeniably revealed. It reveals an underlying alchemical process, whose first manifestation is the collective nigredo, manifest in the 21st century Depression, economic and otherwise.

Will this Depression be the driving force that moves the global death/rebirth process forward, as it does in individuation? Will it help us take a quantum leap into a more meaningful future of mankind? In this collective “ego death,” the dead void disappears once we connect with the fertile void of the dynamic ground, the formless state of pure potential. First we must endure the overwhelming sensations created by contact with this powerful source. The missing transformative information lies in the very heart of chaos.

There is a generic process in nature and consciousness which dissolves and regenerates all forms. The essence of this transformative, morphological process is chaotic — purposeful yet inherently unpredictable holistic repatterning. It implies a flowing state of consciousness, “liquification” of consciousness, a return to the womb for rebirth, a baptism or healing immersion in the vast ocean of deep consciousness. It facilitates feedback via creative regression: de-structuring, or destratification by immersion in the flow of psychic imagery through identification with more and more primal forms or patterns — an expanded state.

As mythologist Joseph Campbell described, “[Heroes have] moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you’ve got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can’t. You don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience—that is the hero’s deed.”

Campbell also suggests, “It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” And, “One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that. ” “The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.” These have become societal goals of our collective awakening from materialism, not just individual ones.

Social Alchemy

Plutocracy is unravelling. Underlying all our problems, the preeminent issue of our age, is human awareness. From one perspective, the ancient version of human awareness limited by fear, anger, greed, reproductive drives, tribal affiliations, ignorance and self-centeredness is the greatest destructive force on Earth. It is no longer adaptive as it was in the Stone Age.

On the other hand, a collective of potentiated humans who embody even a little of the new awareness, an awakened, relaxed and observant big picture awareness, has the potential to be the greatest healing and creative force on Earth. Is an awakening collection of embodied, present-centered people who are enjoying the transformative effects of this new awareness our solution? Many wish to connect with others in an effort to preserve civilization, all life on Earth and to propel humanity to its next evolutionary step in the face of overwhelming disaster and calamity. Can we break our identification with totalitarian society or will the dream of awakening remain a meme?

Civilizations need a myth to live. Futuring includes six synergetic aspects: 1) mapping acceleration, 2) anticipating, 3) timing and 4) deepening the future, 5) creating alternatives to the present and 6) transformation. Aspirational futuring and analysis includes environmental scanning, forecasts, scenarios, visions, audacious goals and understanding change and strategic issues.

Trends identify key forces shaping the future. Environmental scanning includes global, local, political, economic, technological, environmental and social trends. Roadmaps help us visualize strategies and collaborative foresight. Paradigms underpin the assumed truths of our logic.

Obviously, we cannot figure out the Mystery of life with intellect or social science alone. Though “the map is not the territory”, the only consciousness maps we have are those left over from our ancestors — mostly esoteric systems describing the cartography of the human condition. Modern researchers, such as Stan Grof, Ken Wilber, and John Curtis Gowan have attempted to map the mindscape and relationship between the numinous and the ego with some success, at least in broad conceptual strokes. http://www.csun.edu/edpsy/Gowan/

Our attempts to ignore or obliterate the Self are an attempt to wipe out that awareness — to deaden or destroy any connection with it, and the pain of struggling with our higher and primordial selves, godhead, consciousness or whatever we choose to call the “divine” or sacred dimension and forms. Synthesis echoes the alchemical coagula, attempting to counter the fragmentation of the ego, to put the pieces back together in an increasingly chaotic world devoid of the in-dwelling sacred.

Realizing our separateness from the whole is a privilege given to gods. When our separateness realizes its divinity, it realizes that the microcosm is truly the macrocosm, “as above so below”. Ego has been characterized as sinful since we realized our nakedness. Without such separation, which Jung termed “individuation”, nothing can be achieved in the name of the Great Work, the reintegration of the earthly and spiritual aspects of being, in the alchemical marriage that reunites us with Cosmos. The light of the soul is the barometer of being, reflecting our humility and inflations, our compassion for our fellows and our hubris.

Cosmic pattern recognition is the root of shamanic human culture from Paleolithic and Neolithic times. Humans have always pursued cosmology (the linking field), seeing cosmic patterns at work. Perhaps the greatest ancient discovery was the Precession of the Equinoxes, a recurrent 26,000 year cycle, leading to the model of astrological Ages and the mytheme of Eternal Return and The Great Year. Jung took an interest in astrology because he found it archetypally predictive, including the wheel of time and opposites.

Existential Shock; Worldview Warfare

The change of Age, to one of “information” such as we face now, was always considered a challenging time of crisis and chaos as old ways die while new forms emerge. Images permeate our inner and outer life. Therefore, today we find the mindscape riddled with the transitional, messianic, and apocalyptic memes of “2012″, the Rapture, and Ascensionism. Or, is “borgification” the shape of things to come, as encoded in the “Singularity” archetype or meme? In the New Media electronic info-culture we’ve all become cyborgs with machine-extended senses. Will machines become more conscious than we are by 2050, and begin self-replicating throughout the universe? This is a macro version of the world destroying “grey-goo theory” prompted by nanotech proliferation nightmares in the mid-1980s.

A crisis can be a blessing when it gets us to the devastating point where the pain of letting go is less than the pain of hanging on to a self-system that is so undeniably wounding. Not just the world, but “psyche” is in a time of crisis. The modern apocalyptic imagination, the economics of the spiritual marketplace, the commodification of countercultural values, and the cult of celebrity reign supreme. We must acknowledge the variety of manifest emotional and active responses globally to the onslaught of crises facing humanity and the centrality of psyche in articulating, holding and acting on these concerns, in a fragile world in turmoil.

We’ve always wanted to understand our origins, going right back to creation stories or creation myths. Physics connects the largest and smallest things in the Cosmos: “As Above; So Below”. It is our common story because, for the first time, humans have an origin story that transcends our regional, religious, and tribal differences. That is, at least in theory. The flip side is that there is no consensus in physics, behind rather desperate attempts to rescue the Standard Theory from oblivion and the proliferation of orthodox and heterodox models. What may be closer is that we have a fantasy about how we think this has revolutionized our world.

The narratives of the past were as clear as the grossly limited understandings, beliefs, superstitions and power structures of their times allowed them to be. Chasing an ancient past that we are ill-equipped to understand in its original context is a sure path to detour or derailment in all conclusions resulting from it , if we take it literally. Old ideas are rediscovered, and succeeding generations find new applications for these ideas, valid and illusory. People identify with their beliefs, and they identify with their own self-image most strongly and enthusiastically — even desperately. Both “official culture” and denial can lead to tunnel vision, medieval and older mindsets.

We need to differentiate between lies and truth not only “out there”, but more importantly in ourselves. Most people can’t face the lies “out there” because they can’t face the many lies in themselves, which make up part of their existence, from popular held beliefs about politics, government, religion, education, family, etc., up to more subtle lies we tell ourselves to make our lives more “comfortable” and justified.Ideology and culture intersect in explanatory power that has real effects, regardless of the truth value of those explanations.

Questioned on any of the mass-accepted beliefs we may have to reevaluate our own lives and realize we may have been largely living a lie. Truth is not always pleasant. However, there is no judgment in truth. It only IS, neither “good” or “bad”. Because of the identification with certain beliefs that make up their whole life and existence, people tend to ignore truth and/or the lies they tell themselves. We tend to build buffers, excuses and all forms of denial to keep our “world view” intact. Ultimately we defend and argue limitations and the prison we are in to defend false ego states. We defend our tragic social systems the same way.

This is why Jung noted, “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to stop from facing their souls.” And he goes on to say, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

In short, if people can’t face the lies within themselves, they will never be able to face the lies in the world and find truth within and without. Their whole life just becomes way of shutting oneself out from anything that may be a “threat” to their beliefs and way of life. As the Russian mystic Gurdjieff wrote: “In order to understand the interrelation of truth and falsehood in life, a man must understand falsehood in himself, the constant incessant lies he tells himself.” Hence, the most important aspect in life is to Know Thyself.

In “States of Denial”, (Cambridge), Stanley Cohen remarks that “the scientific discourse misses the fact that the ability to deny is an amazing human phenomenon [...] a product of sheer complexity of our emotional, linguistic, moral and intellectual lives.” He writes that Denial is a complex “unconscious defense mechanism for coping with guilt, anxiety and other disturbing emotions aroused by reality.“ Even skepticism and solipsistic arguments – including epistemological relativism – about the existence of objective truth, are generally a social construction.

Much of the value of studying these ‘Holy Grail-type’ notions, in science, psychology and philosophy, comes from making connections across disciplines and ultimately building up our intellectual muscle power — conceptual background. Learning different perspectives from our own is a primary source of human creativity. It can also be fallacious. To the extent such ideas spark insight they may help us move forward, but new ideas in reductionistic form can stall progress, too.

We know more than previous generations and have caused more problems than previous generations. The future we craft together depends on transformational dialogue and sharing worldviews. Exponential growth must be curbed to avoid catastrophic consequences. Decisions made now have effects over a very long period.

There is a hidden revolution in science today. Instead of focus on a part, focus has moved to relationships. A psyche capable of manipulating forms can create logical relationships, but logic remains a limited tool. Imaginal images have enabled interaction, projection and cultural expansion. The human capacity itself is an extension of nature.

Images and symbols, like language, can be ambiguous. Piantadosi et al (2011) have shown that all efficient communication systems will be ambiguous, assuming that context is informative about meaning. They also argue that ambiguity allows for greater ease of processing by permitting efficient linguistic units to be re-used. We can imagine the same is true for symbols. Theoretical analysis suggests that ambiguity is a functional property of language that allows for greater communicative efficiency.

So, instead of what something is, we look instead toward what something is doing and its non-deterministic effects on whole systems. The solutions lie not in the past but the future-perfect tense. Still, the near future is unlikely to be perfect. Furthermore, the nature of that future is a wide-open field, subject to endless confabulation — personal and collective delusion. The ability to shift approaches with agility and speed is the essence of future adaptation.

We sense we are ending and yet just beginning because both are simultaneously and timelessly true. Humanity’s race is against time toward the great Unknown. The perennial question remains, “What is wrong with the world and why is it that way?” Neither religion, philosophy, nor systems theory has been able to do more than balance out the negative, much like Yin and Yang. Transcendental religions seek to escape time and its dichotomies altogether.

