HOLOGRAPHIC ARCHETYPES
Top Down & Bottom Up Control of Personal & Collective Consiousness
by Iona Miller, (c)Oct. 2011

“... we are so full of apprehensions, fears, that we don't know exactly to what it points...
a great change of our psychological attitude is imminent, that is certain...
because we need more understanding of human nature because ...
the only real danger that exists is man himself... and we know nothing of man -
his psyche should be studied because we are the origin of all coming evil...” ― C.G. Jung

WEBSITE - http://holographicarchetypes.weebly.com

Mind Control Countermeasures

What you "see" is not always what you "get." Reality may be hidden by nature's veil or a dramatic mask. Many people mistakenly take their own perceptions and visions literally without "seeing through" the various possibilities deeply buried within that are outside their belief system, knowledge or skill sets. Self-reports and self-concepts often differ widely from objective measures. Do archetypes help us con our own consciousness with myths of individuality? Are we unwitting undercover agents for social memes without realizing it?

We need to be not only conscious of the nature of our consciousness, but conscious of our fallibility, realizing that intuition is fallible if unsupported by rational criticism. Personal, sociopolitical and spiritual myths and memes drive false perceptions. If we have little access to our pre-conditioned decision-making process, the whole concept of 'consciousness' becomes questionable. But we are also subject on an a priori basis to the influence of genes, memes and archetypal schemes. 

Psychodynamics of the Unconscious

Chaos theory, quantum and torsion physics, and analytical psychology provide portals for new awareness both of the processes of personal growth and of changes in world life. Modeling incorporates the five structures of consciousness—archaic, magical, mythic, mental, and integral. Complexity Theory describes the Universe as a complex of whole systems spontaneously generating out of a void and self-organizing at thresholds between chaos and stability

The archetype, a word used by Jung (1958) and elaborated by his follower Erich Neumann (1954) is a numinous (potent, powerful) unconscious psychic content -- the core of representations including those of states, and patterns of coordination of actions. Von Franz describes archetypes as "excited points in the field of the objective psyche" which behave like "relatively isolatable nuclei".  We can imagine this as a precursor to the notion of archetypal "attractors" in choas theory. Chaos is not so much pathological as it is a state of maximum readiness for an emerging reorganized self-system. Individuals with schemas or working models bordering on chaos are likely to be those most flexible and resilient.

Archetypes are also highly connected to each other. They describe capacities for consciousness --  functions, attitudes and character pathologies. In itself an archetype has no specific form. Such innate organizing principles exist in a very deep layer of the brain, but it gives rise to images in the visual cortex which partially represent it.  Our ancient instinctual apparatus included affection, inquisitiveness, self-preservation, competitiveness, fear and curiosity, i.e. these have archetypal existence. Archetypes were the forefathers of symbols, and are inherently symbolic.

Many concepts which are essential components of human (and group) thought originated as archetypes. Later on, both in time and in terms of cognitive activity, they put on the clothes of visual imagery and verbal identity. But they began in the limbic brain as archetypes. All people have the same archetypes, and they are the instruments of cultural evolution; but they express themselves differently in different cultural circumstances.

Lumsden and Wilson hypothesize that it takes about 1,000 years for a cultural element, or a propensity to express some culturally defined trait, to become established in the gene pool as an inherited trait. So Jung wasn't wrong in talking about 'endless repetitions of typical patterns of behaviour', he just didn't understand the mechanism which would give them a genetic basis. Pre-linguistic memes and archetypes, such as rhythm, may have played a greater role in genetic evolution than he dared to propose.

Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) says: 'When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation.' Perhaps so, but we might speculate that a meme is fertile or successful because they bind to archetypes, helping the effective expression of the archetype, rather than parasitizing the brain in any general sense.

Memes & Genes; Archetypes & Holograms

People construct all kinds of aberrant realities for themselves. A cognitive illusion, the self-attribution fallacy means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren't responsible.  Our perceptions are hopelessly distorted, our best thinking is fuzzy. Self-image is perhaps the most distorted, yet 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.  Over vast distances of the universe, 'now here', is seen as the future or past from elsewhere. Depending on how your velocity is maintaining your localized time, you can leap frog standard perceptual time and move to the future or past. Some claim the future is already out there as well as the past and the only real difference between now and then is the location from which the perception occurs.

Vacuum models of holographic realities have a different basis than the Standard Model, too. That's why when people use 'intentionality' to justify their wishful thinking with Copenhagen's 'observer effect', it is laughable, since the Standard model works great for mechanics, 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).

Trance Lucence

We cannot see the "big picture", so any attempt we make to holographically conceive our existential condition is more of an anamorphosis, a distorted projection or perspective requiring the viewer to use special devices or occupy a specific vantage point to reconstitute the image. The word "anamorphosis" is derived from the Greek prefix ana-, meaning back or again, and the word morphe, meaning shape or form. It deals with perspective and mirroring that conjure up a multi-dimensional perspective.

Archetypes are imagined as such distorting lenses, conditioning our perception of reality which is 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.

Ramachandran (Phantoms in the Brain)  describes symbolic characterizations of differing descent groups. Distinctions between groups (largely kin-based distinctions) had considerable importance; prior to the development of language as such, which could be used to express such distinctions, it could be done through dress, or through totemic, ritual and mythic symbolic expression. But how can a mutation that benefits the group survive and spread if it occurs only in isolated individuals? The answer appears to be that the group 'sharpens' genetic evolution by choosing members who conform to a required standard and excluding those that don't. This would make evolution happen very quickly, at least within the currently available pool of variation, since excluded individuals would not survive or mate.

Fortes (The Structure of Unilineal Descent Groups) explains how different but related descent groups are distinguished: 'Cults of gods and of ancestors, beliefs of a totemic nature, and purely magical customs and practices, some or all are associated with lineage organization . . . every significant structural differentiation has its specific ritual symbolism, so that one can, as it were, read off from the scheme of ritual differentiation the pattern of structural differentiation, and the configuration of norms of conduct that go with it.'

Any distinction between symbol and symbolized is spurious. The emotional projection of symbols, or "magical thinking," happens in psychosis, in cultures, and subcultures. Disgust is an emotion heavily caught up in symbolic and magical thinking. Yet, symbols can have biophysical and material effects. We trick ourselves into mobilization.

Magical thinking helps us feel more secure in an unpredictable world. By manipulating symbols, we imagine being able to manipulate the reality that a symbol represents, but it makes us vulnerable to manipulation, too. The psychology of superstition "works" better in a virtuality. Superstition provides the illusion of increased control. Symbols are captivating, indistinct, metaphoric and enigmatic portrayals of psychic reality. The content, i.e. the meaning of symbols, is far from obvious; instead, it is expressed in unique and individual terms while at the same time partaking of universal imagery. Our society is having to rethink such fundamental notions as money, security, growth and many other bases of our current worldview.

Symbols can be recognized as aspects of those images that control, order and give meaning to our lives. The source of symbols can be traced to the archetypes themselves which by way of symbols find more full expression. Symbols are thus one type of what Jung called "archetypal images," that is, the representation in consciousness of an underlying archetype. 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.

In God's Shadow: The Collaboration of Victor White and C.G. Jung
By Ann Conrad Lammers-

Scientific Archetypes

Mind, consciousness, and awareness are so central to the process of reality, perhaps they are the very reason for reality. Concepts of matter, life, and mind have undergone major changes. Consciousness is not a material system and neither is Quantum Mechanics (QM), which reduces all information and energy down to its fundamental holographic nature. As energy flows, information is coherently organized into animated forms of information. Though we have assumptions and beliefs, we remain unsure of the primordial nature of reality.

