HOLOGRAPHIC GODS
by Iona Miller, 2013
More HOLOGRAPHIC GODS: http://holographicarchetypes.weebly.com/pantheon.html
Archetypes are forms or images of a collective nature which occur practically all over the earth as constituents of myths and at the same time as autochthonous individual products of unconscious origin. Archetypes may be considered the fundamental elements of the unconscious mind. Hidden in the depths of the psyche they are systems of readiness for action and at the same time images and emotions. Indeed, they are its psychic aspect. --Carl Jung
"In them, as distinguished from the "empty" spaces, the energy charge of the unconscious collective psyche is concentrated, acting in a manner of speaking, AS THE CENTER OF A MAGNETIC FIELD. If the charge of one (or more) of these "nodal points" becomes so powerful that it "magnetically" (acting as a "nuclear cell") ATTRACTS EVERYTHING TO ITSELF and so confronts the ego with an alien entity, a "splinter psyche" that has become autonomous--then we have a complex." --Jung & Jacobi
"This entelechy principle can be expressed symbolically as a god or a guide. We feel its presence as the inspiration or motivation that helps us get life moving again after times of stress or stagnation. There are many ways to engage the symbolic forms of the entelechy principle..." --Jean Houston, The Hero & the Goddess, 1992
Keywords: Archetype, archetypal forms, Jung, dreams, culture, psychic patterns, pattern recognition, unconscious, subconscious, collective unconscious, gods and goddesses, godforms
Cosmic & Psychic Dynamics
The Cosmos has many faces. We are all taking part in a deep mythological, archetypal, and cosmic drama of death and rebirth at the individual and global level. From the dawn of time, mankind has instinctively taken on and embodied archetypal forms (meta-forms) and patterns of behavior, both unconsciously and with spiritual purpose. This invisible groundplan molds both individual and collective psychic behavior. Psychic patterns, shared across cultures in countless energetic forms are buried deep in our collective unconscious.
Ancestor worship is probably the oldest recognition of spiritual beings. Primitive conceptions of our state after death originated in this shamanic belief. Primordial belief in souls and spirits originates in energies and images that come from the unconscious. It is also the root of superstition. We must make a distinction between fantasy and imagination. Imagination happens to us; it is an autonomous force or energy, welling up from the depths as the water of life.
Dr. Stanley Krippner says, "Shamans were the first dreamworkers...if someone could imagine or dream an event, that action was considered to be, in some sense, real." Souls correspond to the autonomous complexes of the personal unconscious (subconscious). Spirits are those of the collective unconscious, the inner universe. There are definite enduring forms in the unconscious psyche.
What is the Psychè, the soul? Hillman says that the soul is not "a concept but a symbol "who resist - like all living symbols - to all definitions providing metaphors for basilar systems of human thought." He adds in his grounded "psicofania" : "The soul is the component that makes possible the MEANING and transforms events into EXPERIENCE".
This experience is the 'PSYCHE', image taking the form of changing reality that surrounds us and lives in us, maker of meaning and emotion (what "moves from") and taking us back to an intimacy and a liminality otherwise inexpressible. These inner and outer worlds remain for one more invisible, inaccessible and inexpressible if Soul does not make his appearance and guide us towards the EXPERIENCE of life. Soul is the archetype of life itself, says Jung ...
Archetypes bring spirit down to earth. Images lead into the realm of soul, which joins those of matter and spirit. They are the myriad forms of Nature's "to be". Highly symbolic forms, autonomous Gods and goddesses arose from our elemental depths, altered states of consciousness and participatory wisdom to inform collective culture. Some contend they emerge from cultures, not the unconscious. Campbell (1968, 1974) argued that most archetypal forms originated in Sumer and Akkad around 2500 B.C.
Culture consists of three layers: artifacts, values and beliefs, and underlying assumptions -- shared learning, experience, and problem-solving. Participation mystique links unconscious individual egos to larger and smaller groups. It provides the attractor that makes an individual want to be part of a given organization. It is the conduit for expressing collective sentiments by each person in the group.
Culture normalizes a shared set of values. Values become underlying assumptions. Archetypes are the template of individuals and organizations, providing their psychic energy. This foundation is why our current institutions exhibit illness. The organizational shadow includes what has been repressed because the organization does not allow it by its rules, procedures or values. The buildings are sick and the organizations, such as banking, government, and academia are sick. When such archetypes remain unconscious, they fall into our psychological blind spots, into our deep denial of certain realities.
Multiple archetypes are expressed in each individual. Archetypes create self-serving tacit assumptions that lead us to mistake certain beliefs for reality because each is only a relativistic viewpoint. They create immanent phenomenological experiences in existential reality, levels of cognitive awareness, and transcendental abstract speculations. Archetypal shift happens when we shift focus from one archetypal field to another. Each archetypal field (universal symbolic patterns) contains traces from similar previous encounters; this residue takes the form of thoughts, images, energy tones. (Find descriptions of 70 archetypes here:
http://www.myss.com/library/contracts/three_archs.asp )
Archetypes form the basis of life. The root words are archein, which means "original or old"; and typos, which means "pattern, model or type". The combined meaning is an "original pattern" of which all other similar persons, objects, or concepts are derived, copied, modeled, or emulated. They represent our human potential, contained or encoded in clusters of related symbols. Symbols are inevitably imperfect attempts to represent archetypes since they can only express a portion of it. Pure archetypes are essentially content-free. Universal forms cut across historical, geographical and cultural boundaries. They are autonomous and energized through synchronicity.
Archetypes are visual symbols or energetic imprints that exist in our psyches. The archetypal dimension of reality appears in the form of unfiltered psychic experience -- mythic figures and narratives from various cultures, gods and goddesses, transcendent Platonic Ideas, etc. Once filled out, they enter consciousness. All of us are the myth-makers and co-creators of the 21st century. Myth has become an important core feature of modern spirituality and self-understanding, and even within the best-practice of genealogy and gnosis.
These unconscious mental phenomena are at the root of our self-reflective consciousness and projected frameworks or worldviews. Archetypes take the form of personified mythological figures, as deities. The shift from spirits within natural forms to supernatural ("above nature") gods and deities signified a new religious paradigm, that of polytheism, or "many gods." The matrix of complex 'archetypal form' generates other forms (symbols and images) by selecting suitable parts.
Like the spirits of earlier religions, the existence of these gods explained many things. Their 'human' characteristics could be kind, ambitious, quarrelsome, jealous, angry, or wise. Some were evil, others were forces for good. They also took an active interest in human affairs, taking care of people in need, and administering a degree of cosmic law and order. Those who behaved badly were punished by the gods, either in their own lifetimes or in the afterlife–which by then had gathered its own rich mythology–while the repentant would be forgiven their misdeeds. (Russell) http://www.peterrussell.com/SG/Ch8.php
Explanations transform the world. These polytheistic patterns persisted in the psyche even with the adaptive shift in spiritual paradigms to monotheistic, atheistic pantheistic, and scientific worldviews. These paradigms are still colliding, redefining the relationship of the individual and society. But preoccupation with individualism cannot be sought at the expense of collective work. Collective work or work in the service of others makes a significant difference to the quality of life for all humanity. Soul is also in the world, as well as our inner realm.
Jung insisted that our individuation is not about becoming "divine" like the transpersonal Gods, but in distinguishing, relating, and freeing ourselves from them in a creative way that constitutes a self-initiatory path -- a life lived with a unique, particularized connection to source, meaning, depth, and soul. He encouraged becoming more fully human. Most of us have experienced the power present in a collective field – moments when a deep well of meaning suddenly opens, expanding awareness.
We yearn for self-awareness, self-knowledge, an objective opinion or appraisal and comprehension of nature and our nature because we need the empirical world as a reflection by which to "see" ourselves. These reflections take numerous typical forms projected from and onto the zero-point ground of being and nonbeing. As godforms, they are ideal; as our personal complexes, less so. As the archetypes pattern the individual psyche they are subject to particularized distortions of their pure form.
Such "holographic godforms" define our bio-psycho-social roles and ways of being, our aspirations and our deepest frustrations. Each godform typically has physical, emotional, mental and spiritual aspects around which personality 'crystallizes'. We call them 'holographic' because of their primordial, informational, and multidimensional nature. Jung ponders that life altering archetypal experiences may be the origin of consciousness. They make us wake up and pay attention to what they are doing.
Archetypes are the elements of the soul. They are exemplary forms or prototypes -- an informational code -- the original schema or dynamic patterns that model all things of the same kind. For Plato, they were the primordial forms of the universal mind. We recognize the world within us through their patterns. Being universal, archetypal forms can be found everywhere. They are the essence that sustains life.