The treasures of cultural history and spontaneous renewal reside within this living field, our connection with the primal source of life and parallel phenomena. The history of the world emerges from the multidimensional field of possibilities. Somehow life works despite infinite deviations. Viability can be anticipated if not planned. But we’ve outgrown Earth’s carrying capacity.

Though barely aware of them, we are tied together by deep processes. We can learn to consciously understand and apply, rather than destructively act out these eternal patterns. We must learn to recognize what is being revealed even though it is always open to interpretation. We are also subject to delusions and misperceptions, so we need to learn discernment. We need to focus on our own dynamic process, not just its finite contents, personalistic signs and symbols.

Archetypes of Nature and the Nature of Archetypes

Jung reduced archetypes to a select few that mostly matched up with ancient godforms that described human behavior sets and transformational forces. But archetypes are not limited to that in any way. The forces of nature and the elements have always been considered archetypal — floods, hurricanes, volcanoes, tornadoes, earthquakes, fire, ocean, river, mountain, cave, stars, lightning, voidspace — the abyss of the transcendent imagination. Nietzsche famously claimed, ‎”And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

There are archetypes emerging in science that have an ancient history in symbolism with meaningful messages that resound through the ages. They have been resurrected in scientific forms to explain even the mathematical mysteries of the microcosm and the macrocosm: vortex, solitons, toroids, entanglement, spin, singularity, black holes, flower of life, fractal iteration, and more. http://www.tetras-consult.gr/resources/Resources/Archetypes%20%20Mythology/The%20Emergence%20of%20Archetypes%20in%20Present.pdf

These primordial forms,geometries, and pre-geometrical dynamics are the archetypes of nature, at levels more fundamental than those of personification. As our penetration of our own depths and those of nature deepens, we become cognizant of the primordial nature of such symbols in our personal and collective life.

Personified archetypes were well-covered in the 20th century, but in the 21st we need to revision our view of archetypes and what is archetypal to include the raw nature of archetypes, not just the archetypes of nature. Energy has shape…and that shape emerges from the vacuum potential. As the Heart Sutra implies, form is not other than void and void is not other than form. In this sense, all of manifestation is archetypal.

Rumi, the 13th-century Sufi mystic poet said, “The nature of reality is this: It is hidden, and it is hidden, and it is hidden.”
Physical reality is not absolute. Science has tried to find the fundamental building blocks of matter, but has been stymied. It simply depends on the assumptions and theory you use with the level of observation: cosmological, molecular, atomic or subatomic. Now the quark (theoretically point-sized), long thought the smallest unit discernable, is giving way to finer distinctions — a whole new level of the makeup of matter.

In The Quantum Brain, Jeffrey Satinover describes, “a world in which one can comfortably argue the dynamics of interference among multiple universes both forward and backward in time; can ask seriously, as did Feynman and Wheeler, whether every electron in the universe is the same one, just reappearing through multiple loops in time.”

Lee Smolin is not a fan of MWI, but he describes its anomaly: “only an observer who lived outside the universe who had somehow the same relation to the whole universe that we may have towards some atoms of gas in a container, could observe this quantum state of the universe. . .it is only such an observer who could know all of reality.”

Creation may come from nothingness (ex nihilo), but it doesn’t travel very far from it when closely examined. It only and ever manifests as quantum potentiality, though it appears particle-like. This includes both the so-called organic and inorganic matter. The universe is more like a dream than concrete.

In fact, there is no such thing as solid matter at all, no hordes of tiny particles. All manifestations are reduced to probability waves in quantum mechanics. We have suggested elsewhere (see “Helix to Hologram”, Nexus) that the so-called material world is a projection of a frequency domain, fields within fields, tuned with resonance, light and sound. This holographic concept of reality requires the unperceived information background as its basis. Both particle and field exist only in the implicate order.

Light is even more ephemeral. As Wolf (2000) describes, “When we see light, we really don’t see light at all; we see an effect appearing as a result of light pushing and pulling on the mattter making up our sensory bodies. We see matter moving. Light itself is really out of this world and, as far as I can tell, out of any parallel world we wish to think about.”

The most theories provide is the best explanation. Explanation not prediction is the point of science. We explain the world in terms of embedded hierarchies of substructures and superstructures. Each appears as a thing in itself with specialized functions and dynamics. Physics determines what can be computed, including the information capabilities of matter and energy underlying physical dynamics and deeper sub-quantal levels.

Reality consists of continually diverging and converging waves unfolding from the information level, but that is another story, as is the physics of consciousness. The mind arises from the laws of matter. While some scientists are trying to describe matter as consciousness others are trying to reduce consciousness to matter.

A thought of a thing is not that thing, but it is not nothing either. Our thoughts about the ultimate nature of reality affect that reality at the metaphysical level. As intuitive Jorge Luis Borges said, “Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.” All that can happen, must happen. The outdated notion of our universe is an idea, not a reality. As an idea it has been proven obsolete.

Re-creating the Wheel

Do we have to imagine our end to find a new beginning, to reinvent civilization? Change starts with the questions we ask because they have the potential to shift our awareness. What is inconceivable one day may not be the next. The tipping point could come at any juncture. Reality is neither structure nor chaos, but a process in which structure and chaos dance between form and formlessness. This is the eternal cycle of death and renewal.

Just what is the universe at the tiniest scales — dots, strings, consciousness — nothing at all? Abrams and Primack write: “if we were to possess a transnationally shared, believable picture of the cosmos, including a mythic-quality story of its origins and our origins — a picture recognized as equally true for everyone on this planet — we humans would see our problems in an entirely new light, and we would almost certainly solve them.” Is this the meaning of today’s crises rooted in the changing Age? Do we need to recreate the cosmic Wheel? Or is their premise just wrong – utopian?

Our ancestors may have had as much native intelligence as we do, but being dead doesn’t make you smarter, so in retrieving their “wisdom” we may bog ourselves down in the undertow of outmoded thinking, swayed by emotional draw to archetypal fascinations, stereotypical superstitions, and magnetic symbolism. Something was missing from ancient science that does not lead to universal harmony through its practice. Yet, each person cleaves to their limited interpretations, conceptions, and overdrawn conclusions like a jealous lover. Our theories of self, others and world are constrained by the limitations of our individual minds.

Consciousness doesn’t mistake itself for a god; people do. Some cultures are still locked in worshiping their version of God, while others have reduced god to the personalistic level, wishing to be that through such memes as co-creation, LOA, and “intentionality”. The later is thinly disguised ego-aggrandizement. Whether that is possible in any sense or not, it is hubris, or spiritual pride, an addictive state of the ego that opens the door to self-deception, even in science. Does spiritual innovation and natural discovery trump religious belief? Despite our efforts, existence remains an enigma.

Consensual reality is not a single objective reality, but many entangled worlds that share information with each other, each defined on its own viewing screen, and each observed from its own point of view. The self-concept is understood in terms of the encoding of information on the viewing screen, and the expression of personal will and universal will is understood in the sense of the flow of energy. The nature of the Self is understood as a presence of consciousness that arises at a focal point of perception, while the perceivable world arises on a viewing screen. In a nondual sense, the Source of any such world, and the Source of any individual consciousness, is understood as a void of undifferentiated consciousness. (James Kowall) http://scigod.com/index.php/sgj/article/view/155/186

Cognitive science indicates that much of our mental lives is not available to introspection (e.g. Nisbett and Wilson, 1977; Gopnik, 1993; Wegner, 2002). People presume introspective access to their mental events. There are two dimensions of introspective access: (i) the power of access, i.e. whether people believe they can unfailingly or only typically introspect mental events; and (ii) the domain of access, i.e. what types of mental events people believe they are able to introspect. Beliefs about introspection fall on these dimensions. IWhile people do not presume universal introspective access, they overestimate the amount of access they actually have, particularly in the case of decisions. http://ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2011/00000018/F0020011/art00006 Awareness of Unawareness Folk Psychology and Introspective Transparency Authors: Kozuch, Benjamin; Nichols, S., JCS

Big Questions will always remain as our understanding is necessarily limited. We are receivers of revelatory downloads in symbolic and cognitive form that can change the paradigm. But we lack the capacity to “know” it all, which is reserved to the archetypal domain. Thus, the unified theory, which would be more than theory because it actually describes reality, remains elusive.

Leon Maurer suggested this new paradigm would start with the reasonable fundamental propositions (some already presumed as aspects of advanced physics) that: (1) Unconditioned pre-cosmic space is the ground of all reality; (2) Such absolute (0°K) space is inherently potentially conscious as well as potentially infinitely energetic — in the form of abstract cyclic motion or zero-point angular spin momentum; (3) Such zero-points of both consciousness and infinite potential mass-energy, located everywhere in total cosmic space-time, necessarily contains the infinite structural information of the entire cosmos — which could, logically, only be the conserved memory of all previous cyclic manifestations and evolutions of the cosmos.

If such a worldview can only appear as a consequence of far-reaching changes to the conceptual foundations of science, changes which science proper cannot initiate for itself. A legitimate contemporary philosophy of nature complements the methods and aims of science. It remains for the archetype concept in psychology, and its extension to other areas of science to be established. Criticisms and misperceptions about the nature of archetypes remain to be addressed and corrected, changing the present meaning of the concept of archetype. If successful, such a transformation at a very deep level of our understanding of nature will change our place in it.

“Through haste and increased willing and action we want to escape from emptiness and also from evil. But the right way is that we accept emptiness, destroy the image of the form within us, negate the God, and descend into the abyss and awfulness of matter. The God as our work stands outside us and no longer needs our help. He is created and remains left to his own devices.” ~Carl Jung, Red Book, Page 288

“Thus your soul is your own self in the spiritual world. As the abode of the spirits, however, the spiritual world is also an outer world. Just as you are also not alone in the visible world, but are surrounded by objects that belong to you and obey only you, you also have thoughts that belong to you and obey only you. But just as you are surrounded in the visible world by things and beings that neither belong to you nor obey you, you are also surrounded in the spiritual world by thoughts and beings of thought that neither obey you nor belong to you. Just as you engender or bear your physical children, and just as they grow up and separate themselves from you to live their own fate, you also produce or give birth to beings of thought which separate themselves from you and live their own lives. Just as we leave our children when we grow old and give our body back to the earth, I separate myself from my God, the sun, and sink into the emptiness of matter and obliterate the image of my child in me. This happens in that I accept the nature of matter and allow the force of my form to flow into emptiness. Just as I gave birth anew to the sick God through my engendering force, I henceforth animate the emptiness of matter from which the formation of evil grows.”~Carl Jung, Red Book, Page 288

Though theories abound, many phenomenological questions remain unanswered:

1) anomalous cognition and phenomena (ESP, NDE, ghosts, ufos, channelling).
2) Personal identity, the soul, the self, mind-matter, the psyche, reincarnation
3) Physical and mental health/illness, why are genetic factors triggered.
4) Time, space, origin of the universe,
5) Perception

Professor Russell Stannard offers unanswerable questions that include:

“The brain is a physical object and many people liken it to an elaborate computer. But unlike a computer the brain is conscious.” What is consciousness?