Simply stated, it is impossible to take the 'meta' out of physics since it is impossible to take the observer out of physics. It is impossible to take the knower out of knowledge. All metaphysical discussions are inherently about the nature of the observer and the knower. There is no physical theory of the observer because consciousness cannot be explained physically. Everything our physical theories of the observable world describe is some physical thing observed by an observer.

The observer is inherent in our most basic scientific principles, like the principle of equivalence. All the scientific debate about the correct interpretation of quantum theory is about the nature of observation. Both physics and metaphysics place the observer at the center of this discussion. ...That physical world of images demands of us that we inquire into the nature of the consciousness of the observer present at that focal point of perception. ...The holographic nature of the world describes at the most fundamental level possible how all information and energy is encoded in the world. But what does that fundamental description of the world tell us about the fundamental nature of consciousness? What is the nature of the consciousness that perceives that holographic world?

The key insight of the holographic principle is that an accelerating frame of reference, with an observer present at the central point of view, can arise even within empty space. As the observer arises, an event horizon also arises, which is a far as the observer can see things in space due to the constancy of the speed of light (Penrose 2005, figure 27.16). Where does the point of view of the observer arise? Where does the two dimensional surface of the event horizon arise? They both arise in empty space. (Kowall)

Scientists have shown that the brain runs largely on autopilot; it acts first and asks questions later, often explaining behavior after the fact. If much of behavior is automatic, then how responsible are people for their actions? These are among the concerns of  neuroscientist Dr. Michael S. Gazzaniga in his new book, Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain. The brain is a cacophony of competing voices. “The question, ultimately, was why?” Dr. Gazzaniga said. “Why, if we have these separate systems, is it that the brain has a sense of unity?”

Brain images are snapshots, for one thing; they capture a brain state at only one moment in time and say nothing about its function before or after. For another, the images vary widely among people with healthy brains -- that is, a “high” level of activity in one person may be normal in another. Can brain science tell exactly where automatic processes end and self-directed “responsible” ones end? Not now and not likely ever, Dr. Gazzaniga argues in his book. Social constructs like good judgment and free will are even further removed, and trying to define them in terms of biological processes is, in the end, a fool’s game. 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. Complexes can be pathological, archetypes cannot, as entirely healthy expressions of nature The complex may form around any archetypal, that is, structurally important, component of the psyche.

Archetypes play through our self-narratives, 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

Archetypal explorations: an integrative approach to human behavior By Richard M. Gray

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, unllke 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.

Jung in the 21st Century: Synchronicity and science By John Ryan Haule

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.

Pablo Amaringo

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.

Nebulous Vison, Randy Mack

REFERENCES

Haule, John Ryan, Jung in the 21st Century: Synchronicity and science

http://books.google.com/books?id=A3MUJJ0Gcu0C&pg=PA167&lpg=PA167&dq=holographic+archetype&source=bl&ots=qjU_WehKXb&sig=2N93sc2wO_cBbBFCk7dpO5psgKI&hl=en&ei=a7ynTuGsGayGsALezsi_Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAjgU#v=onepage&q&f=false

John Granrose, Ph.D., The Archetype of the Magician, http://www.voidspace.org.uk/psychology/wizard_archetype.shtml

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Kowall, James, What is Reality in a Holographic World? Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research | November 2011 | Vol. 2 | Issue 8 | pp. 1192-1282    http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/180/190

Luhrmann, Tanya Marie - Professor, "Magic",  http://freq.uenci.es/2011/10/27/magic/

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Henrickson PhD, Paul, Personal correspondence 11-2011:
Our children leave our homes, large or small, good or bad. They head toward centrally located building where they are joined by many more.  The corridors of the building are lined with metal closets intended for books, other supplies and some clothing, but they are sometimes used symbolically as prisons when one who is playfully energetic pushes a companion into that space. This image may be considered an adequate analogy of life in a penal institution, or a picture of a fact of life in many American schools.  Either way what is described is a procrustean subjection of a basically defenseless segment of our society.

It was Socrates who observed that the public itself was the greatest of all sophists and what he went on to describe was a process of socialization, which can, among the more sensitive of us, destroy all confidence in our individual perceptions and personal expressions. He describes the classic contest between the will of the mass and the striving of the individual, the consensus bound against the visionary, the King against the prophet.

A similar description can be found in the words of a more recent commentator, Harold Taylor, and American Psychologist.  “In contemporary American life, there are so many private pressures which bear down on the individual American citizen, that it requires a serious and sustained effort of will to think and even to feel independently.  It requires a continuing reaffirmation of moral courage to express independent conclusions once they have been reached. It is as if all the pressures of modern life were conspiring to crush the individual and to make him conform to a stereotype set by governments and public officials.”

I do not remember the date of the quotation above but I suspect it is already both technically and conceptually speaking out of date in that it is describing a more haphazard and unplanned series of social experiences. I have reference to a development that made its appearance ten or fifteen years ago when it became apparent hat those who have a desire and an aim to engineer society, that it was possible for the elementary school teacher to identify the one or two of her pupils in a first-grade classroom of thirty who would most likely become the thief, the rapist, the alcoholic, the murderer, and, to quote the supporter of this philosophy, “nearly any first grade teacher could make the identification.”

When I first heard this statement from an official of the State of Iowa, who was in a position of power and influence, I felt the chill of terror.  The identifying characteristics which “any first grade teacher” could observe included, “being a loner”, “seeing the world differently”, “not being able to accept one’s peers”. These were also the characteristics identified by a group of psychologists interested in the creative personality.  These differing points of view placed an awesome responsibility on the first grade teacher to be able to distinguish between the rapist and Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci. This Iowa official recommended that such children be treated in a fashion, which would prevent them from behaving in unsociable ways. I heard this man say then, and I have heard more recently, that some authorities have considered administering drugs to unquiet children as well as to teachers who are hyper-achievers. As E. Paul Torrance, Head of the Department of Educational Psychology has pointed out, fear is often the motivation for acts designed to limit individuality of expression. Thomas Szasz, M.D. has noted that “institutional psychiatry, whether in the mental hospital or in the school, is perhaps the finest technique developed so far for driving the soul out of man”.

An interesting development of this Iowa episode was that when I brought to the attention of the official the similarity between what he identified as the personality characteristics of the potential criminal, and what others identified as the potential creative, he responded with a short note to the effect that arts educators were doing a fine job when they employed their talent toward therapeutic ends.I think there may be a danger here that in the mind of many, who are fearful of divergent behavior, of merging concepts of what criminal and creative behaviors are. Torrance suggests that to a great extent this may already have happened, “ridicule and punishment have been mine since the day of my birth”, is the testimony, according to Torrance, of almost every creative person who has managed to maintain his creativity through childhood and into maturity. Shall we conclude that there are those who covertly hold that the art process probably assists the therapeutic process but that, in its more exalted form should be limited because it does not help to bring the individual “back into line”.   On the contrary, in its most exalted form it helps to distinguish the individual from the crowd. The statement by this Iowa official is one, which brings to mind the observation of Jose Ortega y Gassett. That “the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will”.