We ourselves as living organic systems are very complex holographic entities so we can become resonantly entrained with specific archetypal attractors in the psychic field. Archetypal forms repeat nature's characteristic patterns from the largest to smallest scale. Dynamically, “archetypal” forms are underlying instinctual patterns of behavior which reflect how the unconscious “imagines” reality into being. Psyche, our "larger self", reveals itself in symbolic form through manifestations of the archetypes. They organize experience giving it collective meaning.
Each archetype has its structural parameters. They organize how we experience certain things. Their dreams are our realities. Within the myths a jumbled myriad of possibilities play through the personality seemingly at random. Yet each has its agenda and characteristic mode of appearance. The activation of a mytheme in a life is decoded by noticing its corresponding imagery and effects, in dreams and waking life. Archetypal energies awaken us to live a larger life where we are all healers, warriors, visionaries and teachers -- but many potentials remain latent or formless.
An individual's personal myth or mytheme can be conceived as an activated chaotic attractor, a magnetic vortex. In another phase of life, the focus and narrative could change to other patterns. Sometimes these transitions are fairly smooth, sometimes competitive, other times catastrophic, sweeping the old structure away in an uncontrollable fashion.
The hologram is an analogy for events in space-time, quantum states, or static entities of some nature. In their emergent manifestation archetypes are self-replicating patterns. We become quantum entangled and structurally bound to those meaningful patterns within. Transformation is a first-order change of interholographic conversion. Engulfment of our entire entity could be likened to spirit "possession" by an ultramagnetic archetypal attractor. We could also liken the splitting off of a complex to fractal bifurcation.
Before psychophysical embodiment in the experiential world, archetypes are like "empty sets". As a morphism, each archetype is a structure-preserving mapping of energetic information. Such "zero objects" or identity elements are the "pre-existent" blueprints (entities or components) for ways of being and becoming -- inborn forms of intuition. The Self is the common denominator of all symbolic sets.
Archetypal images designate patterns, typical basic forms, prefigurative determinants, and the tendency to repeat the same psychic experiences. They conceal the unborn eternal archetype (unconscious nucleus of meaning) while they reveal particularized meaning and form. Such ‘oculi piscium’ (fishes eyes)” are fiery soulsparks of the World-Soul, the light of nature, divine sparks of the spirit, according to Jung.
Specified but incorporeal forms, at the deepest level archetypes are the wave-like counterpart of our corporeality, figuratively and perhaps literally made of pure light and nonbeing. This animated matrix is the root of form, as the Heart Sutra says, form is not other than void. Jung suggested in his notion of the nondual 'pleroma' that nothingness is the same as fullness.
Memory is not confined to the brain or mind. Because our entire organism is our psycho-physical structural memory, biography becomes biology. This why Jung suggested, "the gods have become diseases." Repressed shadow conflicts and unlived potential easily become physical problems embedded in deep tissues, often with symbolic overtones. The body mirrors our psychic state.
The living matrix is the molecular system that is the actual biophysical locus of the so-called subconscious, unconscious and intuitive processes. Structure is genetic and acquired memory, including muscle memory of the fundamental polarized dynamic of approach/avoidance. Deep tissue massage eradicates negative muscle memory by reworking the myofascial and connective tissue. Many cultural practices or roles can be seen as de facto ritual abuse in the way they are collectively forced upon us repetitiously, whether they 'fit' or not. Serial abuse creates repressed rage and depression.
Psychodynamic process therapies work on the psychophysical organism in a way analogous to deep tissue massage, destructuring and freeing up libido or psychic energy. What gets 'processed' is the bound energy. When deeply buried memories and experiences are expressed energy begins to flow more freely. Ideokinesis is a general term applied to mental imagery that affects posture and movement.
The body, emotions and thought field are unblocked by changing the attitudes and emotional reactions to memories. It requires engaging and processing through the emotional or right brain, not just the rational left brain mind. Our conscious self remains unaware of what our body knows, even though it is conditioned by it.
New postures arise from many options. Most archetypal imagery addresses the whole body and not just a part. Archetypal imagery can expose the importance of areas that are small or distant from a location of complaint, often unexpectedly. We assess any changes we sense.
Complexes
Feelings that are not dealt with through emotional release become repressed, and what we repress controls us. Chemical responses become structural traits and functional problems. Cellular, genetic and epigenetic memory are arguably even more primordial levels of information encoding through deep time. When we behave out of character, we wonder what got into us. Some personalities are more complex than others. Complexes are deeply significant in our lives.
In psyche and soma, what makes us feel better is deemed "good" while what makes us feel worse is deemed "bad". The catch-22 is that what we think, feel and believe to be good or bad is preconditioned by archetypal interplay and this is one source of ambivalence, confusion, chaos and mood swings. When this process opposes or thwarts rather than nourishes us, we call it a complex. Complexes are organized experiences patterned by the psychic energy of archetypes as they take form.
We all have a team of voices within, that either work for or against us. Something incompatible, unassimilated, and conflicting exists that can be an obstacle or act as a stimulus to greater effort, opening new possibilities. The complexes themselves are essential, healthy components of the psyche -- the generic forms and dynamic structure of the psyche -- unless they have been twisted by fate. The personal unconscious is the realm of the complex and personalized expressions of archetypes.
Unresolved issues carry a high emotional charge. If an 'entity' expresses through mythical or universal transpersonal imagery, it originated in the collective unconscious. If it is contaminated with individual, personalistic material, if it appears as a personalized conflict, then it emerged from the personal unconscious. We are not unified, consistent personalities. The basis of the human psyche seems to be a collective of selves--a multimind in a multiverse. Independent and autonomous, they relate with one another mostly unknown to our outer awareness.
Personification is a convenient way of relating to inner states or over-protective false ego states. They are sources of internally-generated self talk and internal debate that further influences our thinking, feelings, and behavior. They are mere facets of the whole or core personality, rather than independent of it. It is "bad" if it renders the core personality fearful or helpless, even though the core personality can generally override it. The persona or social mask is a prime example of a dynamic meant to protect the core in public life.
Subpersonalities
What Jung called complexes are more commonly termed subpersonalities, split-off emotional groupings of felt-sense, perspectives, memories, and beliefs. The less integrated we are, the more they influence us. These 'subways of the subconscious' form at different ages, and range from the sexual persona to the sage. Archetypal characters follow an established plot pattern to accomplish predefined goals.
Adaptations turn into distinct subpersonalities. Because we compulsively, reactivly, or unknowingly slip into them, we can be one type of person, then sometimes another. Unintegrated in the adult personality, they can become problematical. Such partial personalities or energy patterns are fragments of archetypes, like exiled gods and goddesses.
Complexes can appear as split-off subpersonalities or personifications that help us cope with certain aspects of life, such as Rebel, Judge, Child, Victim, Trickster, Skeptic, Warrior, Patriot, Parent, Professional, Protector, Controller, Buddy, Boss, Little Professor, Saboteur, Martyr, Outcast, Scapegoat, Partner, Muse, Artist, Hetaira, Fortune-Teller, Gossip, Innocent, Orphan, Adventurer, or Seeker, Hero/Heroine, etc.
Subs can deal with major issues, such as Love, Knowledge, Compassion, Quest, Humor, Discipline, Healing, Immortality, and Enlightenment. They originate in the cultural unconscious, social roles, internal conflicts, fantasy images, repeated trauma or stress. They mature at uneven rates. New complexes can arise in the spiritual crisis of midlife.
When the complex is cleared of the emotional baggage of the personalistic expression, its true, pure, archetypal center shines through. The personal was superimposed over the transpersonal, but that can be changed by raising it into conscious awareness. Then the nucleus or archetypal core shows through.
When the conflict seems unresolvable for consciousness, when its desires are continually thwarted, we often find that it is the contents of the collective psyche that are intractable. If a complex remains only a greater or lesser strange attractor in the deep psyche, if it doesn't swell up with too much personal baggage, then it usually stays positive. It functions as the energy-giving cell from which all psychic life flows. But if it is overcharged it can turn negative, in the form of neurosis or psychosis.
Unlimited by number, each of us has about a dozen of these unconscious pattern sets which have independent conflicting agendas, needs, impulses, desires, principles, eccentricities, and aspirations. They can appear as different genders and even be different personality types, in terms of extroversion-introversion, and characteristic functions like thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition.
Challenges and events that affect one subpersonality can ripple through the others. But we can become deliberately aware of what areas of life tend to be ruled by a subpersonality patterns and consciously examining those contexts, rather than waiting until the subpersonality has already risen to control. They can be healthy or pathological, positive or negative.