Free will versus determinism: “Will a scientist be able to to predict what anyone does in the future? That doesn’t match with our decision to make a choice – it is the free will versus determinism question”.
“Why is there a world in the first place? Why is there something rather than nothing?”
“If the world was chaotic, there’s nothing to explain. Certain things happen and other things cannot happen because of the Laws of Nature. But why are there any laws at all?”
Is mathematics something human beings invented or something we discovered?

For all of us to be here, many many conditions had to be satisfied. The chance of life happening on earth, and satisfying those conditions were “practically zero”. We find ourselves in one of these freak universes.

How do you prove that there are universes other than our own?
Cosmologists are able to describe the tiniest fraction of a second after the Big Bang. There was neither space nor time before the Big Bang. Some theories do not require nor include a Big Bang at all, making it’s “cause” meaningless.
Does the universe go on forever? Where is its border and where does it stop?
No one knows what the smallest unit of distance or time is, or the length of a “string”.

Humans have always pursued cosmology. Perhaps the greatest ancient discovery was the Precession of the Equinoxes, a recurrent 26,000 year cycle, leading to the model of astrological Ages and the mytheme of Eternal Return and The Great Year. Jung took an interest in astrology because he found it archetypally predictive.

The change of Age, such as we face now, was always considered a challenging time of crisis and chaos as the old ways die while new forms emerge. Therefore, today we find the mindscape riddled with the transitional, messianic, and apocalyptic memes of “2012″, the Rapture, and Ascensionism. A crisis can be a blessing when it gets us to the devastating point where the pain of letting go is less than the pain of hanging on to a self-system that is so undeniably wounding.

Not just the world, but “psyche” is in a time of crisis. The modern apocalyptic imagination, the economics of the spiritual marketplace, the commodification of countercultural values, and the cult of celebrity reign supreme. We must acknowledge the variety of manifest emotional and active responses globally to the onslaught of crises facing humanity and the centrality of psyche in articulating, holding and acting on these concerns, in a fragile world in turmoil.

We’ve always wanted to understand our origins, going right back to creation stories or creation myths. Physics connects the largest and smallest things in the Cosmos: “As Above; So Below”. It is our common story because, for the first time, humans have an origin story that transcends our regional, religious, and tribal differences. That is, at least in theory. The flip side is that there is no consensus in physics, behind rather desperate attempts to rescue the Standard Theory from oblivion and the proliferation of orthodox and heterodox models. What may be closer is that we have a fantasy about how we think this has revolutionized our world.

The narratives of the past were as clear as the grossly limited understandings, beliefs, and superstitions of their times allowed them to be. Chasing an ancient past that we are ill-equipped to understand in its original context is a sure path to detour or derailment in all conclusions resulting from it , if we take it literally. Old ideas are rediscovered, and succeeding generations find new applications, valid and illusory, for these ideas.

Much of the value of studying these ‘Holy Grail-type’ notions comes from making connections across disciplines and ultimately building up our intellectual muscle power — conceptual background. Learning different perspectives from our own is a primary source of human creativity. It can also be fallacious. To the extent such ideas spark insight they may help us move forward, but new ideas in reductionistic form can stall progress, too.

We know more than previous generations and have caused more problems than previous generations. The future we craft together depends on transformational dialogue and sharing worldviews. Exponential growth must be curbed to avoid catastrophic consequences. Decisions made now have effects over a very long period.

There is a hidden revolution in science today. Instead of focus on a part, focus has moved to relationships. A psyche capable of manipulating forms can create logical relationships, but logic remains a limited tool. Imaginal images have enabled interaction, projection and cultural expansion. The human capacity itself is an extension of nature.

So, instead of what something is, we look instead toward what something is doing and its non-deterministic effects on whole systems. The solutions lie not in the past but the future-perfect tense. Still, the near future is unlikely to be perfect. Furthermore, the nature of that future is a wide-open field, subject to endless confabulation — personal and collective delusion. The ability to shift approaches with agility and speed is the essence of future adaptation.

We sense we are ending and yet just beginning because both are simultaneously and timelessly true. Humanity’s race is against time toward the great Unknown. The perennial question remains, “What is wrong with the world and why is it that way?” Neither religion, philosophy, nor systems theory has been able to do more than balance out the negative, much like Yin and Yang. Transcendental religions seek to escape time and its dichotomies altogether.

The treasures of cultural history and spontaneous renewal reside within this living field, our connection with the primal source of life and parallel phenomena. The history of the world emerges from the multidimensional field of possibilities. Somehow life works despite infinite deviations. Viability can be anticipated if not planned. But we’ve outgrown Earth’s carrying capacity.

Though barely aware of them, we are tied together by deep processes. We can learn to consciously understand and apply, rather than destructively act out these eternal patterns. We must learn to recognize what is being revealed even though it is always open to interpretation. We are also subject to delusions and misperceptions, so we need to learn discernment. We need to focus on our own dynamic process, not just its finite contents, personalistic signs and symbols.

Do we have to imagine our end to find a new beginning, to reinvent civilization? Change starts with the questions we ask because they have the potential to shift our awareness. What is inconceivable one day may not be the next. The tipping point could come at any juncture. Reality is neither structure nor chaos, but a process in which structure and chaos dance between form and formlessness. This is the eternal cycle of death and renewal.

Abrams and Primack write: “if we were to possess a transnationally shared, believable picture of the cosmos, including a mythic-quality story of its origins and our origins — a picture recognized as equally true for everyone on this planet — we humans would see our problems in an entirely new light, and we would almost certainly solve them.” Is this the meaning of today’s crises rooted in the changing Age?

Our ancestors may have had as much native intelligence as we do, but being dead doesn’t make you smarter, so in retrieving their “wisdom” we may bog ourselves down in the undertow of outmoded thinking, swayed by emotional draw to archetypal fascinations, stereotypical superstitions, and magnetic symbolism. Yet, each person cleaves to their limited interpretations, conceptions, and overdrawn conclusions like a jealous lover. Our theories of self, others and world are contrained by the limitations of our individual minds.

Consciousness doesn’t mistake itself for a god; people do. Some cultures are still locked in worshiping their version of God, while others have reduced god to the personalistic level, wishing to be that through such memes as co-creation, LOA, and “intentionality”. The later is thinly disguised ego-aggrandizement. Whether that is possible in any sense or not, it is hubris, or spiritual pride, an addictive state of the ego that opens the door to self-deception, even in science.

Big Questions will always remain as our understanding is necessarily limited. We are receivers of revelatory downloads in symbolic and cognitive form that can change the paradigm. But we lack the capacity to “know” it all, which is reserved to the archetypal domain. Thus, the unified theory, which would be more than theory because it actually describes reality, remains elusive.

Professor Russell Stannard offers unanswerable questions that include:

“The brain is a physical object and many people liken it to an elaborate computer. But unlike a computer the brain is conscious.” What is consciousness?

Free will versus determinism: “Will a scientist be able to to predict what anyone does in the future? That doesn’t match with our decision to make a choice – it is the free will versus determinism question”.
“Why is there a world in the first place? Why is there something rather than nothing?”
“If the world was chaotic, there’s nothing to explain. Certain things happen and other things cannot happen because of the Laws of Nature. But why are there any laws at all?”
Is mathematics something human beings invented or something we discovered?

For all of us to be here, many many conditions had to be satisfied. The chance of life happening on earth, and satisfying those conditions were “practically zero”. We find ourselves in one of these freak universes.

How do you prove that there are universes other than our own?
Cosmologists are able to describe the tiniest fraction of a second after the Big Bang. There was neither space nor time before the Big Bang. Some theories do not require nor include a Big Bang at all, making it’s “cause” meaningless.
Does the universe go on forever? Where is its border and where does it stop?
No one knows what the smallest unit of distance or time is, or the length of a “string”.

http://news.techeye.net/science/science-is-grinding-to-a-halt#ixzz1fb1MqE7U

We are appropriating for our own consumption a large and increasing fraction of the biological productivity of the entire earth. This is why we need to figure out quickly how to transition out of the current period of worldwide human inflationary growth as gently and justly as possible. Cosmology can help – by providing a model for this seemingly insurmountable task. The way that cosmology, and cosmic thinking, can help is to provide an accurate big picture of the universe that might motivate people to change enough, fast enough. Abrams and Primack argue that for the human race to take responsible and meaningful action, we must first agree on a common creation story. http://bigthink.com/ideas/41338

Jung’s acausal theory of synchronicity was a step toward a complete theory of the symbol. Hogenson (2004) suggests symbolic systems obey the same rules of scaling as other systems. Symbolic systems can therefore be understood as exhibiting the characteristics of a power law distribution, which led to the discovery of fractals. Mandelbrot realized that the exponent in a power law defined a pattern of self-similar structure in the phenomenon under investigation that was “scale invariant” — fractal.

A power law means that there is no such thing as a normal or typical event, and that there is no qualitative difference between the larger and smaller fluctuations. Scale-free power laws reveal a lack of any expected size for the next event. Upheavals are not unusual. A big event need not have a cause. The causes that trigger a small change on one occasion may initiate a devastating change on another, and no analysis of the conditions at the initial point will suffice to predict the event. The famous example of the “butterfly theory” in chaos theory was understated, as the butterfly would be only one event that led to the hurricane’s emergence.

Jung described synchronicity as a juxtaposition of a psychic state with a state in the material world that resulted in the emergence of meaning and a transition in the individual’s state or understanding of the world. Emergence is a phenomenon associated with systems. Synchronicity is an aspect of the symbolic that exhibits a high degree of “symbolic density.” Tuning is crucial to reach a critical point in which any tiny event can trigger a huge upheaval. Sometimes criticality can be tuned by nature on its own. Each theme has its archetypes. Archetypes are universal concepts determining a probability field. All the most powerful ideas in history are rooted in archetypes.