Burke, J. (2003). Strange Attractors: Transference, Holography, and an Archetype
(Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2003).
There are similarities between the patterns of holography and of psychological transference, where holography is the process of recording and reconstructing holograms. Employing a theoretical perspective using a hermeneutic method, this dissertation parallels holography with transference, offering another way to encounter transference by showing similarities between the processes of each and the results of each. Though complex, infinitely varying, and unique, their patterns are clearly identifiable. Thus they are a metaphorical fit to the concept of strange attractors in physics and a more literal fit to the concept of archetypes in depth psychology or dynamic psychology, which attends to the living, autonomous unconscious. The underlying pattern or strange attraction between transference and holography extends to other processes both within and outside the field of psychology. The visual image of the overall hologram is present in each component part of the hologram, the autonomy of the overall human is present in each conscious and unconscious component part of the human psyche.
http://pacifica.edu/pgl/stories/storyReader$730.html_print-friendly=true.html

Burke, Joseph. The Rainmaker’s Reality and the Holographic Archetype. Psychological Perspectives. 50/1, 2007. A Jungian psychotherapist evokes the luminous feature which suffuses deep religion and science by way of the optical hologram whence each iota contains a refraction of the whole image. From the Sefirot and Indra’s web to our intricate, nested psyche and on to an ascendant similarity from galaxies to Gaia, the same pattern and process holds and recurs everywhere.

http://junginvermont.blogspot.com/2010/02/body-and-archetype-presentation.html

This image making is also related to myth making in response to the experiences of the body. Keleman goes on to explain how this process works: "Experience is part of the body's self-organizing process, a pattern of response by which the body knows what it is, and what it is on the way to becoming. In that sense, the flux of experience as emotions, movement, sensations, creates an anatomic image in the brain of what is going on or what has already happened...The basic experience of the body is its pulses, which organize multiple realities in layers of expanding and gathering; of fullness and emptiness. This process generates two times: the time of the event and the time of the response, of encoding the event. The duration of the event and its organizational imprint, which is the present and the past, take place in the same person. We maintain in our tissue the actual event, and an organization of an image of the event. Out of one event we have organized the experiential and the symbolic...When we begin to be intimate with the pulse and quality of somatic experience, we begin to appreciate this experience as myth, outside of subjective time; as myth that forms internal knowing. As we learn to live again from our organic responses, the soma grows itself, deepens its feeling and images. In this way we grow a maturity out of the Wasteland." (Keleman, pp. 22-23). Thus, from Sansonese through Campbell and Keleman, we move from myth as a descendent of the experiences of ancient mystics being passed on in symbolized form, to myth as also representative of the human quest, individuation. They speak to the archetypal nature of somatic experience as something that evolves phyllogenetically as well as ontogenetically, and to its partnership with our image making abilities.

Finally, let us turn to affect and its relationship to body and archetype. Jung said that "psyche and matter are 'two different aspects of the same thing.’” (Chodorow, p. 44). He felt that emotion was the bridge between psyche and soma, instinct and archetype, and that archetypal experience includes both image and affect (i.e. a psychic and somatic state). For Jung, affect was both a “psychic feeling-state and a “physiological innervation state.” (Chodorow, p. 46) Quoted in Chodorow’s Dance Therapy and Depth Psychology, he discusses the relationship of emotion in relation to an archetypal experience:

“In their original form, archetypes are images and at the same time emotions. One can speak of an archetype only when these two aspects coincide...It is a great mistake in practice to treat an archetype as if it were a mere name, word or concept. It is far more than that; it is a piece of life, an image connected with the living individual by the bridge of emotion.” (Chodorow, p. 46)

In other words archetypal complexes manifest not just in the mind and thought, but also in the body vis a vis emotional states, somatic symptoms and behaviors.
Chodorow goes on to cite various theorists, including Darwin, who identify certain affects as innate. Jung viewed these innate patterns as having “their origin in the depths of the primordial unconscious.” (Chodorow, p. 62) A contemporary Jungian analyst, Louis Stewart, who had been a former teacher in a nursery and kindergarten program based in the arts, found through his research on the relationship of affects to play, that affect motivates and is transformed through play. Continuing his studies he came to incorporate and modify other perspectives on affect to develop a theory of archetypal affects. The archetypal emotions and their life stimuli are:

Affect Stimuli

Joy (Enjoyment-Ecstasy) Relationship to the familiar;
Interest (Interest-Excitement) Novelty
Sadness (Distress-Anguish) Loss
Fear (Apprehension-Terror) The Unknown
Anger (Irritation-Rage) Restriction of Autonomy
Contempt/Shame (Dislike-Disgust Rejection
Embarrassment-Humiliation)
Startle (Surprise-Startle) The Unexpected , (Chodorow, p. 77)

Stewart views the archetypal affects of Joy and Interest as the “energic, affective source of libido...He suggests that the senses and remaining five primal affects amplify each other and that the senses may have been the early precursors of the primal affects. To illustrate: ...touch is central to experiencing the impact of loss; our constant longing is for the embodied presence of the one we miss. Fear has to do with our response to the unknown. The sense of hearing seems to be a direct link to that intangible realm. Anger has to do with protecting oneself...seeing is central to our ability to identify the threat and protect ourselves against it...Contempt/Shame has to do with an evaluative response that finds others or ourselves unacceptable, unworthy. Similar to the affect Contempt, the sense of smell evaluates the external ‘other;’ similar to the affect Shame, the sense of taste evaluates something within oneself..Together smell/taste forms a bi-polar sense that is presumably related on a primal level to the rejection of noxious substances, from without and within...Startle is the affect of centering, orientation and re-orientation; it is our response ot the unexpected. On the instinctive body level, the kinesthetic and proprioceptive senses keep us centered and oriented.” (Chodorow, p. 81-84)

Furthermore, in relation to body archetypes, “the dynamic expression of Joy is play, and the dynamic expression of Interest is curiosity, each of the crises affects has its own expressive dynamism that has evolved with the human species...Sadness is expressed and transformed through rhythm and rhythmic harmony. Fear is expressed and transformed through ritual... Anger is expressed and transfomed through reason, primitive and differentiated. Contempt/shame is expressed and transformed through relationship.

Another aspect on the affects and their expressive dynamisms can be seen in the universal games that have been played since antiquity in every part of the world (Chodorow, p. 92)”

Chodorow reflects that “Stewart’s theoretical synthesis is original, provocative, stimulating and deeply grounded in the experience of the body.” (Chodorow, p. 94) If you have any doubt as to the veracity of that statement, don’t just think about a feeling, but allow yourself to experience it and see what happens!

The ideas presented above demonstrate many of the ways to explore the theme of body and archetype, but in no way represent all of the possibilities for doing so. However, this is where we end for now. In doing so, let us return to where we started, with Jung and the connection of mind, body (which is matter) and archetype. Jungian analyst Michael Conforti picks up where Jung left off in his exploration of quantum physics and psychology and “extends Jung’s theory of archetypes by suggesting that individuals are embedded in specific archetypal fields, which become represented by and embodied in matter over time. What is manifested is highly consistent behavior structured by an archetypal pattern....We know that the “royal road to the unconscious” can be traveled not only by way of the dream or the complex, as Freud and Jung believed respectively, but also by way of matter...All is connected. Within a unitary reality, psyche and matter are complementary aspects of the same fundamental wholeness and must be studied together to achieve a deeper understanding of consciousness and of psyche as a totality.” (Buck, 2010)

Floral Mind by Randy Mack

PART II

Obsolete Reality Wormholes to Past Beliefs

OBSOLETE REALITY TUNNELS: DigI/Osophy. The digital universe consists of 1’s ad 0’s; input and output: I/O. Likewise, our subjective experience consists solely of Input and Output, even though as human beings we can’t be reduced to purely mechanistic descriptions. There is organic and mechanical logic, that both hold true philosophically: garbage in, garbage out. But ‘self-organization' and ‘self-steering' provide an alternative dynamic perspective on the causal effects of conscious will in Chaosmos. The structure of digital information is decentralized, heralding the end of cultural and individual control fantasies.