Therapies that connect subpersonalities and increase self-awareness include NLP, Psychosynthesis, and Transactional Analysis. We can extend our consciousness through dialoguing with them. Dialogue is a form of imagery. Rather than enemies, they are alternative strategies that function beyond our conscious control. They only become harmful when they control us inflexibly because we over-identify with them. The therapeutic cycle includes acceptance, cooperation, alignment, integration, and synthesis.
Only a certain number of complexes, varying with the individual, can be made conscious. No one can ever fathom the entire contents of the psyche or self. To attempt to do so would be superheroic, an ego error. It is grandiose to consider. The remaining complexes continue to exist as "nodal points" as "nuclear elements," which belong to the eternal matrix of every human psyche. They remain potential and do not express.
The complex is a meaningful feeling-toned group of representations in the unconscious. It is a manifold of symbolism all compulsively relating to the same archetype that distorts our energetic field. When the charge of one (or more) "nodal points" becomes so powerful that it "magnetically" attracts everything to itself, it confronts the ego with an autonomous alien entity.
Unlike the contents of the personal unconscious which seem to "belong" to us, the contents of the collective unconscious seem alien (Not-I), as if they had invaded from outside. The reintegration of a personal complex has the effect of release and often of healing (mental and physical). But the invasion of a complex from the deep collective psyche is a disturbing, even threatening, phenomenon.
The most powerful and ubiquitous autonomous subpersonalities come from a source having nothing to do with our daily life. They have to do with the deepest irrational contents of the psyche--that which has never been conscious before. Jung termed them shadow, anima/animus, and self.
The Shadow
The figure of the Adversary or Antagonist emerged in the myths of many cultures in the earliest times. It signifies a polarized psyche, suspended between the opposites, rather than freely circulating within the whole field. One representation of archetypal shadow and collective evil is The Devil. In its positive aspect it is the things of value, including aptitudes and qualities, we have disowned -- our unlived potential for good and evil.
The shadow is not experienced directly by the ego because it is part of the unconscious, so it is projected instead onto others. It includes our defense mechanisms: acting out, autistic fantasy, denial, devaluation, displacement, dissociation, idealization, intellectualization, isolation, passive aggression, projection, rationalization, reaction formation, repression, somatization, splitting, suppression, and undoing.
Such emergence in the collective or individual psyche signifies the constellation and energetic challenge of a meta-conflict (Good vs. Evil), the outcome of which will remain in doubt until these energies are either subdued or integrated. The solution of the protagonist (ego)-antagonist duality lies in the Observer Self -- an unidentified source of transfinite information that reconciles the opposites.
Toxic chemical and hormonal responses can be triggered by events in the present that remind us of the past. Locked in by fear and pain, we revert to feelings of insecurity, low self esteem, lack of confidence, lack of abundance, lack of joy etc., stuck and replaying old traumas and insults, again and again. This disturbs self-organization and self-regulation at the psychogenic root.
The nervous system governs the range of emotional expression, quality of communication, mobilization, and the ability to regulate bodily and behavioral states. The autonomic nervous system animates affective experience, emotional expression, facial gestures, communication and contingent social behavior.
Jung contends, "Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is." We might say, the less it is embodied in conscious awareness the more likely it is to go "into" or disturb the body, structurally and symptomatically. It is everything we deny and disown in ourselves, and therefore project outwardly and "stuff" inwardly. In part it is our link to more primitive animal instincts, superseded in early childhood by the conscious mind.
Jung saw the imagination as a bridge, over which the Psyche ("God") can cross from unconsciousness into consciousness. In the mythopoetic approach, The Devil is both the Ur-Adversary, and a tremendous source of strength, a nearly inexhaustible source of energy. Battling him gives us strength. Submitting to him completely is ego-death. The Adversary can be represented by death and dark symbols.
Jung referred to distinct images of Dragons in a number of his works. He initially cites it as the arch-enemy of the Hero archetype, drawing mainly from the New Testament and Gnosticism. The mother Dragon threatens to overwhelm the birth of the God, thus the ego must defeat the Dragon before becoming the Hero/heroine. He later views the Tiamat-Marduk myth as the basis of the Mercurial Serpent image - the Dragon that both destroys and creates itself and represents the Prime Material (or Philosopher's Stone).
The hero/heroine and adversary archetype often resemble each other symbolizing their relationship as two parts of the same whole. Similarly, the treasure which is the goal of many legendary heroes is seen as life itself, the resolution of the struggle between conscious and unconscious; through introversion, the entering of the cave, the treasure is regained, the self reborn.
Joseph Campbell called archetypes the "masks of God", because of their diversity and multidmensionality. Others suggest Lucifer as a "mask" of the Adversary, a motivator and illuminating force of the mind and subconscious. As higher intelligence, understanding and vision, the higher self and reason, Lucifer is seen as the Angel/Lord of Light, Divine Light and Pure Energy He is an initiatory rather than a Biblical character. Like God, he is a Mystery. The Self appears as evil incarnate because the polarities of good and evil are intrinsic to human life. Even spirit can be an adversary to the soul.
Jung identifies the adversarial Dragon directly with the unconscious, the natural state of consciousness vanquished by the Hero. The mother Dragon and the Mercurial Serpent are closely linked as creators. In Jung's idea of the Dragon as an archetype it may be a representation of the life-giving mother, though this is not true for all civilizations. The spirit of evil is fear, the forbidden desire, the adversary who opposes not only each individual heroic deed, but life in its struggle for eternal duration as well.
We have to fall back on Jung's statement that an archetype is a collective cultural artifact for Chaos. The Babylonian Tiamat is a Sumerian archetype. The Egyptian archetype is a snake which destroys life and has to be defeated before life is reborn - in other words the Prime Material. The Chinese archetype is that of the life-giver, the lizard which emerges with the onset of the spring rains.
Jung never contemplated the Hebrew God and the adversary the Devil (Satan) as literal persons. The occult is about energy, not personality. The Devil represents for us what Jung has called the collective shadow. It is a truism that we disown and project our own negativity through the shadow. "The opposite principle" splits the ego at work seeking to privilege its own insecurity. A healthy ego is capable of living with anxiety, ambiguity and ambivalence, without trying to always solve them. The spirit of evil is fear, negation, the adversary who opposes life, bondage, dissolution and extinction in the unconscious.
The reality is that life is anxious, life is ambivalent, life is ambiguous -- not just good or bad, black or white. The more we try to solve or resolve that or split it off, the more we're going to fall into a fundamentalism of some kind—military, political, theological, economic, psychological. The greater the light, the greater the shadow.
What we need is a more nuanced approach to the field -- the myriad psychological forms of gods and goddesses in dynamic interaction, in contemporary terms.
Jung believed to be spiritually alive and balanced we must perceive ourselves as part of a cosmic purpose. Our symptoms and difficulties are trying to transform us. We can renew our personal consciousness by examining all of our assumptions about ourselves and our lives, to assist us in growing beyond our difficulties to uncover our hidden potentials. Archetypes, embody our adversaries and allies and allow us to take up a conscious relationship with them.
Archetypes are universal principles, or forces that affect, impel, structure, and permeate the human psyche and the world of human experience on many levels. We can think of them in mythic terms as gods and goddesses. Essentially, archetypes are living symbols we all share in common. They reside in our psyche as patterns of potential but they also manifest in the physical world and in the depth dimension of soul through the imaginal process -- our stream of consciousness.
There is always an imaginal subtext or mythic overlay to the objective physical experiences of our lives. We react to both realities. Mythological motifs and recurrent expressions reawaken certain psychic experiences, formulated in an appropriate way.
The remarkable thing is that 'the cure is in the poison'; that is, the healing is contained within the very process that plagues us through sickness, self-delusion, stuckness, fear, despair, pain -- and a poor self-image. Jung's individuation process, separating ourselves consciously from archetypal roles and collective imperatives, challenges us to become more fully engaged in life and a transformative way of life.
Analyst Bud Harris says, "Jung considered these things—that we usually dislike or despise about ourselves—as containers of a divine spark. At first they appear as blocks to our full development, such as the achievement of our goals or hopes and dreams, including those of having relationships built on love and trust. But, within these very blocks are the seeds, even the roadmaps and the energy, that when opened and tapped lead us to wholeness, which means the ability to live as fully as possible." He suggests we (1) Fully engage in life, (2) Reflect upon life, (3) Bear the burden of that conflict, and (4) Live the transformation.
Loss of soul is loss of self. If you are depressed, you have disconnected from the life giving place of energy, the bridge between the conscious and the unconscious. "Being that has soul is living being. Soul is the living thing in [us], which lives of itself and causes life" (Jung, CW 9/1, par. 56). Living spirituality grants us access to the numinous. Spirituality, allows our consciousness to be changed by the experience of the numinous. This is essential to confront and counteract the depression and confusion resulting from our existential condition.