When the density of symbolic activity reaches a steep pitch, a phase transition or a symbolic avalanche is precipitated and radically reorganizes the whole subjective/objective world. What counts in the critical state is the simple underlying features of geometry that control how influences can propagate. Fractals and power laws are at work in settings where the critical state underlies their dynamics. Fractals can be produced by chaos, but they also arise in processes of growth or evolution.

Dynamic phenomena manifest physical and energetic characteristics which are archetypal..Criticality is an archetype describing natural phenomena. Organizing criticality” occurs at a bifurcation or saddle point of crisis/opportunity. Thus, psyche is a self-organizing, self-similar domain. Most phenomena are smaller in their own right, but self-similar to the great events of the collective unconscious. The system reflects on or mirrors itself. The “objectivity of the psyche” is a self-reflective capacity, evident as modes of consciousness, then retrojected, somewhat modified, back into the psyche.

The symbolic world is characterized by phase transitions, that occur at the threshold of phenomenal transformation. An associative network shapes the psychic reality of the individual. Associative networks (gestalts), complexes, archetypes, synchronistic events and creative emergence become evident through a series of self-organized critical transitional moments that result in phase transitions within the symbolic system as a whole. They are the result of small symbolic developments that don’t stop. Small symbols add together into denser symbol sets with chaotic structure. Details are not important in deciding the outcome.

In the Journal of Analytical Psychology, Saunders, a mathematician, and Skar, a Jungian analyst, argue that the developmental forces usually thought to originate from the archetype arise instead out of the complexes, which are formed through self- organization in the brain/mind. In this view, the “archetype” is not something that forms the complexes; it is a class of complexes which fall into the same general category (Saunders and Skar 2001). Archetypes represent something as a state of self-organized criticality, an “iterative moment” of psychic synthesis. Archetypes are emergent properties of developmental processes.

Given that archetypes exist, how do they come into being and how the idea of archetypes can be aligned with advances in scientific thinking? Hogenson says the archetype does not exist, in the sense of being a discrete ontologically definable entity with a place in the genome or the cognitive arrangement of modules or schemas in the brain. Rather, the archetype, like the complex, is an iterative moment in the self-organization of the symbolic world in a critical phase change that radically reorganizes while maintaining its fractal, self-similar structure. The complex and the archetype are fundamentally structured like the symbol, only the archetype exhibits itself at the point where symbolic density transcends the carrying capacity of the complex and moves into a more collective realm. http://iaap.org/congresses/barcelona-2004/the-self-the-symbolic-and-synchronicity-virtual-realties-and-the-emergence-of-the-psyche.html

The brain at rest or in expectancy holds itself in a state of self-organized criticality. Nature as a computational process is at the heart of self-organized criticality. Not all events in the physical world are predetermined with absolute precision, or causal results. Indeterminism is the concept that events (certain events, or events of certain types) are not caused, or not caused deterministically (causality) by prior events. It is the opposite of determinism and related to chance. Indeterminism has been promoted by the French biologist Jacques Monod (Nobel Prize 1965,), Werner Heisenberg (Nobel Prize 1932), and Murray Gell-Mann (Nobel Prize 1969). The physicist-chemist Ilya Prigogine (Nobel Prize 1977) argued for indeterminism in complex systems.

Chaos theory and its succesor theory, self-organizing criticality (SOC) have shown that large interactive systems perpetually organize themselves to a critical state in which a minor event starts a chain reaction that can lead to a catastrophe. Criticality describes a dynamical process, merely metastable, which is even now building toward the next set of catastrophic reorderings. Although composite systems produce more minor events than catastrophes, chain reactions of all sizes are an integral part of the dynamics. Furthermore, composite systems never reach equilibrium but instead evolve from one metastable state to the next. A system in criticality, however, offers no neutral ground. Once in it, you are of it, as we learn after catastrophe.

Jung saw archetypes as primordial patterns, common to all human beings, affecting the way we perceive, imagine and think, and by structuring psychic apprehension, influencing behavior profoundly (Stevens, 1982). They are paradigms, rules or schema: “active living dispositions, ideas in the Platonic sense, that perform and continually influence our thoughts feelings and actions” (CW 8:154)i. Jung imagined archetypes operating at the deepest level of the psyche, and originating in the collective unconscious. We cannot observe them directly; they are but general structures determining a probability field that encompasses a range of actual events, images and experiences (Jacobi, 1974; von Franz, 1975; Edinger, 1972). From the archetypes arise archetypal images (Jacobi, 1962)–universal symbols, myths and motifs. http://www.tetras-consult.gr/resources/Resources/Archetypes%20%20Mythology/Competition%20archetypes%20&%20creative%20imagination.pdf

Abrams and Primack write: “if we were to possess a transnationally shared, believable picture of the cosmos, including a mythic-quality story of its origins and our origins — a picture recognized as equally true for everyone on this planet — we humans would see our problems in an entirely new light, and we would almost certainly solve them.”

Our ancestors may have had as much native intelligence as we do, but being dead doesn’t make you smarter, so in retrieving their “wisdom” we may bog ourselves down in the undertow of outmoded thinking, swayed by emotional draw to archetypal fascinations, stereotypical superstitions, and magnetic symbolism. Yet, each person cleaves to their limited interpretations, conceptions, and overdrawn conclusions like a jealous lover.

Consciousness doesn’t mistake itself for a god; people do. Some cultures are still locked in worshiping their version of God, while others have reduced god to the personalistic level, wishing to be that through such memes as co-creation, LOA, and “intentionality”. The later is thinly disguised ego-aggrandizement. Whether that is possible in any sense or not, it is hubris, or spiritual pride, an addictive state of the ego that opens the door to self-deception, even in science.

Big Questions will always remain as our understanding is necessarily limited. We are receivers of revelatory downloads in symbolic and cognitive form that can change the paradigm. But we lack the capacity to “know” it all, which is reserved to the archetypal domain. Thus, the unified theory, which would be more than theory bacause it actually describes reality, remains elusive.

Professor Russell Stannard offers unanswerable questions that include:

“The brain is a physical object and many people liken it to an elaborate computer. But unlike a computer the brain is conscious.” What is consciousness?

Free will versus determinism: “Will a scientist be able to to predict what anyone does in the future? That doesn’t match with our decision to make a choice – it is the free will versus determinism question”.
“Why is there a world in the first place? Why is there something rather than nothing?”
“If the world was chaotic, there’s nothing to explain. Certain things happen and other things cannot happen because of the Laws of Nature. But why are there any laws at all?”
Is mathematics something human beings invented or something we discovered?

For all of us to be here, many many conditions had to be satisfied. The chance of life happening on earth, and satisfying those conditions were “practically zero”. We find ourselves in one of these freak universes.

How do you prove that there are universes other than our own?
Cosmologists are able to describe the tiniest fraction of a second after the Big Bang. There was neither space nor time before the Big Bang. Some theories do not require nor include a Big Bang at all, making it’s “cause” meaningless.
Does the universe go on forever? Where is its border and where does it stop?
No one knows what the smallest unit of distance or time is, or the length of a “string”.

http://news.techeye.net/science/science-is-grinding-to-a-halt#ixzz1fb1MqE7U

We are appropriating for our own consumption a large and increasing fraction of the biological productivity of the entire earth. This is why we need to figure out quickly how to transition out of the current period of worldwide human inflationary growth as gently and justly as possible. Cosmology can help – by providing a model for this seemingly insurmountable task. The way that cosmology, and cosmic thinking, can help is to provide an accurate big picture of the universe that might motivate people to change enough, fast enough. Abrams and Primack argue that for the human race to take responsible and meaningful action, we must first agree on a common creation story. http://bigthink.com/ideas/41338

Earth’s geomagnetic field makes the compass work and protects the biosphere from cosmic radiation. The field has existed at least three billion years, although it fluctuates in strength and at times reverses polarity. When the field strength drops too low, life on Earth is imperiled by radiation. Substantial changes in the field happen as quickly as within only a thousand years at times, although stable periods of hundreds of thousands of years also occur. Temperature patterns within the lower mantle influence both the stability and intensity of the field. Complete geomagnetic reversals on average occur every 200 thousand years– but the last one was 780,000 years ago. Massive changes in or on the Earth, including extinction events, follow a 26.6 million to 30 million year cycle over the last 250 million years. The solar system crosses the relatively dense galactic plane every 30 million years.

Electromagnetic fields are a fundamental aspect of reality. For humans, fluctuating geomagnetic effects lead to increased liminality and anomalous experiences. Field effects include hallucination and temporal lobe microseizures. As Earth’s field continues to weaken in certain areas, we can expect more reports of dramatic psychophysical phenomena emerging at an increasing rate.

MAGNETOSENSITIVITY

Pioneering biophysics work has shown that DNA and living tissues interact with electric and magnetic fields in unexpected and dramatic ways. In 2011, cryptochrome was suggested by biophysicists as a mechanism for for perception of such suble fields. http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/cryptochrome/

Human cryptochrome exhibits light-dependent magnetosensitivity

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v2/n6/full/ncomms1364.html

Human and Drosophila Cryptochromes Are Light Activated by Flavin Photoreduction in Living Cells http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0060160

Expression of the Blue-Light Receptor Cryptochrome in the Human Retina http://www.iovs.org/content/44/10/4515.short

Magnetic Field Sensed by Gene, Study Shows http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/science/28magnet.html

Humans may sense light through skin http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2008/July/14070801.asp
14 July 2008 A team of researchers from Europe and the US has shown that a type of protein molecule found in many different human tissues can respond to light. The finding raises the intriguing possibility that humans might be able to detect light through skin as well as the eye. Margaret Ahmad from the University of Paris VI, France, and her colleagues focused on a class of photoreceptor proteins called cryptochromes, which are activated by light in plants and trigger a number of physiological responses, such as maturation of seeds and unfurling of leaves. Cryptochromes are also found in insects and mammals, including humans. But until now no-one has known whether human cryptochromes react to light.

Humans Could Have Geomagnetic Sight http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/geomagnetic-vision/
Geomagnetic orientation using light. The ability to see Earth’s magnetic field, thought to be restricted to sea turtles and swallows and other long-distance animal navigators, may also reside in human eyes. Tests of cryptochrome 2, a key protein component of geomagnetic perception, found that its human version restored geomagnetic orientation in cryptochrome-deficient fruit flies.Researchers have described how cryptochrome seems to be a quantum compass that detects infinitesimally subtle, geomagnetically-induced variations in the spin of electrons struck by photons. From those variations, animals seem able to determine their orientation in relation to Earth’s magnetic field. Many gaps still remain in cryptochrome theory, but it’s generally thought that the cryptochrome system may be active across the animal kingdom, from fish to reptiles to birds. Humans, however, were thought to be an exception. Our own cryptochrome is considered a piece of circadian machinery, part of our molecular clock rather than any optical compass.