Crumbling truths were simulacra all along. Meaning has imploded into digital binaries of electronic society. Reality has imploded into hyperreality. For example, digital art can be a copy of photorealism that is tweeked into a reflection of the imaginal theater of the mind; a copy of a copy of a copy of the original, bearing only a surface resemblance. Multiplied stylized images take on a life of their own, shattering the grid of repreentation (Deleuze, Guattari).

Metaphysical beauty hides the rotting corpse of new age thought, the eclectic pastiche of rotting and ruined abstractions. Seeking a root in today’s creatively evolving culture, many look backward, recursively adopting an outdated philosophy. R.A. Wilson and Tim Leary called them “reality tunnels” while McKenna dubbed it an archaic revival. Tunnelling make us “see” in a certain way; create our often myopic beliefs about self, others and world at any time. They are belief wormholes that take us to potential universes that don’t necessarily match up with Reality. They are a way of sticking our metaphysical head in the sand.

Physics and art face similar problems with imaginary universes that do not match up with this existant one. Even Renaissance art was trying to re-capture some values from the past, technologically. It’s good to ask yourself just where you think you are going? Where do you go from here?

You are already living a Hyperreality. Debord calls it the Spectacle; Baudrillard calls it the Similacrum. Beliefs are false promises to restore a mythical truth underlying the simulation. Belief maps create the fabled territory that claims to be salvation but is a well-disguised trap, mentally and spiritually. Do you opt for magical concepts that are tricks of the mind or the charm of the so-called real? Imaginal representations are metaphysical simulations, virtual realities.

Metaphysics is a dead end; all points of reference are liquidated by the universal solvent: chaos. Likewise the preferred terrain of popular religions. There is a short-circuit in our psychological position. There is no touchstone of reality or truth, beyond the simulation of the sacred, the content of sacred technologies. We have mass murdered our own models, creating a power vacuum. Only the simulation of power masks the political fiction.

Baudrillard concludes, "It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves any chance even in the event of death. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference."


CLICHES AND ARCHETYPES: Are you creating a unique reality tunnel reflecting your aesthetic like an artist, or a haphazard victim of dogmatic programming and conditioning? There are no ideals and no ultimate negation. Those choices just buffer us in archaic perceptual cocoons, rather than drawing us into the vortex of developing future. McLuhan pointed this out long ago, saying, "Utopians and anti-utopians are always obsessed with a period preceding their own. Orwell's 1984 happened in 1930." - MM, Take Today, p.75.

Most of New Age culture is either Theosophical or Utopian, sometimes in a very saccharin kind of way, sickly sweet if not toxic and phony; full of New Age “guilt”, parroting, parody, and put ons. Of course, it is good to root in tradition, but we can get caught in the web of living metaphors. But reality tunnels create tunnel vision, a subconscious filter of belief-congruent experience, confirmation bias. In the womb we recapitulate the phylogeny of species, and after birth our beliefs evolve following the historical arc. Yet, we never stop in our arc to live like a reptile, for example.

The human mind is a competitive memescape. Its 'normal' to have our desires shaped by the social grid and social codification (groupthink), but it makes us neurotic. The effect of pop culture is conformity; even our subcultures are homogenizing and recur in an infinity of fractal forms. Pop art is an oxymoron since it cannot fulfill the promise of art to deliver us from the conformity of market forces. The 'original' becomes a fiction; nothing is original since it is all derivative. But it may reflect the zeitgeist of the moment.

Everyone is a fundamental slave to the system because virtually no one can ever fulfill their desires. There is the saying those who forget or do not know the past are condemned to repeat it. But, in the post-postmodern world, what hasn’t been done? And done to death probably as good or better than it can be redone? Where is the unexplored territory?

BEYOND BELIEFS: Neurotheology has shown that spirituality is a natural phenomenon, hardwired into humans as a biosocial survival strategy that bonds groups with common beliefs and goals, personal and collective. This current runs so deep that for the majority of people, nothing is more important. It infuses all life passages with Presence and meaning in animism, shamanism, polytheism, and monotheism, even science-ism. We believe in belief even over uniformity of belief. But there is a deeper causal vector than beliefs, rituals, customs, commitments, and sacrifices: evolutionary value or fitness. It is the source of mythmaking, morality, sociality, and redemptive values.

Belief systems and paradigms provide rigid structures, the matrix of belief, we can use as our medium for self-expression. They allow us to investigate existence in conventional or unconventional ways. Research methods include setting aside received wisdom, burrowing deep inside your subject and learning to think like your material.

A meme is a self-propagating idea, a unit of cultural imitation that, much like a biological or computer virus, effectively programs its own retransmission. They spread through motivating their "host population," novel configurations of old ideas, and by proselytizers. Popular beliefs spread like contagions, cognitive viruses. Memes are informational viruses that influence our thinking, feelings, even our physical regulation.

Memes function like evolving cultural viruses taking on a fractal life of their own as the trances we live. They engineer our cultures and subcultures; what we will, won’t and can’t do, and believe. In short, self-replicating memes condition our lifestyles as “True Believers”. Each meme is an existential trance state. Memetic structures compel our attention; we propel and persuade one another toward them socially; sociocultural programming.

VIRTUAL REALITY CHECK: Korzybski pointed out that there are two ways to slice easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking. So, from time to time you have to give yourself a Virtual Reality Check. The hallmark of postmodern philosophy has been disbelief or skepticism of all "metanarratives," or translations of reality. Postmodernism has even turned its profound skepticism on such important humanist concepts as "objective truth" and reason.

Yet, for a deconstructionist postmodern society, individually we are still riddled with superstition and gullibility, and open to manipulation through our belief systems as any politician, philosopher, clergy, or salesperson will attest. Further, most people are painfully naive when it comes to even the simplest scientific understanding. Most of us don't have a clue about the fundamental nature of physical reality or our own psychological nature, and our ability to be fooled by our senses and mind, or methods of social and technological persuasion. We may think we know, but the penetration is deeper than we dare imagine.

Nature rejects the naivete that seeks absolute truth. We are beginning to realize, individually and culturally, that "realities" are all human constructions. The task becomes one of "catching ourselves in the act" of creating our own "reality" from the flow of events. Human truth is always an engagement of mind with experience. The challenge of the therapist in these times of chaotic change is to validate the concept that we don't have to fear the collapse of what we think we are.

We can embrace this disruptive chaos, trusting that it is an emergent self-organizing process. We don't need to fear the collapse of our personalistic belief system (the "box" we live in), nor our belief in absolute truth. A strong desire to engage in the "quest for uncertainty" complements our anxiety that perhaps there is no absolute, objective ground to reality. The warrant of Truth is ever elusive when we deconstruct the foundational justifications of our convenient notions about the way the world works.

It is easy to confuse what is actually the creation of beliefs with the "discovery of Truth," a common goal of science and theology. Science offers no ontological Scientific Picture of the World but substitutes a number of applied theories as meta-theory. It’s close, powerful and useful: it ‘works’ and allows use to do work. But the still mysterious “true” metatheory may reveal the basis of consciousness. But who knows when we will lift that veil?