We learn to listen more to the unconscious and its expressions, to discover and integrate our disowned parts and pursue an ultimate wholeness and balance. through continuous transformation. Difficult at times, it forces us to question our basic assumptions about who we are and what we value, again and again, even though our ego always prefers comfort and safety to transformation.
In mythology, defeating the dragon and winning the maiden is a metaphor for being heroic enough to leave the passive, dependent world of the illusory security of living unconsciously. We win our engagement with life through consciousness, mindfulness, and diffuse awareness -- unifying masculine and feminine energies within. When we experience ourselves, our being, as rooted in the unconscious and our instinctual lives, we are rooted in the feminine principle or the ground within ourselves. Becoming whole and renewing mystic vision is a spiritual necessity.
This is not self-improvement nor self-actualization, because it is not a heroic developmental process with a mundane social goal of security and prestige, but a way of life. It is about transformation and breaking through limitations -- conscious realization of our complex unique personality, including its strengths and weaknesses. Self-knowledge helps us recognize the importance the unconscious as a partner in informing our lives.
Facing the unpleasant reality that the pursuit of self-knowledge, we question every aspect of conventional wisdom, of our religion, or lack of religion, our notions of what love is, our approaches to problem solving, our ideas of peace and the value of struggle, of the value of suffering, and the meaning of unhappiness in our lives.
Jung suggested that the layer in our psyche he called collective unconscious provides the archetypal "geological" structure. Long forgotten memories strive to reveal itself in coded images and symbols, Jung called “archetypes.” Myths, fairy tales, legends, fantasies, and dreams give content to the events in our psyches. They underlie historical continuity and 'inhabit' a timeless, transcendent dimension. The collapse of time and space is characteristic of psychic experience. The energy created by the tension of opposites forms the raw material for a process.
The imaginal is a natural alternative level of reality, which is the spiritual aspect of our soul, but that doesn't mean we have to take psychic reality literally. We are part of a bigger reality that can change our perspective that has been within us since the beginning of time. We can learn the artless art of watching images in the psyche's mirror.and mindfulness of self. The imaginal is the voice of the transcendent. Imagination mediates between conscious and unconscious (outer and inner). It embodies the first images and the common matrix of myth and language.
Psyche "dresses up" the archetypes with our personal experience. Because they affect our attitudes, they impact what we believe, how we think and feel and our subsequent behavior. They are patterns of meaning and order that extends through every level. We know them largely by their EFFECTS. Images themselves are the embodiment of meaning. Metaphors of nature mirror our nature and processes of birth, death and renewal.
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.
'Hologram' may be more than a metaphor for the emergence and expression of manifestation. Metaphors provide a reference point without defining reality. Thus metaphors are instructive. They are a central Way of leaping the epistemological chasm between old and new knowledge, old and new ways of essential being. Metaphorical understanding is the norm.
Metaphors help us make this leap. A metaphor is the expression of an understanding of one concept in terms of another concept, where there is some similarity or correlation between the two; understanding one concept in terms of another. Perhaps universal history is the unfolding of several metaphors. Mental pictures and verbal processes meet in metaphor which promotes retrieval of images and verbal information that intersects with information aroused by the topic -- implying meaning.
Metaphors Be With You
Archetypes developed over millions of years to provide us with information about life's experiences. Myths are metaphorical representations of the content of the archetypes and can be used to provide us with information about life's experiences.
One value of myth and ritual is the unbidden psychological effect of having the archetypal forms pulled from the unconscious world into the conscious world. It enables us to gain insight into the sources of our fears, reactions, behaviors, and perceptions. Another value is as blueprint for handling specific situations that we experience in the cycle of our lifetimes.
Archetypes are root metaphors. Metaphor is not merely a superficial phenomenon of language, but shapes our judgments, and structures our language. Displaying many facets, metaphor pervades our everyday non-theoretical language.
A metaphor is a holistic schema, a unifying framework that links a conceptual representation to its sensory and experiential ground. It embodies the gestalt and ecological properties of thought. We can even imagine the physical as a metaphor for psychic transformation. Intense physical experiences go deep within our being and those memories are stored deep within the tissue and organs. Such experience is accessible as epistemological metaphors - how we know what we know, and what that experience is "like".
The network of underlying metaphors form a cognitive map, a web of concepts organized in terms which serve to ground the abstract. Archetypes embody this metaphorical quality. They help us enter a problematic situation in order to solve it, to explore it, and explore the world restructured by the metaphor. We can tap the source of creativity, healing and holistic restructuring through imagination and metaphor.
The possibilities for concepts and for thought are shaped in very special ways by both the body and the brain that evolved to control it. Each archetype can be literally or metaphorically illustrated by a consciousness state, particularly if we include dreamlife.
In fact, they are all present within each and every one of us when we turn our attention inward. It is as if archetypes 'happen to us'. We can observe what appears while we were just 'allowing it to happen'. But then don't just leave it there, engage it, grapple with and challenge it, confront it, enter into a dialogue with whatever you have come face to face with.
In Jung's biological model, archetypes exist embedded in the collective unconscious. The archetype is a primordial image whose content manifests only when it has become conscious and therefore informed by the material of conscious experience. The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a capacity or potential. The archetypal image makes the archetype appear in consciousness allowing us to form an active relationship with it.
Plato suggested we are each born with a unique daimon or guardian before we are born, and it has selected an image or a pattern that we will live on earth. The daimon is the soul companion that guides us, but at birth we forget. The daimon remembers, however, what belongs to us, and therefore, it is our daimon that is the carrier of our destiny. It is essentially identical with Jung's notion of the Self.
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho echoes Jung's theory in biological terms. She postulates that, "a pure coherent state for the entire system would be a many-mode quantum electrodynamical field with a collective phase over all modes. It may be attainable only under very exceptional circumstances, as during an aesthetic or religious experience when the ‘pure duration’ of the here and now becomes completely delocalized in the realm of no-time and no-space.”
Metaphorical analysis displaces the assumed meanings of metaphors, especially if we expect those metaphors to provide stable epistemological connections. Alternative readings of metaphors, like altered states of consciousness, illustrate how knowledge and truth are displaced once they are detached from habits, memes, positivism, intended meanings, or predetermined uses, allowing us to rethink the narratives of our lives. More important than the stability of any methodological labels or particular methods is the way in which a specific processing technique is used as well as how that changes our possible interpretations and outcomes, including our self-image.
When metaphors are synchronistic, emergent, spontaneous, self-organizing expressions of our dynamic stream of consciousness, they are an imaginal encoding of information that bridges the domains of conscious and unconscious worlds, material and transpersonal realms. Such metaphors can be deeply transformative--more than mere language, a technology for changing our behaviors, feelings, thoughts, and beliefs. Intentional contact and immersion in these metaphors can transform our spirit and soul.
How can we know or describe anything about the changes we have not yet experienced, change that by universal consensus takes us beyond the realm of everyday reality, for which our words and concepts have been fashioned? Metaphors contain a subtle communication by containing meaning in a delicate net of imagery. In psychotherapy and mysticism, both, it is characteristic of the Self to speak to the ego-personality in the language of myth and metaphor. It allows us to grasp some image of that which remains as-yet-unknown. The Self is an archetypal idea that coordinates and balances the relationship between the ego and psyche as a whole. One metaphor describes it this way.
Consider a symphony orchestra performance; the Self can be thought of as the conductor and the musicians coming together in an effort to extract the best music from the best talents; whereas the ego is the orchestra's manager who makes the humble but necessary decisions about bookings and tickets, hotels and transportation and meals. The manager is obviously not the music, and it would be catastrophic to confuse the manager's role with that of the conductor, but without the manager's services, the orchestra doesn't play. (Irene Gad, M.D., Ph.D)
Classical metaphors of transformation are embodied in the primordial wisdom traditions. Metaphors are strongly related to process-oriented psychotherapy and immersion in the stream of consciousness [itself a metaphor]. The process of individuation is largely coded in terms of metaphor and metaphorical transformations through the union of opposites. The notion and phenomenon of metaphor raises as many questions as it answers. Metaphors do not directly describe perceptual reality, but its language helps us imagine an "as if" reality -- the depth of the imaginal psyche.
The role of conscious and unconscious processes in metaphor production and interpretation is ubiquitous. The role of "seeing as" permeates the development of consciousness. It reflects interactions between archetypes, imagination, perception and cognition; how bodily and neural processes create and constrain imagination. Language, concept and world are the three realms of metaphor which is a mode of cognition.