The new study, however, suggests that cryptochrome may be more than a clock. Seeking to test how a vertebrate cryptochrome would work in fruit flies, Reppert decided to use the human version. His team engineered flies to be cryptochrome-deficient: They struggled to orient within a magnetically-charged maze. When the researchers spliced human cryptochrome into the flies, they again found their bearings.

Sedlak discusses how a living organism is not only an information detector and generator, but is also a transformer of electromagnetic energy. Biological systems generate their own magnetic mediums through a process he calls “dia-par”, or diamagnetic to paramagnetic transition. Sedlak proposes that the science of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) can be used to model living bioplasma. A wide spectrum of genetic mechanisms now appear to be under the influence of surrounding electromagnetic fields. (Roffey) Is there a correlation between the effects of electromagnetic fields and those of paranormal experience, mental intent on genetic regulation and living tissues?

Under certain conditions humans affect local geomagnetic fields. Field codes are context dependent. Local geomagnetic field fluctuations are seen to dramatically change as a function of directed mental protocols. These same fields are also changed and uniquely altered when measured in close coupling to the human body. It appears that mental protocols that send out thoughts and energy, even from distant points around the world, directly affect the local geomagnetic fields in accordance with intentions. Mankind is closely tied to Earth’s geomagnetic fields, as quantum entanglement vehicles of information transfer, fields that underlie extraordinary forms of communication such as telepathy. (Chouinard). We might even find evidence that dark matter is charged (Pitkanen).

(1) We are complex electrodynamic, rather than merely chemical beings, sensitive to natural and artificial EM fields; (2) SR frequencies coincide with human brain waves, affecting subtle and gross brain-wave generation, regulating homoeostasis, healing and psi; (3) there is strong correlation between human behavioral disturbance and geomagnetic field turbulence or isolation from Schumann Wave frequencies. (Miller)

Keywords: geomagnetics, bioplasma, EMFs, coherence, resonance, liquid crystals, interference grids, photon polarization, psycho-physiological remodeling, nonlocal communication, temporal lobe transients

Archetypes * Complexes * Serendipity * Negentropy * Synchronicity * Fractals * Chaos * Complexity * Hub Theory
Holism * Nonlocality * Entanglement * Complex Adaptive Systems * Entrainment * Noetics * Mimetics * Genetics

Ultraholism & Cyclic Superpositions

Paradoxically, when we look into the depths of matter, we look into the depths of ourselves. Scientists and mystics report similar phenomena in their models and phenomenology. Spiritual technologies, the software of sacred penetration and amplification, virtually predicted the fine nature of matter as nothing but a complex illusion – what we have come to understand as a hologram. Mystics have also always emphasized the primal nature of Light, and claimed that we are in fact made of light itself. Science has confirmed this in numerous ways.

In the quantum world, everything is in self-organizing flux, including the subquantal virtual photons popping in and out of existence. The foamy Zero Point fluctuation of subspace perturbs and determines the behavior of quantum systems theoretically through radiant EM fields. Radiation is absorbed from the zero-point background. The stability of matter itself is mediated by the zero point fluctuation phenomena.

The gist of the holographic paradigm is that there is a fundamental reality that 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.

In this dynamic model there are no “things”, just energetic events. Light and sound (acoustic cymatics) modulate all matter. This “holoflux” includes the ultimately flowing nature of what is, and all possible forms. 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.

Our brains mathematically construct ‘concrete’ reality by interpreting frequencies from another dimension. This information realm of meaningful, patterned primary reality transcends time and space. Thus, the brain is an embedded hologram, interpreting a holographic universe. All existence consists of embedded holograms within holograms and their interrelatedness somehow gives rise to our existence and sensory images.

We now presume the fundamental unity of all things, but still struggle to make it more than a concept in our lives. This paradigm takes a transdisciplinary approach. Integrating scientific, social, cultural, psychological and spiritual concepts and ideas helps us wrap our minds around such ultraholism.

Artist Roy Ascott distinguishes the syncretic process from synthesis, in which disparate things meld into a homogenous whole, thereby loosing their individual distinction. Nor is it mere eclecticism, which usually signals a wavering course of thought of only probable worth. In the syncretic context, extreme differences are upheld but aligned so likeness is found among unlike things. The power of each element enriches the power of all others within the array of their differences. This is a viable approach to archetypes.

More than binary opposition, syncretism is a process between different elements, the in-between condition of ‘being both’. In describing syncretism, it is useful to bring into play the “both both/and, nor/nand, and either/or” formulation, meaning “mixing together”. In present day cultural terms the enemy is habit – the passive, uncritical repetition or acceptance of behaviors, opinions, perceptions and values, and the enshrining as verities, metaphors that have passed their sell-by date. Habit is the enemy of art and science, impeding the search for new ways of being.

The intangible ground of Being is primarily active. Each and every wave has zero point energy of virtually infinite potential, due to infinite interpenetrating waves. Only recently have we begun seriously entertaining this vast ocean of dark light — the energy of empty space — as a primordial reality.

An archetype is a primordial vortex, node, nexus, or strange attractor The attractor is the explicate order, a complex manifold of vortices of nonlinear information explication that modulates the vitality of archetypal dimensions.

Simultaneous reverberations interpenetrate consciousness and we perceive it directly. The whole meaning of particular enfolded resonant structures may be activated. Meaning is derived from its relationship to the context — the ground. The cosmic dimension of some archetypal symbols is the sure guarantee of their universality. This storehouse of knowledge is both an asset and hindrance, but more importantly it points to a deeper, implied domain.

The image stream or imaginal process is our primary experience and permeates and conditions all facets of human life. We tend to take the background noise of the constant imaginal flux of the stream of consciousness for granted. We rarely focus our conscious awareness on this imaginal wellspring, but sometimes it intrudes on consciousness during our gaps in normal awareness – day dreaming, fantasies, reverie, lacunae, meditation, inspiration, discovery.

Consciousness, like creativity, is an emergent phenomenon patterned by strange attractors which govern the complexity of information in dynamic flow. Our consciousness appears co-temporaneously with our embodiment, creating the imaginal flux of representational and nonrepresentational perception – the stream of consciousness.

Subnuclear Physics

The energy body or the field body, along with the scalars of our holographic blueprint, connect us directly with the negentropic potential of the zero-point field. Radiant light literally emerges from this mystic void, beyond nature’s veil of observability. Primordial structuring processes are common to both psyche and matter, working in the gap or empty interval between intention and action.

When foreground emerges based on need or habit, the ground recedes. Need in the new moment emerges from the ground as figure. The force of necessity arises in the emotions. A need is an incomplete charged multisensory image that rises to awareness. Image-making is a self-generating activity. Images are involved in the social construction of self. Social and personal realities help construct ‘archetypal’ images, which influence our perspective of the world.

The dynamic mindscape underlies our beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Imagination is both a realm or domain of experience and a human faculty. Images come in from the outside through our senses, and are also produced autonomously from the unconscious as a perpetual multisensory narrative of experience, immediate though often metaphorical in nature. Meaningful signals or mental forms emerge from the amorphous background.

The person is figure to the ground of elements.The ground is what is further from perception or not in awareness. When you focus at any one time, the ground is the remainder of perceptual awareness. The ground state of a quantum mechanical system is its lowest-energy state; the energy of the ground state is known as the zero-point energy (ZPE) of the system.

The figure symbolizes the need in focus, while the ground symbolizes other needs. Nothingness is the ground for change, mobilizing our superposed possibilities in the macrocosm. There can be something between the states of beingness and non-beingness. Everything that exists occupies that indeterminant place, a state of emptiness of all forms, all formulations, and the ground of all experience. Via cascade, we reach the ground state after the excitation of an activation. The ground of our nonlocal potential really does rise up to meet us.

Negistence

The ground (source field) reveals the significance of archetypal imagery (phenomenal field) being rooted in nature. It is the universal, not objective realm that is primary. Archetypes are the patterns that connect. Even the Torah says, Adonoy Elohim formed from the ground every beast of the field. This clearly does not mean dirt, or even atoms or molecules. It means the lowest state of dynamic equilibrium, the basement of being in nonbeing, which remains sensitive to perturbations of matter/antimatter annihilation.

Imagery unfolds as self-revealing visual or multisensory narrative. It attracts – even commands — our attention, consciously and unconsciously. It invites entrainment through ‘recognition’, providing the energy for follow through in the creative process. We are stimulated, emotionally charged or enflammed, and respond to it intentionally, even compulsively. It drives us.

When we believe in and follow that impulse, what was pure potential crystallizes waves of psychophysical energy and becomes manifest. Each image emerges from the creative context that links all events, real and imaginal – the underlying destructured phenomenal field – the meaningful void of the transcendent imagination.

The nonmanifest is the dynamic source of everything, but we tend to ignore it favoring the tangibles of objects to the creative ground. The whole of any level is the part of more fundamental levels. When the movement is complete, there is a return to the ground of awareness itself.

Chaos, the real matrix of order, is experienced as a consciousness state–the ground state. Paradoxically, chaos is the essence of order. That order is inherent. Dynamics has successfully explained many natural phenomena and been heralded as a new scientific paradigm. The quintessence is now found in nonlinear dynamics, the holographic field and the virtual vacuum of absolute space. Only when we comprehend the groundstate of being can we fathom reality.

The transcendent principle “emanation” is primordial. All derived or secondary things proceed or flow from the primal Source. It eliminates will from the theory of creation. There is no hand of a supreme artisan who finds matter at his or her disposal. All things, actually or only apparently material, emerge or flow from the dynamic primal principle.

Unlike evolution, the process of development, emanation declares the immutability of the first principle. Emanation involves a series of descending stages, a subjective gnosis, not a developmental evolution that goes from less to more perfect. Thus, chaotic excitability is a paradigm of emergence, transcendent yet immanent potential. The undecomposable domain of Chaos is not an emptiness, but a rich, generative source — a bornless nothingness from which all form proceeds.

The probabilities of transformation emerge from total potential as pluralistic chaos erupts into awareness as motivation. In the creative process, one path is amplified and chosen. Beyond the hyperfine structure of reality, this process of self-discovery, phase transition, and integration is the ground, path, and fruition of our work.