Permeating the living reality of our culture are certain contagious notions, fads and trends that have the ability to influence the way we think about the nature of Reality and ourselves. Some of them are toxic and can consume you; others are just whims of pop culture infectious and benign as the common cold. Jung described the concept of psychic contagion by certain archetypal forces inherent in the human psyche, which manifest in our spiritual lives and belief systems. He spoke of both conscious and unconscious contamination. Notions like this range from simple superstitions to scientific concepts, to urban myths.

Notions sweep through our culture and insinuate themselves within its fabric, as fads, whether they are "real" or not, they can be influential. They mood alter us, make us feel we belong. An analysis of these notions is useful in distinguishing a common human phenomenon from any potential "alien influence" which may or may not be exerted on us from an unknown source.

BREAKING THE SPELL: Skeptic, Daniel Dennett takes a hard look at beliefs and attendant phenomena in his new book of this name, and asks: Where does our devotion to God come from and what purpose does it serve? Is religion a blind evolutionary compulsion or a rational choice? In a spirited investigation that ranges widely through history, philosophy, and psychology, Dennett explores how organized religion evolved from folk beliefs and why it is such a potent force today. He contends that the “belief in belief” has fogged any attempt to rationally consider the existence of God and the relationship between divinity and human need.

Ask yourself how adaptive it is to remain spiritually, mentally, or emotionally stuck in the past, for whatever reason. In my written archive you can catch me at virtually every phase, yet never stuck in one. Most forms of ‘worship’ are either archetypes or clichés, perhaps both. Personal revelatory experiences are no measure; they are often fraught with strong emotional content, but faulty thinking built on a grain of Truth. Often it is a compensatory mechanism to help us maintain specialness, a trick of the mind and self-image. If you recycle a retrievalist reality tunnel you are blinded to other options. It’s like being a scientific or artistic specialist; you know more and more about less and less.

What organic robotoid, parroting perennial philosophy is truly spiritual? Future-resistance stops the process of maturation, as well. What we procrastinate about can take on overwhelming dimensions. It is a way of not “letting go” of outmoded forms that stunt developmental potential. Be careful what models you let colonize your imagination. Are the terms you define yourself with irrelevant? Those whose cherished beliefs are challenged in the context of traumatic life events are likely to experience severe spiritual disequilibrium; manifesting chaos instead of self-organization.

Spiritual disequilibrium can be a blessing, heralding rebirth: emergence from the destructuring of emergency, breakthrough from breakdown. The future draws us forward like a handshake reaching back from somewhere between our fate and destiny, the strange attractor of our own futurity. It does not squeeze us into a recycled mold, and send us down a dusty rabbit hole of myopic vision. That is not focus, but self-deception, disinformation. You are probably not the “reincarnated alien-hybrid messiah of world peace and environmental restoration”. But you do make your own global contribution to the commonweal, especially through self-awareness, practice, service, and compassion.

The Cloud of Unknowing, a medieval mystic text, describes the human soul as embodied in one's memory, reason, will, imagination, and senses. Yet, all these faculties are falsifiable or easily subject to distortion. Unless USED artistically, rather than passively, media is an interruption of our internal narrative, our self-talk; a detour in content and focal point. Is your phone more important than your movie, or your loved one?

Interruption enables incoming messages by lending them shape and hijacking our attention, or they enter subliminally. Particularity is content and momentary truth. The goal is not to pick the right reality tunnel or be psychically tunneled by obsolete beliefs but to live freestyle on the tunnelless edge of dissolving boundaries, the anticipatory/participatory fusion of NOW.

BOUNDARY FREE CREATIVE EDGE: In part, this is the source of the generation gap. The imaginative and adaptive faculties play a big role in what century (archaic revival) we choose to live in, according to our adopted beliefs, which condition our perceptions. Popular options include eclectic adaptations of the world’s religions, neo-tribalism, psychics, and gurus; even science and art have their own historical POVs.

The so-called New Age of spiritual snake oil sales actually harbors the agenda of hijacking the Holy Grail of new paradigm thinking, as long your new vision resonates with a polyglot of poor research protocols, implausible assumptions and lack of critical thinking. Radical pointlessness is the least occupied position, having no POV the toughest to maintain. The poetic vision of Science-Art does not split the material base of Multiverse from the reflexive component of Spirit. It encourages mythopoesis but not literalization at the expense of common sense.

There is a paradoxical dissonance between old and new ways of being in the environment; things that should be preserved and those that are emerging. Things that stay the same are isomorphic constants; but metamorphosis, metaphoric change creates a sense of novelty and newness. The new excites us by emotional appeal, overwhelming our senses, shocking us, thrilling us, or otherwise modulating our systems in a way the old cannot. It reflects the future of our dreams.

Our own epistemological metaphors describe how we know what we know and what it is like. Harking back to the past for a point of reference helps us move from the known to the Unknown in our descriptions, but if we take our metaphors literally, our beliefs stay archaic. We continue to recapitulate the philosophical evolution of mankind, but not truly move forward into new territory. The same is seen in the iconography of “sofa” art, which recycles the same tired themes and styles in the same media, over and over.

ALL the creative juice of science and art is at the leading edge, the living edge. Chaos theory defines the “edge of chaos” as a special dynamical balance. Science has shown that order emerges from the critical paths of chaos. In psychology, it means sticking to the image as given in Imagination, rather than resorting to glib dream or symbol interpretations. Shamanic personalities work at the edge of chaos for healing. Talent expresses at the edge. Phase transitions occur here, state changes, quantum leaps of consciousness, complexity. Like Schrodinger’s Box, it separates the Living from the Dead.

COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS: Wyndham Lewis wrote that all "living art is the history of the future". The formula is we become what we behold. What our culture compels us to behold is the holographic ICONOSCOPE: all the new media that both virtually surround and contain, as well as permeate our lives, and comprise an intrinsic part of our environment. The mind-numbing rate of change in our society is so unprecedented it is called Future shock. It’s a technological tsunami.

Debord called it a Society of the Spectacle, emphasizing its visual nature. Everyone is a player. Spectacle as a commodity is embodied in so-called Reality TV. The War on Terror is a materialized ideology, fighting an Idea. It is unwinable since you can’t wage war on an idea. Ideology is the problem, not the solution to human survival technology. Coercive ideas foster looting of natural resources, coercive institutional power and imported orthodoxies. The same dynamic produces trends, fads and memes, which permeate thinking as well as lifestyle. All gnostic forms are based in an ideology and theology of truth and secrecy.

Baudrillard speaks of successive phases of the image: 1) It is the reflection of a basic reality. 2) It masks and perverts a basic reality. 3) It masks the absence of a basic reality.4) It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum. In the first case, the image is a good appearance: the representation is of the order of sacrament. In the second, it is an evil appearance: of the order of malefice. In the third, it plays at being an appearance: it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation.


YOU TURN ME I-ON-A: We literally have the electromagnetic capacity to broadcast our images if not ourselves to the stars. We broadcast our identities as a fusion of recombinant personae, cliches, and archetypes: infinite fractal use of finite iconography: technological self-amplification of our bodyminds. You turn me on; I turn you on in a fusion of knower and known. I call my broadcast "Radio Free Qabala". coming to you from station IONA, sponsored by the Temple of Living Light. Channels may vary in your locale, that is, by your capacity to tune in and comprehend my essential nature.