In metaphorical reality, death and rebirth is a common occurrence. We die to our old form and waken to a new way of being. There are latent patterns and images that we recognize and give form to when they are activated, like seed potentials. New life comes from the darkness of our own unconscious creative process.
Archetypal Psychology
Jung modeled the Self as the harmonization of such opposites as masculine/feminine, good/bad, hero/adversary, etc. It also contains the patterns for experience of the cyclic nature of life's crises points. Its contents include the quest for meaning and the cycle of death and rebirth. Containing everything, it represents the maximal potential of any individual.
The Self provides an inner model of oneself in an idealized future. It confers experiences of the highest value through powers beyond one's conscious abilities. It is a mode of transcending the mundane world. Therefore, Self is both personal and transcendent. This gives divine worth to each individual manifestation of human nature, and dignity to everyone's' personal experience. The archetypes, symbolized collectively by the Self, shape and define human behavior, attitudes, thoughts, feelings, and the very body itself.
Archetypes are vessels that inspire and contain our awe and dictate our emotions. In deliberate rituals, we contact or identify with them, and they permeate the psyche modulating and balancing the system. We begin invocations by creating the holographic image of the godform. In the reverse passive process of possession, the process is largely unconscious and may go unnnoticed. If you identify with an archetype, you lose your humanity, your individuality. You get inflated by it. You get taken over by it. And you may remain blind to or in denial of the whole cycle.
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. Imagination is unbound. 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 even in dreams. 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. 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.
With archetypes comes 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, self-delusion, and trancendence. Compensation may calm or disturb consciousness.
There is no imperative for the ego to integrate these alternative perspectives, private and public myths. The unconscious can produce deep wisdom and utter nonsense. It is up to the ego to discriminate. The value of myths is purely heuristic, not pragmatic. Mythological consciousness has a persona, cultural and archetypal dimension that manifest in dreams, fantasies, delusion and visions.
The concept of a God, archetype or god-form is not necessarily an absolute but appears to be more than symbolic. We perceive and label their symbol clusters which we identify through pattern recognition. Such energy is ontological and epistemological -- it informs us 'how we know what we know'.
Epistemological metaphors -- how you know what you know and what it's like -- are a gateway to the subconscious, as are dreams and symptoms. They veil our conception of reality. By analogizing, rather than interpreting, we simply ask, "What is this image like?" Analogies carry us into many meanings, amplifying, not restricting the image.
Epistemology is the study of knowledge; how we know something. Epistemological metaphors are the symbolic language of our unconscious and underlie every thought and feeling we have. When you are sad or when you are happy how do you know that you are sad or happy? There is a metaphor that contains all the history and memories associated with that particular state. It might be a deep dark hole or a bright blue sky; it could be a heavy weight or a bright shining light; it could be a bottomless pit or a shining lake, but every ‘sad’ or every ‘happy’ will be individual idiosyncratic and unique.
We can use our holographic minds to facilitate realization of our 3-D visualizations. Attitudes also are related to our body chemistry, to stress hormones and lifestyle. Emotions control the immune system. The psychosomatic network can be easily accessed through hypnosis. There is a biological, emotional, mental and spiritual aspect to healing. Interrelating metaphors enable a cycle of transformation between epistemological modes.
Multidimensional perception of deep natural processes informs our unconscious being and behavior. In the holographic model of consciousness, the processing of mental forms occurs within the context of a part/whole relationship, where the identified part exists within the code of the whole. This paradigm can be applied to the energetic archetypal field.
"Each grain (brain) of a hologram (pantheon of gods) contains the whole image at very low resolution. As more grains (brains) are involved, the hologram (pantheon) gains more detail. As the hologram becomes more and more detailed, those details influence the behavior of the brains." (Burt Webb)
The interactive dynamics of holographic gods are recounted in myths. They are our motivating factors, operating like cyclic, bipolar and strange attractors within our psyches, shifting our energetic gears. Some forces are more user-friendly than others. There are wisdom keys that help us understand these discrete states of consciousness more fully. They are the substanceless blueprints of all form, hinting at deeper Mystery.
Reality is fluid, dynamic process that is multi-dimensional, multi-leveled, multivalent, and meaning-full. That reality is subtle, expressing an ontological relationship between the self and the universe. To be human is necessarily to participate in reality, whose perception is potentially active, conscious, intentional, and creative).
Functioning like "psychic DNA", archetypes are the strange attractors organizing the psyche. The psychoid level of archetypes is analogous to the heritable DNA biohologram, whereas their expressive nature can be likened to epigenetics. Epigenetics is typically defined as the study of heritable changes in gene expression that are not due to changes in DNA sequence. Every cell in the body has the same genetic information. What makes cells, tissues and organs different is that different sets of genes are turned on or expressed.
Environmental factors and our choices alter the way genes and archetypes are expressed and characterize our being. Jung claimed that "the gods have become diseases." The field of epigenetics is now revealing a molecular basis for how heritable information other than DNA sequence can influence gene function, morphology, and plasticity. These advances also add to our understanding of transcriptional regulation, nuclear organization, development and disease.
Archetypes characterize and particularize perennial wisdom, language, images and ideas (theories), and emotion-laden complexes. Sometimes, such complex expression looks like pathology or pathologizing but psyche is trying to tell its perennial story in particularized form. We exist in relation to ourselves, to others, to myths, to images, or to archetypes. Their expression is the essence of our being.
Typical archetypal correspondences come alive through direct conscious experience. The sight of even one aspect of the hologram is enough to grasp the unity of the macrocosm. Pure and abstract energetic forms, like holograms, contain within themselves all possible combinations and expressions. Aspects of nature are reflected in our own natures. But we don't recognize and fully act in accordance with our divine nature, so we are subject to the severe and often capricious rule of "divine forces", and the corresponding passions within ourselves. By its very nature, gnosis permeates and enlivens all things.
"...it can only be embodied, i.e., manifested, actualized, in time and space. Less a method of knowing than a fluid way of knowing, "feminine" gnosis is deeply rooted in the body and in Nature, which contains the body. "Feminine" gnosis is produced by Nature, supported by Nature. Like Nature, it is characterized by emergence, process, and infinite creativity.
Like esoteric gnosis, "Feminine" gnosis approaches Nature as a repository of signs, a book which must be read, interpreted; more than that, however, "feminine" gnosis approaches Nature not only as a repository of actual signs, but as a repository of potential signs, like a book which is still being written by us in participation with Nature. "Feminine" gnosis places great value on personal experience, i.e., the subjective. It is a way of knowing which entails opening, not closing. It is a way of knowing in which a subject opens onto an object, and thereby enters into relation with it, and experiences a change in being as a result. " (Karen Clair Voss, http://www.istanbul-yes-istanbul.co.uk/gnosis/istanbul.htm)
Holographic Gods
Over aeons, ritual observances produced reassuring order and security in a very uncertain world. If you had a problem, chances are some mything being had it first, and moreso. Christianity suppressed, reviled and demonized the ancient pagan gods but could only reallocate rather than eradicate their forces. Their primordial correlates remained. Because they are invisible and subjective doesn't make them any less potent.
The Age of Enlightenment dismissed their spirituality, and Freud's psychology reduced them conceptually to projections. But we err if we think of them as evil or nonexistent. Jung saw them in a more positive, if abstract, light, as unconscious symbols. But the gods are in no way limited to this and continue filling the space between primeval Divinity and mankind.
It is our comprehension of their deepest meaning that remains primitive, even though we know that they aren't agents of Satan. Debate about the reality and nature of spiritual entities continues. The old biases and contempt for anthropomorphic deities is still with us, even as those very forces inform and deform as continuously as ever. To what degree and how they are real has been codified in archetypal psychology, extending Jung's theory of the heroic monomyth and Self into a dynamic polytheistic field.
Archetypes as described by Jung , play out their eternal patterns with little regard for our puny human personalities, which are both their medium and their externalization in the mundane world. Collectively, they house or encode our diverse identities in their shifting dynamics. All these essential qualities exist as potentials within us. Which ones get expressed depends on circumstances and the environment.
Functioning like "psychic DNA", archetypes are the strange attractors organizing the psyche. The psychoid level of archetypes is analogous to the heritable DNA biohologram, whereas their expressive nature can be likened to epigenetics. Epigenetics is typically defined as the study of heritable changes in gene expression that are not due to changes in DNA sequence. Every cell in the body has the same genetic information. What makes cells, tissues and organs different is that different sets of genes are turned on or expressed.