Ground Rules

You can imagine yourself as the dynamic ground on which the reality dream is taking place. It is a shift in personal center of gravity to the deepest level. When it has come to a point of sufficient resolution, it will fade into the undifferentiated ground, and another appear. Once we “go to ground”, regenerative possibilities emerge. As focus changes, so does the figure and hence the ground. The ground which supports us is home of our transcendental soul. With genuine and unreserved acceptance, we create the ground from which all healing takes place.

The totality of experience is the ground of a life. But ‘unity’ itself is a fantasy goal. We can reexperience ourselves in a more complete, more complex way. What we can know becomes the image that points to the archetype, but never the thing in itself. We cannot see the world in its totality (unbroken wholeness) without imagination, yet imagination clouds the issue by generating a geyser of imagery in the void of the unknown. Imagination demands understanding as non-derivative, as a phenomenon evaluated on its own terms.

By creatively “making something out of Nothing”, it reflects the unconscious perspective back to the self-organizing environment from which it arises spontaneously. It may launch us out of the now in any moment into the past or future.We abandon linear thinking wholly in the gaps in our awareness. Fantasy is a meaningful part of our raw mental life, where transformations take place.

Reorganized, inner life transforms the complex responses and cognitions that become the ground of a more satisfying and fulfilling life. The pluripotent/pluridimensional state is the condition of self-renewal. This cosmic ground is a mundus imaginalis, different from such bases as “biological instinct, eternal forms, numbers, linguistics and social transmission, biochemical reactions, genetic coding, etc.

The imaginal field acts as some sort of intermediary. It is the space which is already present when images are produced; it is the space where images emerge. Images and objects in the imaginal field are both personal and transpersonal. Such images and objects appear in an imaginal field that reaches past subjective, or internal, experience into objective, or external experience.

There is a gloss of imaginary material both over and under our ordinary experience and perception.The subjective imaginal is interwoven with objective “reality” as it unfolds. The Source generates meaningful images, but sometimes that meaning is lost in translation. The dream goes unnoticed, the warning unheeded, the challenge unanswered, the soul unacknowledged. Whatever is seen is also always explored in the imaginal. Immaterial reality arouses the felt-sense of connection to spirituality, yearning to retrieve the sacred. Such connection heals by eliminating fragmentation brought about by projective identifications.

More – http://holographicarchetypes.weebly.com/

When meaning is usurped by media mania, a 24/7 assault on the senses, the metaphors that might heal us overwhelm and enslave us. Archetypes function as programming options, modulating our emotional addictions to pain, fear and suffering, contempt, insecurities, doubt, failure, even love. The images that heal emerge from our insight and realizations, not ones imposed on us from without. All events are holographically recorded and can be holographically healed.

All archetypes are a form of human expression that is both holographic and physical. Physical formations of archetypal sequences cause humans to behave in parallel ways to each associated ancestor, experience or process. Integration is a function of intentionality — conscious and unconsciously maintained, or incorporated. Integration occurs both without effort, as a redesign of the central processor of our minds, and voluntarily as a deliberate effort to understand, find meaning, and rectify our behavior towards self, others and world. Sometimes when we lose ourselves in transcendent experiences, we somehow come back reborn and full of compassion. We are nurtured by the depths.

Images, like the holographic universe, have an implicate order — a deeper enfolded dimension. Memories aren’t localized in one place, but are spread across the associative areas of the brain. Associative areas aren’t set aside for particular functions like speech production, language comprehension, and memory encoding. Instead, they are responsible for all “miscellaneous” tasks. Each associative area seems to contain echoes of all of the information. Symbols arise from and are embedded in the environment as holographic fields of energy. There are innumerable morphogenic veils of primal forces.

Nonlocal Creative Source

Can we have a sense of the cosmos in the world without unwittingly projecting myriad fantasies on it that we embrace literally? Sometimes we lose sight of the fact that we cannot escape our entangled embedding in the universe; we are indissolubly connected. Has the world become so horrible it is unreasonable to be realistic? Perhaps we know far too many ways for it to end and not nearly enough ways to reconstitute. We may need to look at our drives and wishes, rather than the fantasy content. In content-free therapy, the narrative is less relevant than the process itself. We have to factor in our own desires in our own logic tests and philosophy of natural realization.

The capacity for transcending the self through art arises from the creative process, an altered state of consciousness facilitating the occurrence of anomalous events such as precognition and interior visions that appear to be outside the spacetime of waking life. Frustration can trigger the far-from-equilibrium conditions necessary for creativity, while inspiration may seem as if its source is exterior to the artist, and the experience of flow, like a trance state, can produce an altered sense of time. Archetypes in the creative process link a single mind to the collective unconscious and works of art become self-opening worlds that create an expanded reality. (Zausner) www.jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/download/173/182

The Great Unknown lies behind Jung’s transcendent function and mostly we remain clueless in the face of this Mystery even as we encounter its inescapable phenomenology. Non-ordinary states of consciousness reveal a hidden holographic order. However, unlke recreational altered states, only integrative states radically reorganize the psyche and brain. Lesser states can destabilize habitual adaptation, leaving us fragile with split assumptions.

Conflict arises from destabilizing information and experience. Clarity comes in realizing we cannot permanently function in that realm because archetypes don’t understand our personality needs as they play out their own agendas. Deconstructing of reality is a dangerous as well as prospective process not all psyches survive intact. This is why historically we have spiritual and religious guides to that realm. But, again, you’d best be careful who those guides are and what they actually lead toward — increased health and well-being or disintegration.

Psyche constructs reality. Our experience of so-called reality is always mediated by our image of it. Our image of it is now conditioned by new media. Even if all the contents of the psyche are real, that doesn’t mean they are realistic. That psyche is real is still a radical proposition, but psychic politics certainly color the self-image and ideas of everyone. We observe and participate with images, but if we navigate this dream-scape poorly we become essentially “lost at sea.”

It is not a question of nature or nurture (genes alone or experience alone). Rather, everything is both. We inherit the structures that make our experience what it is. But the structure itself is “empty,” and each human culture “fills” it with its own specific adaptations. It is difficult to define an archetype and set boundaries that distinguish it from others. In a hologram each part contains all the information but in lower resolution. Archetypes have this interpenetrating holographic quality. There are patterns within patterns within patterns. Some overlap with others, and some are nested inside others.

Archetypal realities, passed on through DNA, are expressed in distinctive neuronal tracts in the brain. They include customs and laws regarding property, incest, marriage, kinship, and social status or roles; myths and legends; beliefs about the supernatural and cosmos; gambling, adultery, homicide, schizophrenia, and the therapies to deal with them. A mythic and visionary language of immediate experience encompasses themes of deepest, highest, and ultimate concern.

Holistic individualism is a construct. Most fantasy-based individuals are at a complete loss to coherently explain their own conventional behavior much less anomalous events and their deep meaning, or the cultural unconscious, or mythological unconscious matrix. But they try, and become utterly entrenched in their belief that they are right about the nature of the world and reality. We have pseudo-memories about our personal lives. Why not moreso for our collective life?

Studies show that magical thinking in New Age adherents is correlated with schizotypal traits, emotional oversensitivity, and cognitive-perceptual looseness. The subject matter often revolves around escapist fantasy, catastrophe, creation and the mythopoeic forces of mankind. Ignorant of such dynamics, interpretive mistakes and displaced psychic contents proliferate into errors of fact. Propaganda, media distortions, memes, and disinformation compound the social problem of misapprehension further. http://www.asanas.org.uk/files/jasanas002.pdf

Shameless self-promotion by narcissistic personalities of such alternative ideas leads to cults. They make up myths about the myths of by-gone eras. Roiling unconscious images can be fatally confusing. Thought illusions culminate in personal projections and collective projections of mythology. Jung suggested symbols live only as long as they are pregnant with meaning.

Philosophy arose from criticism of myth, from discussing and challenging it. In science, we criticize, reject and eliminate theories. At the edge of the abyss of the unknown, new signs and symbols emerge. Credible theories and paradigms must include biology, physics, and neurophysiology.

Is it God or Memorex?

One of the reasons people “see God”, or a guru, or anomalies may be because our brains are constructed to see reality through the eyes of others. There are heaps of mirror neurons which are there to make us feel the ‘other’. Mirror neurons do for psychology what DNA did for biology. They provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities.

As in the psychochemical processes of empathy or falling in love, a complex feedback loop sustains a state of mind. But when we empathically transpose ourselves into someone else’s position, we expose ourselves to that reality — cognitively and emotionally. The unconscious complicates empathy, both ways. Mirror neurons might well play a role in bonding, language and self-awareness.

If the archetypes have a location, neurostructures instantiate them. It’s not impossible that we can believe in God because we obviously have a brain center that specializes in fatherly images. Behavioral paradigms have been found to have neural representation, puberty being the best known of them. The archetypes are often, if not usually, found in the various deities worshiped in a culture, and they reinforce the roles people experience during the different phases of their lives, able to advise or give guidance about almost any situation.

Naively, we take too much as self-evident. But ‘seeing’ is not always ‘believing’, though many make this error or leap in logic and formulate their choices and future accordingly. Yet, there is only one way to learn what consciousness is. Experience. But we have no satisfactory explanatory edifice for consciousness. Would such a theory release in each of us our own inner knowledge of the creativity of our own consciousness, and its infinite possibilities?

The problem is trying to define a verb, a dynamic, as if it were a noun. Consciousness is present everywhere in spacetime, so has no need to “go” or “be sent” via a medium or carrier. Synchronous events, including intentional or directed healing, may work via coherence, an entanglement or resonance effect, but we should be careful not to mistake this field effect for the mind itself, which permeates and undergirds all.

We live in a chaotic universe to which we are seamlessly wed. We are a chaotic system ourselves, and chaotic systems exhibit holistic behavior. Holism sees the world in all its diversity as connected. A global wave of information (consciousness) is responsible for the extraordinary coherence that expresses as self-organization. We are one with the whole universe of phenomena and being in the deepest sense. The unifying force is consciousness.

But we do recognize the effect of consciousness. It functions to mediate states of consciousness, high and low psychobiological arousal. Consciousness is the subconscious lifted up by the physical body. When the body fails, the consciousness collapses back into the subconscious. All our thoughts come from the subconscious which can see our intentions but not our world. This relates somehow to intention being imaginary and not of the physical frictionized world (King).