Hegel said, “Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself only insofar as it exists in and for another self-consciousness; that is, it exists only by being recognized and acknowledged.” Likewise, only relationships between objects are observable. Arguably, language was the first real technology, and all others mere extensions of our five senses. Metamagic, the original reality medium, is a hypercharged spiritual technology, driven by ritual and belief: active attention is synonymous with “worship”. We are a fractalization of collective history. We are carried forward by the anticipation of our own lives, their emergent qualities. Infinite mirroring and anticipation is beyond synchronicity; Xenochrony is the holomovement of Xenochronicity. Only the level of resolution changes, not the content.

LIFE IS A HOLOGRAPHIC PROJECTION:
The term 'gene' is used slightly differently in biochemistry and in abstract evolution theory. In biochemistry, it usually means a DNA sequence that codes for a polypeptide chain. In abstract evolution theory it means a replicator that encodes an adaptation in an organism. DNA sequences that code for polypeptide chains might not be the only 'genes' in this sense. 'Genes' in this sense need not be DNA at all, in principle. Also, certain DNA sequences could in principle constitute 'junk DNA' by the first definition but not by the second. Retrotransposons that are known to comprise about half of the genomes. Retroviral-like transposable element sequences, transposable elements once considered 'junk DNA' turn other genes on and off.

The team of physicist Peter Gariaev detected DNA Phantoms in their research and concluded that we are human biocomputers. The genome is a quasi-intelligent system, but the wave level of genetic coding programs and organizes our 3-D spatial/temporal organism. Gariaev describes DNA expression as a meaningful text that is read and projected by DNA in 3-D in a bioholographic process with sound and light, much like programs of DNA movies or videotape. The digital analogy is probably even closer to the process of development and maintenance.

These movies get corrupted over time and produce aging and mutations. Wave genetics offers new healing and life extension possibilities. Morphogenic information is holographically transmitted and programmed. DNA is not 98% junk, but the formative and transmissive text.

All the cells of our organism combine to form a unified informational space which functions as a DNA wave biocomputer regulating morphogenesis and metabolic information, activated by transduced coherent light and modulated sound. This is more fundamental than genetics or molecular biology. Disturbances in the field that presage disease can be treated.

Healing information can be transmitted in waveform by resonance, sound and light, correcting error patterns or missing information. Video morphogenic information is regenerative, patterning a healing matrix. The bio-computer reads or scans the data and adapts according to the DNA-movie of healthy form and function. A weak field produces a powerful result. We are mutually linked material and nonlocal energy-informational substances that dynamically exchange energy and information. Soon we’ll be able to “change the movie” physically with quantum bioholography as the medium. This is another aspect of the Acoustic Environment: structural cymatics.

TECHNOTOPIA: Evolving technology resonates like feedback in our phenomenology. Buckminster Fuller did not view technology as separate from nature and our nature, biological intelligence and technological evolution, including speech. Our separateness has created the pursuit of infinite individual "reality wormholes" which reconnect us with collective unconscious, collective identity through "voluntary ESP".

We no longer live as point-particles but in our waveforms, often spread simultaneously over several time zones. We can read the entire holographic time log of the Akashic Records at our local theater or on DVD. In Dobb’s vernacular, “past times have become our passtimes”, including interests in deep nature as the province of science and art, and obsolete gnostic and spiritual technologies.

According to Baudrillard, when the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.

KINETIC FIELD OF DREAMS: The Digital Revolution is here and it IS being televised in a myriad of fractal incarnations, but not on your Grandmother's screen. For artists, the 21st Century is a Digital Universe. In the perceptual-space we now occupy, the gender of presence is neither male nor female, but discarnate! It is the era of the metamorph. Even conventional artists can manipulate their images into a myriad of morphs. Because of insurance problems, fine art has moved toward the giclee print where originals are printed onto canvas and overpainted with a topcoat of paint. But why even bother with the smelly stuff? High end galleries are installing projectors. Popular art is being displayed as virtual paintings on plasma screens in private homes.

NEW MEDIA: Media guru Mark Stahlman defines this term he coined as the media, which replace the ‘cinesthesia’ of TELEVISION as the dominant environment in our lives and culture. Surround sound is already the medium that replaced television. Home theaters now dominate the consumer electronics business. They are simply big television sets with multi-channel sound added, replicating the experience of multi-channel sound in movie theaters. Acoustic space as surround sound replaced the "tactility" of television.

Media analyst/cultural theorist, Marshall McLuhan stressed that ALL media are ultimately a matter of sensory balances and sensory biases. He believed that artists need to integrate, analyze and utilize rapid changes in technology, in order to truly have a mass impact on people in the modern age. But the electronic environment isn't limited to artists but is available to virtually everyone. No one escapes its influence. Rapid evolution of communication devices enables and future-shocks us at the same time.

On the other hand, some new media are in the hands of individual artists, who have the capacity to produce desktop films, find innovative new means of distribution, or create art that helps us meet our future. It doesn't take a multimedia studio to create meaningful work. But cultural and political factors are still limiting factors in the global arena of spiritless totalitarianism.

The era of revolutionary democracies is over, replaced by corporate feudalism which holds our attention in a vice grip of technological self-absorption and self-interest that infiltrates the thinking of both left and right with media propaganda. The Fear-Media Machine fights democracy and liberty with fear and racism, creating a mass culture of disembodied cyborg mutants.

The alluring promise of full-immersion Virtual Reality is the ersatz embodiment of this disembodiment, naturalized technological alienation. Still, the so-called New Age is still focused on 19th and 20th century out-of-body experiences, apparently ignoring they are rarely in-habiting their physical bodies. By subverting new media, the artist introduces a new way of being: Homo Lumen, who recognizes our essential nature is nothing but light. It is the old shamanic function of art and artist in 21st century form, artists and scientists who make the electrons dance.

In Simulacra and Simulation, French social theorist Jean Baudrillard argues that our "postmodern" culture is a world of signs that have made a fundamental break from referring to "reality." Reality is simulation of the simulation of reality. The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth, which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

For Baudrillard all the media of information and communication neutralize meaning and involve the audience in a flat, one-dimensional media experience which he defines in terms of a passive absorption of images, or a resistance of meaning, rather than the active processing or production of meaning. The electronic media therefore on this account have nothing to do with myth, image, history, or the construction of meaning (or ideology).

Television is interpreted instead as a media "which suggests nothing, which magnetizes, which is only a screen, or is rather a miniaturized terminal which in fact is found immediately in your head -- you are the screen and the television is watching you. Television transistorizes all neurons and operates as a magnetic tape -- a tape not an image"” (from Baudrillard: A New McLuhan?)

Welcome to The Media Matrix, the 'machine war'. Are you the One; a Neo trying to figure it all out in a world where nothing makes sense but Ones and Zeros? New Media paradoxically sucks us into the vortex of disembodiment and is simultaneously the anodyne that assuages the resulting pain of alienation. We have fused our nervous systems with the information environment, fusing and morphing both art and nature. Biomedia, genetics and wave genetics are not human survival technologies, but just the opposite, by making us transhuman.


FIGURE-GROUND SHIFT: Shift happens. It is the ground that is the medium, for the most part, and the figure-ground relationship that creates the message. It is the capability of the underlying medium to appear in and through fundamental changes and to sustain fundamental change in this way which is the message (mission), the sending.
It might be said that the message of (genitive?) medium/media exceeds any figure-ground relationship by ex-posing the passing of some previous ground or grounds in the past and pointing to the analogous passing of the present one in the future.