Environmental factors and our choices alter the way genes and archetypes are expressed and characterize our being. Jung claimed that "the gods have become diseases." The field of epigenetics is now revealing a molecular basis for how heritable information other than DNA sequence can influence gene function, morphology, and plasticity. These advances also add to our understanding of transcriptional regulation, nuclear organization, development and disease.
Archetypes characterize and particularize perennial wisdom, language, images and ideas (theories), and emotion-laden complexes. Sometimes, such complex expression looks like pathology or pathologizing but psyche is trying to tell its perennial story in particularized form. We exist in relation to ourselves, to others, to myths, to images, or to archetypes. Their expression is the essence of our being. When our dominant archetypes change we go through transitions.
Archetypes are formative principles and structural elements, as well as typical preconscious modes of apprehension and action. Frey-Rohn characterized them as, "...not only the focal point of ancient pathways but also the center from which new creative endeavors emanated... "The archetypes, then being inherent in the life process, represented forces and tendencies which not only repeated experiences but also formed creative centers of numinous effect ".
Archetypal images designate typical basic forms, prefigurative determinants, and the tendency to repeat the same psychic experiences. They conceal the unborn eternal archetype while they reveal particularized meaning and form.
Holographic archetypes effectively echo their nested-structure and resonant patterns throughout the field as phenomenological, biophysical, literal and symbolic "reflectaphors". They are fractal expressions and reiterations of psychic life. Archetypal morphogenetic fields (or attractors) arise harmonically within nested domains.
The interweaving transient forms of the holographic archetype include the hologram, psychic structure, wave-genetics, and synchronicity. As cosmic forces and patterns, the archetypes are holographic, existing in their own dimensional spaces, unfolding as nature presents opportunities for expression. When we embody them, and can see through the process, they become manifest, living realities -- a meta-text to our own desires and lifestyles.
For millennia priests and shamans have taken on the sacred roles, embodying the purely spiritual for their communities, uniting the heavens and earth. They manifest their divine splendor and awesomeness in our microcosmic lives. Light, energy and life-force span the cosmos as holographic connectors with the whole. Holographic patterns in the mindbody manifest in the outer world, from essence to synergistic tangibility.
Holographic gods remain true to their own primordial patterns and domains of influence, effectively exerting their wills over our own and apparently usurping or overriding our rational agendas and plans for our own lives. Which of these patterns intrudes on our lives determines whether we are in resonance with the broader environment or at odds with it and ourselves. Try as we might, we cannot separate ourselves from this spiritual component that underlies our existence and all existence, as archetypes are in no way limited to the human sphere.
Holographic Gods produce their own forms of archetypal intoxication; they can possess, frustrate and even defeat our best intentions. But we are not the eternal slaves of these behavior paradigms. Jung's methods of individuation and other transpersonal therapies open the way to developing more conscious relationships with these cosmic patterns, leading to more individual freedom from archetypal role-boundedness and spiritual parochialism.
The story of gods in our lives and the universe is still being written. Extra-dimensional truths are encoded in the descriptions traditionally described as gods and goddesses. The ancient classical gods are well documented, but the Gods of the gaps are less well-known, occupying those parts of the Universe that are unexplored and unexplained, that science is just beginning to explore, such as the so-called god particle.
Holographic Gods challenge own own beliefs in God or not, putting them to the secular acid test. The catch-22 is that even all those notions are conditioned by the very archetypes we seek to illumine, whether or not we identify with them consciously. They are just as likely to produce misguided inner authority as perennial wisdom. Whether we like it or not they enter us, intrude on our personal dramas, by modulating the playing field in the game of life.
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, other 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 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.
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.
Jean Shinoda Bolin describes the unfolding process of individuation: "As you get older, your path becomes increasingly a realization that you have moved in an authentic way along the journey. There are the archetypes in both men and women: goddesses in every woman, gods in every man. . . Most men and women find that they’re a mix of different archetypal energies, much as we are all mixes of human talents."
In a holographic universe, even time and space can no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else. Time and three-dimensional space also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. Core mystical experiences of transformation usher us into this holographic domain of pure frequencies, altered states of consciousness, and revelations.
Altered states open the way to polyphasic depth, expressing 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, informed by the depth dimension of psyche or the imaginal.
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 phenomena inside the head is not the same as that penetration. A fantasy of enlightenment is not stabilized enlightenment. But it may be pro-active step in the right direction.
More HOLOGRAPHIC GODS: http://holographicarchetypes.weebly.com/pantheon.html
The Cosmos has many faces. We are all taking part in a deep mythological, archetypal, and cosmic drama of death and rebirth at the individual and global level. From the dawn of time, mankind has instinctively taken on and embodied archetypal forms (meta-forms) and patterns of behavior, both unconsciously and with spiritual purpose. This invisible groundplan molds both individual and collective psychic behavior. Psychic patterns, shared across cultures in countless energetic forms are buried deep in our collective unconscious.
Ancestor worship is probably the oldest recognition of spiritual beings. Primitive conceptions of our state after death originated in this shamanic belief. Primordial belief in souls and spirits originates in energies and images that come from the unconscious. It is also the root of superstition. We must make a distinction between fantasy and imagination. Imagination happens to us; it is an autonomous force or energy, welling up from the depths as the water of life.
Dr. Stanley Krippner says, "Shamans were the first dreamworkers...if someone could imagine or dream an event, that action was considered to be, in some sense, real." Souls correspond to the autonomous complexes of the personal unconscious (subconscious). Spirits are those of the collective unconscious, the inner universe. There are definite enduring forms in the unconscious psyche.
What is the Psychè, the soul? Hillman says that the soul is not "a concept but a symbol "who resist - like all living symbols - to all definitions providing metaphors for basilar systems of human thought." He adds in his grounded "psicofania" : "The soul is the component that makes possible the MEANING and transforms events into EXPERIENCE".
This experience is the 'PSYCHE', image taking the form of changing reality that surrounds us and lives in us, maker of meaning and emotion (what "moves from") and taking us back to an intimacy and a liminality otherwise inexpressible. These inner and outer worlds remain for one more invisible, inaccessible and inexpressible if Soul does not make his appearance and guide us towards the EXPERIENCE of life. Soul is the archetype of life itself, says Jung ...
Archetypes bring spirit down to earth. Images lead into the realm of soul, which joins those of matter and spirit. They are the myriad forms of Nature's "to be". Highly symbolic forms, autonomous Gods and goddesses arose from our elemental depths, altered states of consciousness and participatory wisdom to inform collective culture. Some contend they emerge from cultures, not the unconscious. Campbell (1968, 1974) argued that most archetypal forms originated in Sumer and Akkad around 2500 B.C.
Culture consists of three layers: artifacts, values and beliefs, and underlying assumptions -- shared learning, experience, and problem-solving. Participation mystique links unconscious individual egos to larger and smaller groups. It provides the attractor that makes an individual want to be part of a given organization. It is the conduit for expressing collective sentiments by each person in the group.
Culture normalizes a shared set of values. Values become underlying assumptions. Archetypes are the template of individuals and organizations, providing their psychic energy. This foundation is why our current institutions exhibit illness. The organizational shadow includes what has been repressed because the organization does not allow it by its rules, procedures or values. The buildings are sick and the organizations, such as banking, government, and academia are sick. When such archetypes remain unconscious, they fall into our psychological blind spots, into our deep denial of certain realities.
Multiple archetypes are expressed in each individual. Archetypes create self-serving tacit assumptions that lead us to mistake certain beliefs for reality because each is only a relativistic viewpoint. They create immanent phenomenological experiences in existential reality, levels of cognitive awareness, and transcendental abstract speculations. Archetypal shift happens when we shift focus from one archetypal field to another. Each archetypal field (universal symbolic patterns) contains traces from similar previous encounters; this residue takes the form of thoughts, images, energy tones. (Find descriptions of 70 archetypes here:
http://www.myss.com/library/contracts/three_archs.asp )
Archetypes form the basis of life. The root words are archein, which means "original or old"; and typos, which means "pattern, model or type". The combined meaning is an "original pattern" of which all other similar persons, objects, or concepts are derived, copied, modeled, or emulated. They represent our human potential, contained or encoded in clusters of related symbols. Symbols are inevitably imperfect attempts to represent archetypes since they can only express a portion of it. Pure archetypes are essentially content-free. Universal forms cut across historical, geographical and cultural boundaries. They are autonomous and energized through synchronicity.
Archetypes are visual symbols or energetic imprints that exist in our psyches. The archetypal dimension of reality appears in the form of unfiltered psychic experience -- mythic figures and narratives from various cultures, gods and goddesses, transcendent Platonic Ideas, etc. Once filled out, they enter consciousness. All of us are the myth-makers and co-creators of the 21st century. Myth has become an important core feature of modern spirituality and self-understanding, and even within the best-practice of genealogy and gnosis.