Gerald Edelman postulates that the flows of information in the brain are mediated through ‘re-entrant’ feedback loops. As evolution provides new cognitive functions, new re-entrant loops are established. Even language itself is an archetype — a chaotic field of dynamic associations. A subtle net of tropes, grammar, symbols, and meaning, the program language begins in limbic resonance. Some phenomena generate their own specialty language patterns, nomenclature, and internal coherence of meaning and representation.

In a holographic universe, even time and space cab no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else. Time and three-dimensional space also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. Core mystical experiences of transformation usher us into this holographic domain of pure frequencies, altered states of consciousness, and revelations.

Altered states open the way to polyphasic depth and engaging meaning. We learn to tolerate the irrational and holographically experience the simultaneity of cosmos and individual life. At its deeper level, reality is a sort of super hologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools someday we might reach into the super holographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

Or not. A fantasy of such penetration or phenomenon inside the head is not the same as that penetration.

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 http://www.scribd.com/doc/70353722/The-Shadow-as-a-Magical-Assistant

Sophistry is part of the speculative basis of language based subcultures — persuasion and rhetoric with a dash of charisma. Such persons may believe wholeheartedly in their own self-delusion and zealously try infecting others with it. But why? The question remains, but often has a narcissistic 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?

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.

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. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/science/telling-the-story-of-the-brains-cacophony-of-competing-voices.html?pagewanted=4&_r=1

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), etc], 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.

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. (King, 2011)

Physicist Brian Greene, in a new 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 can stretch, twist, warp, and ripple under the influence of gravity. Space, far from being empty, is filled with some of the deepest mysteries of our time. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/fabric-of-cosmos.html

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 Kornberg 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 follows DNA? As a matter of fact is there anything which combines with anything without an entity bringing the pair together”. (Mandel)

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. The complex may form around any archetypal, that is, structurally important, component of the psyche.

They play through our self-narratives, culture in art, literature, and the movies we so frequently view and in 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 crown, 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, 1966a).

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, 1969c). 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.

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, and metabolism, health and well-being. Unconscious topdown control leads to automatic emotional control. Psychophysical feedback completes the bottom-up regulation of attention and awareness. Functional integration unites the process. Moral sentiments and values are linked to compassion. With altruism, social concepts and values are actualized through decisions and goal-directed behavior. Topdown controlled alpha band activity determines how we perceive sensory information. http://www.neuroethics.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/20048/Moll_powerpoint.pdf

However, archetypes also condition our pathologies, which can be compounded by trauma, personality disorders, and neurological brain damage. Frontal lobe damage leads to lack of foresight, impulsiveness, rigidity, poor planning, impaired moral cognition and behavior, and and poor social judgement. Temporal lobe damage amplifies impaired social perception and conduct, and loss of empathy. Subcortical limbic damage leads to extreme violence, perversion and sociopathy. Motivation and abstract content are impaired. Visceral-emotional bias leads to bottom-up control of the ego. Reason alone does not save us from such holographic field effects that often bootstrap on our childhood traumas.

Psyche depends on body and body depends on psyche. Depth psychology describes psychic contents with psychic means. Psyche is subject and object, medium and message. Models, questions and proofs all originate in the human mind. And even in physics there is no objective observer outside the universe to experiment on it. Jung contended the common background of physics and depth psychology was psychic as much as physical. This essential third element is transcendental. Both disciplines engage in a reflective interior search for hidden connections along with the outward gaze of scientific inquiry.

The archetypes of the collective unconscious are arrayed behind, yet infused in the scenes of our personal lives, and current worldwide conditions of crisis and confusion. They mirror our own states back at us, whether we notice, perceive them as such, or interpret them plausibly or not. They catch us in our psychological blindspots. We might be fascinated, even obsessed, with the paranormal or unexplainable experiences. Activated archetypes compensate for the one-sidedness of the times and provide preset ways to adapt. They show that a person’s problem is also a problem of humanity, a basic human concern. It’s healing to know the general human meaning of the problem.

The basis of learning and experience, they personify characteristics of the current state of the psyche. They contextualize our suffering. Functional at deeper levels, they display psyche’s self regulatory system to consciousness in symbolic form. Soul only exists in one of their forms. Every event is infused with the meanings of all variants. Soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena. Taking fantasies literally and also confusing the literal and the concrete is a fundamentalist approach.

The curse of each god and its blindspot are as important to the affective pattern as the virtues it confers. Powerful symbol sets are self-validating and may appear magical. Archetypes attract, convince, fascinate, and overpower. Yet without any means to grasp high weirdness more than literally, we uncritically “believe” it concretely. Many fall victim to half-baked theories and overstatements from pop physics and pop psychology or their own narratives. Sometimes our experiences are self-deluding; our interpretations aren’t accurate. The noise of ordinary consciousness and beliefs drowns out the signal. Unconsciousness is the mysterious background of our ordinary awareness.

Creativity is another word for insight. The creative person is different, a fact which they, themselves, recognize. They always ask questions about things which puzzle them, they are honest, shy, bashful, they appear inconsiderate, determined, persistent, industrious, never bored, spirited in disagreement, unwilling to accept the judgment of authority, and, they are visionary. The creative person may like to work alone and to strive for distant goals. As Torrance has pointed out, many of these characteristics, taken singly, may be desirable, but taken in combination they make the creative child a difficult child. (Henrickson)

Meta- Levels

Our whole psychophysical organism is very much at the center of such effects. Imaginal space is a net of multiple images and meaning — the ground of meaning and metaphor. The organismic source is our human bodies and the focus of human consciousness. The fantasy principle dethrones reality, but can be dissociative or compensatory. The human mind is a meme-scape, subject to the distortions of cultural “viruses.”

Structurally organized archetypes play a central role as powerful intrusions of archetypal energy in the formation of complex and symptom These intrusions lead to particular patterns of fragmentation in the behavioral and cognitive presentations. Pre-conceived concepts vie with structures, concepts with images, constructions with deconstruction and spectacle. We bamboozle ourselves. Unless we apply certain illuminative processes to our deeper life, it remains hidden in the shadows. The patterns expressed by archetypes remain beyond our awareness. We stay in the dark about much of our being.

For example, Robert Moore calls the trickster archetype, “psyche’s answer to oppression and grandiosity.” Fearless and uncompromising, it exposes pretension and pomposity wherever it is manifest — either in self or other. If possessed by this archetype, however, one becomes a compulsive critic who seeks to ridicule, shame, and humiliate without compassion. Meant to be an agent of liberation and the ally of new creations, the shadow expression of this psychological structure becomes the enemy of both creativity and creation itself.

Automatic Trance States

Archetypes appear unbidden, “possessing” us with trance states that exemplify their typical qualities. The existence of archetypes is demonstrated in the analysis of adult and childhood dreams, active imagination, psychotic delusions, and fantasies produced in the trance state. Such trances condition and cloud our vision. Client-centered therapy uses the trance state as a doorway to a larger world beyond the walls of the conscious psyche.

Everybody sees their own fantasies through their own memes. This deeper level manifests itself in universal archaic images expressed in dreams, religious beliefs, myths, and fairytales. The archetypes, as unfiltered psychic experience, appear sometimes in their most primitive and naive forms (in dreams), sometimes in a considerably more complex form due to the operation of conscious elaboration (in myths).

For James Hillman the task of the therapist is “to keep the snake there”. He wants the psyche, by way of the limitless depths of its images to “threaten the hell out of you,” to keep you in the realm of the unknown for as long as possible, and it is in this way that real psychological work can begin. Hillman’s views here are close to the Kabbalist Azriel of Gerona’s charge that to have “faith” is to enter into a relationship with one’s “nothingness” and the “unknown” of the infinite, Ein-sof. It also accords well with those elements within the Kabbalah that deny the possibility of cognitive, as opposed to experiential, knowledge of the divine. http://www.newkabbalah.com/hil2.html

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 that are outside their belief system, knowledge or skill sets. Self-reports and self-concepts often differ widely from objective measures.

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. People construct all kinds of aberrant realities for themselves. But we are also subject on an a priori basis to the influence of genes, memes and archetypal schemes.

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 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) .http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/1998/vol2/wilkins_js.html

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. Vacuum models of holographic realities have a different basis, 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, it fails to explain the first thing about Reality. Even 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).

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 social 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 wirld 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 signifiers of meaning 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. 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. 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.

What you “see” is not always what you “get.” Many people mistakenly take their own perceptiions and visions literally without “seeing through” the various possibilities that are outside their belief system, knowledge or skill base. Self-reports and self-concepts often differ widely from objective measures. Self-empowerment can be entangled with self-delusion.

Irrational superstitious behavior goes hand in glove with errors of judgement. 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.

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. 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).

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.”

The “archetypes” originating in the collective unconscious are psychological equivalents of Platonic Forms. Archetype-figures also appear in the personal unconscious as “complexes”. Archetypes give form to chaos and function as a holographic control system. All of our experience is filtered through these conditioning “lenses.” But we think we are autonomous. 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.

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. In other words, 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.

Through psychophysical means, archetypes exert a topdown control on psyche and society. None of us are immune to their inherent influence but they affect our immunity, resilience, and metabolism, health and well-being. Unconscious topdown control leads to automatic emotional control. Psychophysical feedback completes the bottom-up regulation of attention and awareness. Functional integration unites the process. Moral sentiments and values are linked to compassion. With altruism, social concepts and values are actualized through decisions and goal-directed behavior. Topdown controlled alpha band activity determines how we perceive sensory information. http://www.neuroethics.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/20048/Moll_powerpoint.pdf

However, archetypes also condition our pathologies, which can be compounded by trauma, personality disorders, and neurological brain damage. Frontal lobe damage leads to lack of foresight, impulsiveness, rigidity, poor planning, impaired moral cognition and behavior, and and poor social judgement. Temporal lobe damage amplifies impaired social perception and conduct, and loss of empathy. Subcortical limbic damage leads to extreme violence, perversion and sociopathy. Motivation and abstract content are impaired. Visceral-emotional bias leads to bottom-up control of the ego. Reason alone does not save us from such holographic field effects that often bootstrap on our childhood traumas.

Psyche depends on body and body depends on psyche. Depth psychology describes psychic contents with psychic means. Psyche is subject and object, medium and message. Models, questions and proofs all originate in the human mind. And even in physics there is no objective observer outside the universe to experiment on it. Jung contended the common background of physics and depth psychology was psychic as much as physical. This essential third element is transcendental. Both disciplines engage in a reflective interior search for hidden connections along with the outward gaze of scientific inquiry.