Exceeding figure/ground indicates grounds (plural), indicates medium indicates message: "changes the medium, which is the message." The medium is the message because the medium, aka the plurality and dynamics of media, is what the message is always going on about. In Take Today, McLuhan states, “Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature.” - p.11

New Media are the various implementations and the profound implications of the shift by acoustic space from the ground of our lives under the conditions of the electric media environment (i.e. television). They are becoming the figures of expression in our increasingly post-electric world -- in particular, as reflected in three-channel stereo (3CS.) When you run your own multimedia content through your home theater, it becomes your own Church of Self-Amplification.

The post-electronic environment is the ground that is the true medium which creates the message, altering our perceptions of self, others and world. The ground of consciousness itself is necessarily double. It includes the nothing part of itself and the something part of itself; and can’t see itself. Conspiracy is the ground of the shifting paradigm. Bob Dobbs points out, “I would say, the reason why the profane think (increasingly) conspiratorially, is: we have disappeared. So, we are not manipulable anymore. Therefore, the whole social engineering through the media, controlling masses as puppets (conspicuous consumers) - it’s a rearview mirror image. We can now see it aesthetically; or as an artform. So WE like to think and project that we’re being manipulated. Thus, conspiracy is the crude popular slang version of watching (Orwellian) TV and seeing the arty ego-ads manipulate you - saying: hmmm, they’re manipulating me. And I know they’re manipulating me! And they know I’m knowing that. There you have a menippean irony going on! And so, an alphabetic distillation of this process is: "We’re being controlled and it’s a conspiracy."

BYTE ME: Media are unconscious extensions of our sensorium. In 2006, New Media are Broadband, Wireless, High Def, and creating portable environments: the cell phone, high rez digicam, digital video recorder, gaming, podcasting, V-cast. The cell phone has become both the mini computer and TV screen with on demand self-programming of content. Portable screens represent a crucial inflection in the arc of digital media development.

McLuhan's famous dictum, "The Medium is the Message" had a second part -- "The Audience is the Content." Entertainment content must become more and more compelling or we simply make our own. We all now have the capacity to capture virtually every nuance of our lives digitally. We don't have to "download" our psyches into the computer; they are already out there in the data streams as disembodied bytes in the aethyr, each with discrete wavelengths: our images, thoughts, and emotions.

LUMONICS: High Brow art dominated the artworld before Duchamp, followed by Low Brow postmodern rejection of all metanarratives. Arguably video guru Nam June Paik ushered in Know-Brow art based in electronic media. Only light can capture the nuance of energetic processes. Special FX pushes it imaginatively over the top. The multisensory electronic moving image is now an artist's medium. It can be employed to express representational and abstract imagery through recorded and virtual technologies.

The moving image is central to our visual culture, articulating new strategies and forms of image making. The kinetic image fuses electronic and digital media into a new form of expression. We can easily alter both materiality and composition of the electronic image; we can refashion its content, visual vocabulary, and plastic forms. Desk-top cinema has made individual productions a possibility that has jumped the Theatre of the Mind, to become sensuously embodied as a "body without organs", an Android Meme. In the vernacular of paramedia ecologist Bob Dobbs, the parts of the Android Meme are the Chemical Body, the Astral Body, the TV Body, and the Chip Body. But in an era in which everyone is a filmmaker, who is the audience?

PARAMEDIA ECOLOGY: Primal man made his environment by magic rituals that were re-enactments and dramatizations of the creative process by which the world comes into being. Even Renaissance art was trying to capture the values of the past technologically, but 21st Century art is a holographic time machine. Your beliefs determine what century you are inhabiting. Technology has the power to be environmental entirely independent of art as environmental.

Even Jung had no dynamic idea of the psychic role in creating technologies or in responding and reacting to them. Yet technologies, especially electronic tech, are extensions of the body, making us all Cyborgs. The psychic and social saturation resulting from electric extension of the nerves is much swifter than effects of mere extensions to our physical being, such as clothing, or the wheel, or mirrors. The environmental role of art can be spiritual or concretely physical. The actual effects of new technologies turns old environments into art forms that help define us as modern humans.

Dobbs defines the Android Meme 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". McLuhan’s chief characteristic of modern media is that they're living organisms. That means they can communicate. The Android Meme wants to join with us in an unholy alliance of archetypal technology and human organism. The Android Meme is 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. It is collective 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).

We actually download the archetype of the Android Meme into our nervous systems through television and multimedia. Bob says, “The Android Meme absorbs any response made to it. The artist's task is to understand and meditate upon the why's and wherefore's of its present techniques. This effort has nothing to do with how an artist survives economically.” So, don’t quit your dayjob.

"Media are really environments, with all the effects geographers & biologists associate with environments. We live inside our media. We are their content. TV images come to us so fast, in such profusion, they engulf us, tattoo us. We're immersed. It's like skin diving. We're surrounded & whatever surrounds, involves. TV doesn't wash over us and then go "out of mind." It goes into mind, deep into mind. The subconscious is a world in which we store everything, not something, and TV extends the subconscious....Such experiences are difficult to describe in words. Like dreams or sports, they evade verbal classification." (Edmund Carpenter; They Became What They Beheld 63)

According to anthropologist Carpenter, we are forced into new modes of communication and forced to create our own environments of declassified information when media render old patterns of perception obsolete. When we program our own psychic and sensory lives, we turn to artists who practice creating their own lives for reference. In many ways we are forced to improvise, taking what is at hand, and forming it into something that could be, into something new, but which is made from the parts of the old in a fractal reiteration.

ANTI-MYSTERY SCHOOL: SACRED AND PROFANE. We virtually 'worship' that which we give our attention; the more energy we give it the more we worship it. Our society is compulsive. Technology as the "demon of progress" is a spiritual rival, a rival to spiritual technologies, our "technical destiny". Naturally in the electric age this rivalry for the soul of man is far more intense than ever before: inner vs. outer quest. McLuhan’s thesis was revolutionary: each medium has a larger effect than its mere content, overloading, compensating and extending our physical senses, forcing individual minds and whole societies to adapt.

Today's 21st Century Media Mystery Schools retrain our perceptions even reviewing obsolete Reality Tunneling of the past: ritualized utility and understanding without boundaries or satcom interconnectedness. Technology competes for and effects human senses and perceptions. Art is inherently and seamlessly wed to media ecology. In some sense, the environment can be seen as merely a war between good and bad art. The question becomes not what do we believe and have faith in, but how can we live more artfully and heartfully, developing human survival technologies that feed our souls and spirits.

RECYCLING CONSCIOUSNESS: McLuhan taught that the environment is a programmed teaching machine. He was arguably the first feedback artist, hungry for people with new ideas, angles, insights, so he could use that material to generate more of his own. Feedback of feedback is bad feed, imitation and parody rather than the chaotic creative edge. Now, with weblife, cell phone/cameras, Blackberries and Sidekicks we all live in our nonlocal "chip bodies" and have become feedback artists, perhaps imagining we are generating our own content of infinite fractal reiterations in a vast parody of ourselves-the put on, the spectacle. Is there any CONTENT without an audience to receive it? Is there any reason to DO anything if it isn't a PhotoOp? At art shows now people are more interested in taking their own photo with the art, than in looking at it firsthand. The same is true for travel; everyone has a camera or digital video attached to his or her POV.