These unconscious mental phenomena are at the root of our self-reflective consciousness and projected frameworks or worldviews. Archetypes take the form of personified mythological figures, as deities. The shift from spirits within natural forms to supernatural ("above nature") gods and deities signified a new religious paradigm, that of polytheism, or "many gods." The matrix of complex 'archetypal form' generates other forms (symbols and images) by selecting suitable parts.
Like the spirits of earlier religions, the existence of these gods explained many things. Their 'human' characteristics could be kind, ambitious, quarrelsome, jealous, angry, or wise. Some were evil, others were forces for good. They also took an active interest in human affairs, taking care of people in need, and administering a degree of cosmic law and order. Those who behaved badly were punished by the gods, either in their own lifetimes or in the afterlife–which by then had gathered its own rich mythology–while the repentant would be forgiven their misdeeds. (Russell) http://www.peterrussell.com/SG/Ch8.php
Explanations transform the world. These polytheistic patterns persisted in the psyche even with the adaptive shift in spiritual paradigms to monotheistic, atheistic pantheistic, and scientific worldviews. These paradigms are still colliding, redefining the relationship of the individual and society. But preoccupation with individualism cannot be sought at the expense of collective work. Collective work or work in the service of others makes a significant difference to the quality of life for all humanity. Soul is also in the world, as well as our inner realm.
Jung insisted that our individuation is not about becoming "divine" like the transpersonal Gods, but in distinguishing, relating, and freeing ourselves from them in a creative way that constitutes a self-initiatory path -- a life lived with a unique, particularized connection to source, meaning, depth, and soul. He encouraged becoming more fully human. Most of us have experienced the power present in a collective field – moments when a deep well of meaning suddenly opens, expanding awareness.
We yearn for self-awareness, self-knowledge, an objective opinion or appraisal and comprehension of nature and our nature because we need the empirical world as a reflection by which to "see" ourselves. These reflections take numerous typical forms projected from and onto the zero-point ground of being and nonbeing. As godforms, they are ideal; as our personal complexes, less so. As the archetypes pattern the individual psyche they are subject to particularized distortions of their pure form.
Such "holographic godforms" define our bio-psycho-social roles and ways of being, our aspirations and our deepest frustrations. Each godform typically has physical, emotional, mental and spiritual aspects around which personality 'crystallizes'. We call them 'holographic' because of their primordial, informational, and multidimensional nature. Jung ponders that life altering archetypal experiences may be the origin of consciousness. They make us wake up and pay attention to what they are doing.
Archetypes are the elements of the soul. They are exemplary forms or prototypes -- an informational code -- the original schema or dynamic patterns that model all things of the same kind. For Plato, they were the primordial forms of the universal mind. We recognize the world within us through their patterns. Being universal, archetypal forms can be found everywhere. They are the essence that sustains life.
We ourselves as living organic systems are very complex holographic entities so we can become resonantly entrained with specific archetypal attractors in the psychic field. Archetypal forms repeat nature's characteristic patterns from the largest to smallest scale. Dynamically, “archetypal” forms are underlying instinctual patterns of behavior which reflect how the unconscious “imagines” reality into being. Psyche, our "larger self", reveals itself in symbolic form through manifestations of the archetypes. They organize experience giving it collective meaning.
Each archetype has its structural parameters. They organize how we experience certain things. Their dreams are our realities. Within the myths a jumbled myriad of possibilities play through the personality seemingly at random. Yet each has its agenda and characteristic mode of appearance. The activation of a mytheme in a life is decoded by noticing its corresponding imagery and effects, in dreams and waking life. Archetypal energies awaken us to live a larger life where we are all healers, warriors, visionaries and teachers -- but many potentials remain latent or formless.
An individual's personal myth or mytheme can be conceived as an activated chaotic attractor, a magnetic vortex. In another phase of life, the focus and narrative could change to other patterns. Sometimes these transitions are fairly smooth, sometimes competitive, other times catastrophic, sweeping the old structure away in an uncontrollable fashion.
The hologram is an analogy for events in space-time, quantum states, or static entities of some nature. In their emergent manifestation archetypes are self-replicating patterns. We become quantum entangled and structurally bound to those meaningful patterns within. Transformation is a first-order change of interholographic conversion. Engulfment of our entire entity could be likened to spirit "possession" by an ultramagnetic archetypal attractor. We could also liken the splitting off of a complex to fractal bifurcation.
Before psychophysical embodiment in the experiential world, archetypes are like "empty sets". As a morphism, each archetype is a structure-preserving mapping of energetic information. Such "zero objects" or identity elements are the "pre-existent" blueprints (entities or components) for ways of being and becoming -- inborn forms of intuition. The Self is the common denominator of all symbolic sets.
Archetypal images designate patterns, typical basic forms, prefigurative determinants, and the tendency to repeat the same psychic experiences. They conceal the unborn eternal archetype (unconscious nucleus of meaning) while they reveal particularized meaning and form. Such ‘oculi piscium’ (fishes eyes)” are fiery soulsparks of the World-Soul, the light of nature, divine sparks of the spirit, according to Jung.
Specified but incorporeal forms, at the deepest level archetypes are the wave-like counterpart of our corporeality, figuratively and perhaps literally made of pure light and nonbeing. This animated matrix is the root of form, as the Heart Sutra says, form is not other than void. Jung suggested in his notion of the nondual 'pleroma' that nothingness is the same as fullness.
Memory is not confined to the brain or mind. Because our entire organism is our psycho-physical structural memory, biography becomes biology. This why Jung suggested, "the gods have become diseases." Repressed shadow conflicts and unlived potential easily become physical problems embedded in deep tissues, often with symbolic overtones. The body mirrors our psychic state.
The living matrix is the molecular system that is the actual biophysical locus of the so-called subconscious, unconscious and intuitive processes. Structure is genetic and acquired memory, including muscle memory of the fundamental polarized dynamic of approach/avoidance. Deep tissue massage eradicates negative muscle memory by reworking the myofascial and connective tissue. Many cultural practices or roles can be seen as de facto ritual abuse in the way they are collectively forced upon us repetitiously, whether they 'fit' or not. Serial abuse creates repressed rage and depression.
Psychodynamic process therapies work on the psychophysical organism in a way analogous to deep tissue massage, destructuring and freeing up libido or psychic energy. What gets 'processed' is the bound energy. When deeply buried memories and experiences are expressed energy begins to flow more freely. Ideokinesis is a general term applied to mental imagery that affects posture and movement.
The body, emotions and thought field are unblocked by changing the attitudes and emotional reactions to memories. It requires engaging and processing through the emotional or right brain, not just the rational left brain mind. Our conscious self remains unaware of what our body knows, even though it is conditioned by it.
New postures arise from many options. Most archetypal imagery addresses the whole body and not just a part. Archetypal imagery can expose the importance of areas that are small or distant from a location of complaint, often unexpectedly. We assess any changes we sense.
Complexes
Feelings that are not dealt with through emotional release become repressed, and what we repress controls us. Chemical responses become structural traits and functional problems. Cellular, genetic and epigenetic memory are arguably even more primordial levels of information encoding through deep time. When we behave out of character, we wonder what got into us. Some personalities are more complex than others. Complexes are deeply significant in our lives.
In psyche and soma, what makes us feel better is deemed "good" while what makes us feel worse is deemed "bad". The catch-22 is that what we think, feel and believe to be good or bad is preconditioned by archetypal interplay and this is one source of ambivalence, confusion, chaos and mood swings. When this process opposes or thwarts rather than nourishes us, we call it a complex. Complexes are organized experiences patterned by the psychic energy of archetypes as they take form.
We all have a team of voices within, that either work for or against us. Something incompatible, unassimilated, and conflicting exists that can be an obstacle or act as a stimulus to greater effort, opening new possibilities. The complexes themselves are essential, healthy components of the psyche -- the generic forms and dynamic structure of the psyche -- unless they have been twisted by fate. The personal unconscious is the realm of the complex and personalized expressions of archetypes.
Unresolved issues carry a high emotional charge. If an 'entity' expresses through mythical or universal transpersonal imagery, it originated in the collective unconscious. If it is contaminated with individual, personalistic material, if it appears as a personalized conflict, then it emerged from the personal unconscious. We are not unified, consistent personalities. The basis of the human psyche seems to be a collective of selves--a multimind in a multiverse. Independent and autonomous, they relate with one another mostly unknown to our outer awareness.