The archetypes of the collective unconscious are arrayed behind, yet infused in the scenes of our personal lives, and current worldwide conditions of crisis and confusion. They mirror our own states back at us, whether we notice, perceive them as such, or interpret them plausibly or not. They catch us in our psychological blindspots. We might be fascinated, even obsessed, with the paranormal or unexplainable experiences.

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. 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.

Meta- Levels

Our whole psychophysical organism is very much at the center of such effects. The organismic source is our human bodies and the focus of human consciousness. The fantasy principle dethrones reality, but can be dissociative or compensatory. The human mind is a meme-scape, subject to the distortions of cultural “viruses.” 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.

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).

Like scientists who ignore their own assumed truths, we leapfrog over our beliefs, blindspots, and personality deficits, claiming idiosyncratic imagination as literal reality. It couldn’t be further from the existential truth and symbolism is utterly lost. Superstitiously looking for signs or mind-blowing synchronicities is no substitute for actively interacting in a healthy process of self-transformation — individuation.

When meaning is usurped by media mania, a 24/7 assault on the senses, the metaphors that might heal us overwhelm and enslave us. Archetypes function as programming options, modulating our emotional addictions to pain, fear and suffering, contempt, insecurities, doubt, failure, even love. The images that heal emerge from our insight and realizations, not ones imposed on us from without. All events are holographically recorded and can be holographically healed.

All archetypes are a form of human expression that is both holographic and physical. Physical formations of archetypal sequences cause humans to behave in parallel ways to each associated ancestor, experience or process. Integration is a function of intentionality — conscious and unconsciously maintained, or incorporated. Integration occurs both without effort, as a redesign of the central processor of our minds, and voluntarily as a deliberate effort to understand, find meaning, and rectify our behavior towards self, others and world. Sometimes when we lose ourselves in transcendent experiences, we somehow come back reborn and full of compassion. We are nurtured by the depths.

Images, like the holographic universe, have an implicate order — a deeper enfolded dimension. Memories aren’t localized in one place, but are spread across the associative areas of the brain. Associative areas aren’t set aside for particular functions like speech production, language comprehension, and memory encoding. Instead, they are responsible for all “miscellaneous” tasks. Each associative area seems to contain echoes of all of the information. Symbols arise from and are embedded in the environment as holographic fields of energy. There are innumerable morphogenic veils of primal forces.

Nonlocal Creative Source

Can we have a sense of the cosmos in the world without unwittingly projecting myriad fantasies on it that we embrace literally? Sometimes we lose sight of the fact that we cannot escape our entangled embedding in the universe; we are indissolubly connected. Has the world become so horrible it is unreasonable to be realistic? Perhaps we know far too many ways for it to end and not nearly enough ways to reconstitute. We may need to look at our drives and wishes, rather than the fantasy content. In content-free therapy, the narrative is less relevant than the process itself. We have to factor in our own desires in our own logic tests and philosophy of natural realization.

The capacity for transcending the self through art arises from the creative process, an altered state of consciousness facilitating the occurrence of anomalous events such as precognition and interior visions that appear to be outside the spacetime of waking life. Frustration can trigger the far-from-equilibrium conditions necessary for creativity, while inspiration may seem as if its source is exterior to the artist, and the experience of flow, like a trance state, can produce an altered sense of time. Archetypes in the creative process link a single mind to the collective unconscious and works of art become self-opening worlds that create an expanded reality. (Zausner) www.jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/download/173/182

The Great Unknown lies behind Jung’s transcendent function and mostly we remain clueless in the face of this Mystery even as we encounter its inescapable phenomenology. Non-ordinary states of consciousness reveal a hidden holographic order. However, unlke recreational altered states, only integrative states radically reorganize the psyche and brain. Lesser states can destabilize habitual adaptation, leaving us fragile with split assumptions.

Conflict arises from destabilizing information and experience. Clarity comes in realizing we cannot permanently function in that realm because archetypes don’t understand our personality needs as they play out their own agendas. Deconstructing of reality is a dangerous as well as prospective process not all psyches survive intact. This is why historically we have spiritual and religious guides to that realm. But, again, you’d best be careful who those guides are and what they actually lead toward — increased health and well-being or disintegration.

Psyche constructs reality. Our experience of so-called reality is always mediated by our image of it. Our image of it is now conditioned by new media. Even if all the contents of the psyche are real, that doesn’t mean they are realistic. That psyche is real is still a radical proposition, but psychic politics certainly color the self-image and ideas of everyone. We observe and participate with images, but if we navigate this dream-scape poorly we become essentially “lost at sea.”

It is not a question of nature or nurture (genes alone or experience alone). Rather, everything is both. We inherit the structures that make our experience what it is. But the structure itself is “empty,” and each human culture “fills” it with its own specific adaptations. It is difficult to define an archetype and set boundaries that distinguish it from others. In a hologram each part contains all the information but in lower resolution. Archetypes have this interpenetrating holographic quality. There are patterns within patterns within patterns. Some overlap with others, and some are nested inside others.

Archetypal realities, passed on through DNA, are expressed in distinctive neuronal tracts in the brain. They include customs and laws regarding property, incest, marriage, kinship, and social status or roles; myths and legends; beliefs about the supernatural and cosmos; gambling, adultery, homicide, schizophrenia, and the therapies to deal with them. A mythic and visionary language of immediate experience encompasses themes of deepest, highest, and ultimate concern.

Holistic individualism is a construct. Most fantasy-based individuals are at a complete loss to coherently explain their own conventional behavior much less anomalous events and their deep meaning, or the cultural unconscious, or mythological unconscious matrix. But they try, and become utterly entrenched in their belief that they are right about the nature of the world and reality. We have pseudo-memories about our personal lives. Why not moreso for our collective life?

Studies show that magical thinking in New Age adherents is correlated with schizotypal traits, emotional oversensitivity, and cognitive-perceptual looseness. The subject matter often revolves around escapist fantasy, catastrophe, creation and the mythopoeic forces of mankind. Ignorant of such dynamics, interpretive mistakes and displaced psychic contents proliferate into errors of fact. Propaganda, media distortions, memes, and disinformation compound the social problem of misapprehension further. http://www.asanas.org.uk/files/jasanas002.pdf

Shameless self-promotion by narcissistic personalities of such alternative ideas leads to cults. They make up myths about the myths of by-gone eras. Roiling unconscious images can be fatally confusing. Thought illusions culminate in personal projections and collective projections of mythology. Jung suggested symbols live only as long as they are pregnant with meaning.

Philosophy arose from criticism of myth, from discussing and challenging it. In science, we criticize, reject and eliminate theories. At the edge of the abyss of the unknown, new signs and symbols emerge. Credible theories and paradigms must include biology, physics, and neurophysiology.

Is it God or Memorex?

One of the reasons people “see God”, or a guru, or anomalies may be because our brains are constructed to see reality through the eyes of others. There are heaps of mirror neurons which are there to make us feel the ‘other’. Mirror neurons do for psychology what DNA did for biology. They provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities.

As in the psychochemical processes of empathy or falling in love, a complex feedback loop sustains a state of mind. But when we empathically transpose ourselves into someone else’s position, we expose ourselves to that reality — cognitively and emotionally. The unconscious complicates empathy, both ways. Mirror neurons might well play a role in bonding, language and self-awareness.

If the archetypes have a location, neurostructures instantiate them. It’s not impossible that we can believe in God because we obviously have a brain center that specializes in fatherly images. Behavioral paradigms have been found to have neural representation, puberty being the best known of them. The archetypes are often, if not usually, found in the various deities worshiped in a culture, and they reinforce the roles people experience during the different phases of their lives, able to advise or give guidance about almost any situation.

Naively, we take too much as self-evident. But ‘seeing’ is not always ‘believing’, though many make this error or leap in logic and formulate their choices and future accordingly. Yet, there is only one way to learn what consciousness is. Experience. But we have no satisfactory explanatory edifice for consciousness. Would such a theory release in each of us our own inner knowledge of the creativity of our own consciousness, and its infinite possibilities?

The problem is trying to define a verb, a dynamic, as if it were a noun. Consciousness is present everywhere in spacetime, so has no need to “go” or “be sent” via a medium or carrier. Synchronous events, including intentional or directed healing, may work via coherence, an entanglement or resonance effect, but we should be careful not to mistake this field effect for the mind itself, which permeates and undergirds all.

We live in a chaotic universe to which we are seamlessly wed. We are a chaotic system ourselves, and chaotic systems exhibit holistic behavior. Holism sees the world in all its diversity as connected. A global wave of information (consciousness) is responsible for the extraordinary coherence that expresses as self-organization. We are one with the whole universe of phenomena and being in the deepest sense. The unifying force is consciousness.

But we do recognize the effect of consciousness. It functions to mediate states of consciousness, high and low psychobiological arousal. Consciousness is the subconscious lifted up by the physical body. When the body fails, the consciousness collapses back into the subconscious. All our thoughts come from the subconscious which can see our intentions but not our world. This relates somehow to intention being imaginary and not of the physical frictionized world (King).

Gerald Edelman postulates that the flows of information in the brain are mediated through ‘re-entrant’ feedback loops. As evolution provides new cognitive functions, new re-entrant loops are established. Even language itself is an archetype — a chaotic field of dynamic associations. A subtle net of tropes, grammar, symbols, and meaning, the program language begins in limbic resonance. Some phenomena generate their own specialty language patterns, nomenclature, and internal coherence of meaning and representation.

In a holographic universe, even time and space cab no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else. Time and three-dimensional space also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. Core mystical experiences of transformation usherus 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.

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.

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. 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 http://www.scribd.com/doc/70353722/The-Shadow-as-a-Magical-Assistant

Sophistry is part of the speculative basis of language based subcultures — persuasion and rhetoric with a dash of charisma. Such persons may believe wholeheartedly in their own self-delusion and zealously try infecting others with it. But why? The question remains, but often has a narcissistic 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.

One may notice that even now some people think of physical life and also spiritual life. Much of the physical life IS strongly repeatable, but not all. And much of the spiritual life is rarely repeatable and certainly not on our whim and control. So, some paradigm transition, some adjustment in the world-modeling is deeply warranted.

Do we just take a load off and tune in, structurally code into the strong, stochastic and rare flavors of repeatable subjectivity? Do we remain fascinated with following the high weirdness of our faulty perceptions or try to see through the dynamics of the process in motion? In this sense, archetypes and anomalous phenomena function like magicians of the psyche, deluding us with misdirection. Does the paranormal contradict scientific explanation or merely elude it?

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.