Between space and ground camera surveillance and GPS accountability no one is ever really ALONE; no first-person singular exists anymore. In Dobbs-speak, between voluntary ESP (net) and synthetic telepathy we no longer own our own thoughts and can't even know what they are or might have been without that perturbation. No wonder there is so much static on the Reality Channel of the Digital Universe. Also see http://www.fivebodied.com/project/

METAMAGICK; TECHNOSHAMANISM: Shamanic beliefs are based on the notions that 1) the matrix of reality can be manipulated with artistic endeavor and spiritual technologies, and 2) powerful artwork can be stimulated by a variety of consciousness altering experiences, or initiations. Technoshamanism is the process of altering consciousness through technology. It implies using the artistic, psychosexual, healing and mind altering techniques of ancient shamanism combined with modern technologies for altering consciousness, culture, and the holistic mindbody.

Technoshamanism is the interactive integration of futuristic technology with ancient pathways of the past. As an artform, it implies access to full-immersion experiences, virtual realities that have consequences in the real world. Magickal technologies evolve; belief systems are technologies. Magic means intentionally defining a state of reality through the transmission of information; the medium is the message. Ritual technology is manipulation of categories of information as data and instructions. Contemporary magic claims that the human mind can directly influence the state of reality, though old-fashioned magic attributed it to manipulation of spirits or occult forces.

This gnostic experience for the new millennium explores the final frontier: the untapped powers of the human mind: spiritual technology without the straightjacket of fixed belief. It means dancing through the doors of perception into the hyper-spatial realities of the unfettered collective imagination. The world of mage and shaman is the world of the spirits, psi powers, psychic phenomena, initiation, altered states, dreams, death, rebirth, and healing. It is the irrational realm of body, faith, trust, and belief. Shamanism reveals the uncanny world of superstition, disruption, dissolution, intuition, mysticism, transcendence, psychedelia, cosmic consciousness. It controls societies, revealing Dionysian and Apollonian spirit: sex and madness vs. conventionality, intellect, morality, and dogma.

Technoshamanism is also the world of what we can call extrasensory science. We can bridge the archaic and modern with cutting edge science and art, which dares to trespass into the forbidden realms. We can play the human sensorium with modulated electromagnetic energy. We can move shamanically through our blocks by heading directly into the fear and pain, which are the doorways to our transformation and head chaotically toward the creative Source. This is the shamanic journey. It is a restructuring process that dissolves old, outworn forms, and fosters spontaneously emergent new images and manifestations.

Technoshamanism is a voyage into the holographic matrix of experience, reflecting both our tribal heritage and global citizenship. In mythology Prometheus, staling fire from the gods, represents the archetypal technological man. Arguably, two defining characteristics of the modern age, icons of our times, are the omnipresence of the Promethean spirit and the pervasiveness of sexuality and its imagery, soft and hardcore pornography. But even more important and fundamental is the power of imagination, passion, and pathos. We can each tap the spirit of Prometheus and Promethea, grasping our share of the fire of the gods, taking a bite of the forbidden fruit.

To the extent that the shamanic personality (like any artist) has great power, he or she penetrates deeply into the basic roots of the structuralizing process, and brings that symbolic information back. In the realm of “metaphorms” our brain images reality and the universe in its own structural terms. This surreal vision attempts to portray the working of the subconscious mind. The future is being created in the imagination of the now. Herein lies the tremendous power of both art and invention. All the symbolic iconography of the ages is perpetually recycled and morphed at warp speed, and the vanguard senses that breakthrough is near. The morphology of this repertoire is embodied in Know Brow Art, neither high nor lowbrow, but cutting edge electronic media.

TRUTH VALUES: Categories of the "real" include not only the symbolic and imaginal, but also the hyperreal. Even our libidos have been hijacked and short-circuited by the therapeutic medium. Truth changes what we think and what we think is possible. All forms of psychotherapy are riddled with fads, buzzwords, and belief systems about how and when healing and transformation can and do occur, and what constitutes the valid content of the trusted process that leads to the healthy, authentic life, self-actualization. It may be an oxymoron.

Is the search for the “holy grail” of Truth the ultimate Quest, a journey rather than a goal, as so many philosophers imply? It has taken humanity through the physical rigors of horizontal exploration, and accompanied us on our trips down the rabbit hole of conceptual and spiritual exploration. But, as we know, there is ‘truth’ and ‘Truth’. Our beliefs compel us to engage in confirmatory searches, where we support, corroborate and verify to our own personal satisfaction.

It is the same drive that motivates both scientist and spiritual seeker to bite off an experiential piece of the Great Unknown. Is Truth primary or emergent? What is Truth? We may know nothing about truth but presume it knows everything about us. Our concept of truth is actually pretty flimsy. Metaphysical truth is by definition beyond observation, beyond the physically observable, yet perhaps available by deduction or inference.

The very first and foundational inner experience in Kabbalah (the art of being fully human) is the Vision of the Mechanics of the Universe, in order to foster a critical eye toward Reality and its underlying physical laws. How can you possibly comprehend yourself if you don’t know the fundamental laws of physics and psychobiology? A common existential “mistake” is viewing ourselves primarily as a solid meatbody, rather than as an electromagnetic wavefront in space that science suggests.

If you are wrong about the fundamental truth of your own existence, how distorted will your other notions be? Kabbalah is radically pragmatic, though not objective, empirical, or reductionist in its approach. It invites you to subjectively make the experiment yourself. We should take care that our protocols and resulting theories have a sound rational basis, taking the best from both ancient and modern worlds. The brain can register the same result for a simulated or real event; that is a double-edged sword that leads many to faulty conclusions. Can Truth be extracted from Cosmos; will the Truth ever come out? And if so, where is it hiding? All we know right now about the primary groundstate of human existence is that it is Pure Nothing (vacuum fluctuation; ZPE).

The physical and metaphysical roots of different kinds of Truth, relative and Absolute, include physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual dimensions; scientific and metaphysical truth. Truth relates to the Big Picture, adaptation and human survival. Even beautiful and convincing explanations can be wrong. Science often doesn’t know if it is ‘true’ and that is why ‘falsifiability’ is a keystone of the scientific process. We have various forms of truth but they are not reliable for understanding ourselves or Cosmos in the sense of a final and absolute Truth.

We try to obtain the most accurate explanation we can at the moment. Still, we cannot say there will never be an absolute Truth. Yet partial truths remain approximations. But this very lack of absoluteness keeps the future open. What most attracts our concern is often at the creative frontier of the mind.

Our understanding and definitions are refined as data are refined and our perceptions become more enlightened. It doesn’t change what is true, but it doesn’t mean we can never comprehend an Absolute Truth that is currently beyond our ability. We can’t really know. But expansion of our previous understanding doesn’t change the reality or truthfulness of existence. In black and white: what exists and true and what does not is false or a lie. Our perceptions can be wrong and sensible.

Reality can be strongly counterintuitive or contain hidden options at the point of observation. Truth fits happier with philosophy, but should not be confused with probability, as shown in the nature of paradox. Seemingly obvious truths are often not correct at all. We all harbor unwitting biases that distort the signals received by our senses and generated in our own psychophysical systems. Experiments in sensory deprivation have exposed the intense power of inner-generated imagery/feeling states. We can’t remove this distorting prejudice from our viewpoint so Truth remains elusive, if not completely partial and relative.

Dreamscape, by Randy Mack