Personification is a convenient way of relating to inner states or over-protective false ego states. They are sources of internally-generated self talk and internal debate that further influences our thinking, feelings, and behavior. They are mere facets of the whole or core personality, rather than independent of it. It is "bad" if it renders the core personality fearful or helpless, even though the core personality can generally override it. The persona or social mask is a prime example of a dynamic meant to protect the core in public life.
Subpersonalities
What Jung called complexes are more commonly termed subpersonalities, split-off emotional groupings of felt-sense, perspectives, memories, and beliefs. The less integrated we are, the more they influence us. These 'subways of the subconscious' form at different ages, and range from the sexual persona to the sage. Archetypal characters follow an established plot pattern to accomplish predefined goals.
Adaptations turn into distinct subpersonalities. Because we compulsively, reactivly, or unknowingly slip into them, we can be one type of person, then sometimes another. Unintegrated in the adult personality, they can become problematical. Such partial personalities or energy patterns are fragments of archetypes, like exiled gods and goddesses.
Complexes can appear as split-off subpersonalities or personifications that help us cope with certain aspects of life, such as Rebel, Judge, Child, Victim, Trickster, Skeptic, Warrior, Patriot, Parent, Professional, Protector, Controller, Buddy, Boss, Little Professor, Saboteur, Martyr, Outcast, Scapegoat, Partner, Muse, Artist, Hetaira, Fortune-Teller, Gossip, Innocent, Orphan, Adventurer, or Seeker, Hero/Heroine, etc.
Subs can deal with major issues, such as Love, Knowledge, Compassion, Quest, Humor, Discipline, Healing, Immortality, and Enlightenment. They originate in the cultural unconscious, social roles, internal conflicts, fantasy images, repeated trauma or stress. They mature at uneven rates. New complexes can arise in the spiritual crisis of midlife.
When the complex is cleared of the emotional baggage of the personalistic expression, its true, pure, archetypal center shines through. The personal was superimposed over the transpersonal, but that can be changed by raising it into conscious awareness. Then the nucleus or archetypal core shows through.
When the conflict seems unresolvable for consciousness, when its desires are continually thwarted, we often find that it is the contents of the collective psyche that are intractable. If a complex remains only a greater or lesser strange attractor in the deep psyche, if it doesn't swell up with too much personal baggage, then it usually stays positive. It functions as the energy-giving cell from which all psychic life flows. But if it is overcharged it can turn negative, in the form of neurosis or psychosis.
Unlimited by number, each of us has about a dozen of these unconscious pattern sets which have independent conflicting agendas, needs, impulses, desires, principles, eccentricities, and aspirations. They can appear as different genders and even be different personality types, in terms of extroversion-introversion, and characteristic functions like thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition.
Challenges and events that affect one subpersonality can ripple through the others. But we can become deliberately aware of what areas of life tend to be ruled by a subpersonality patterns and consciously examining those contexts, rather than waiting until the subpersonality has already risen to control. They can be healthy or pathological, positive or negative.
Therapies that connect subpersonalities and increase self-awareness include NLP, Psychosynthesis, and Transactional Analysis. We can extend our consciousness through dialoguing with them. Dialogue is a form of imagery. Rather than enemies, they are alternative strategies that function beyond our conscious control. They only become harmful when they control us inflexibly because we over-identify with them. The therapeutic cycle includes acceptance, cooperation, alignment, integration, and synthesis.
Only a certain number of complexes, varying with the individual, can be made conscious. No one can ever fathom the entire contents of the psyche or self. To attempt to do so would be superheroic, an ego error. It is grandiose to consider. The remaining complexes continue to exist as "nodal points" as "nuclear elements," which belong to the eternal matrix of every human psyche. They remain potential and do not express.
The complex is a meaningful feeling-toned group of representations in the unconscious. It is a manifold of symbolism all compulsively relating to the same archetype that distorts our energetic field. When the charge of one (or more) "nodal points" becomes so powerful that it "magnetically" attracts everything to itself, it confronts the ego with an autonomous alien entity.
Unlike the contents of the personal unconscious which seem to "belong" to us, the contents of the collective unconscious seem alien (Not-I), as if they had invaded from outside. The reintegration of a personal complex has the effect of release and often of healing (mental and physical). But the invasion of a complex from the deep collective psyche is a disturbing, even threatening, phenomenon.
The most powerful and ubiquitous autonomous subpersonalities come from a source having nothing to do with our daily life. They have to do with the deepest irrational contents of the psyche--that which has never been conscious before. Jung termed them shadow, anima/animus, and self.
The Shadow
The figure of the Adversary or Antagonist emerged in the myths of many cultures in the earliest times. It signifies a polarized psyche, suspended between the opposites, rather than freely circulating within the whole field. One representation of archetypal shadow and collective evil is The Devil. In its positive aspect it is the things of value, including aptitudes and qualities, we have disowned -- our unlived potential for good and evil.
The shadow is not experienced directly by the ego because it is part of the unconscious, so it is projected instead onto others. It includes our defense mechanisms: acting out, autistic fantasy, denial, devaluation, displacement, dissociation, idealization, intellectualization, isolation, passive aggression, projection, rationalization, reaction formation, repression, somatization, splitting, suppression, and undoing.
Such emergence in the collective or individual psyche signifies the constellation and energetic challenge of a meta-conflict (Good vs. Evil), the outcome of which will remain in doubt until these energies are either subdued or integrated. The solution of the protagonist (ego)-antagonist duality lies in the Observer Self -- an unidentified source of transfinite information that reconciles the opposites.
Toxic chemical and hormonal responses can be triggered by events in the present that remind us of the past. Locked in by fear and pain, we revert to feelings of insecurity, low self esteem, lack of confidence, lack of abundance, lack of joy etc., stuck and replaying old traumas and insults, again and again. This disturbs self-organization and self-regulation at the psychogenic root.
The nervous system governs the range of emotional expression, quality of communication, mobilization, and the ability to regulate bodily and behavioral states. The autonomic nervous system animates affective experience, emotional expression, facial gestures, communication and contingent social behavior.
Jung contends, "Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is." We might say, the less it is embodied in conscious awareness the more likely it is to go "into" or disturb the body, structurally and symptomatically. It is everything we deny and disown in ourselves, and therefore project outwardly and "stuff" inwardly. In part it is our link to more primitive animal instincts, superseded in early childhood by the conscious mind.
Jung saw the imagination as a bridge, over which the Psyche ("God") can cross from unconsciousness into consciousness. In the mythopoetic approach, The Devil is both the Ur-Adversary, and a tremendous source of strength, a nearly inexhaustible source of energy. Battling him gives us strength. Submitting to him completely is ego-death. The Adversary can be represented by death and dark symbols.
Jung referred to distinct images of Dragons in a number of his works. He initially cites it as the arch-enemy of the Hero archetype, drawing mainly from the New Testament and Gnosticism. The mother Dragon threatens to overwhelm the birth of the God, thus the ego must defeat the Dragon before becoming the Hero/heroine. He later views the Tiamat-Marduk myth as the basis of the Mercurial Serpent image - the Dragon that both destroys and creates itself and represents the Prime Material (or Philosopher's Stone).
The hero/heroine and adversary archetype often resemble each other symbolizing their relationship as two parts of the same whole. Similarly, the treasure which is the goal of many legendary heroes is seen as life itself, the resolution of the struggle between conscious and unconscious; through introversion, the entering of the cave, the treasure is regained, the self reborn.
Joseph Campbell called archetypes the "masks of God", because of their diversity and multidmensionality. Others suggest Lucifer as a "mask" of the Adversary, a motivator and illuminating force of the mind and subconscious. As higher intelligence, understanding and vision, the higher self and reason, Lucifer is seen as the Angel/Lord of Light, Divine Light and Pure Energy He is an initiatory rather than a Biblical character. Like God, he is a Mystery. The Self appears as evil incarnate because the polarities of good and evil are intrinsic to human life. Even spirit can be an adversary to the soul.
Jung identifies the adversarial Dragon directly with the unconscious, the natural state of consciousness vanquished by the Hero. The mother Dragon and the Mercurial Serpent are closely linked as creators. In Jung's idea of the Dragon as an archetype it may be a representation of the life-giving mother, though this is not true for all civilizations. The spirit of evil is fear, the forbidden desire, the adversary who opposes not only each individual heroic deed, but life in its struggle for eternal duration as well.
We have to fall back on Jung's statement that an archetype is a collective cultural artifact for Chaos. The Babylonian Tiamat is a Sumerian archetype. The Egyptian archetype is a snake which destroys life and has to be defeated before life is reborn - in other words the Prime Material. The Chinese archetype is that of the life-giver, the lizard which emerges with the onset of the spring rains.
Jung never contemplated the Hebrew God and the adversary the Devil (Satan) as literal persons. The occult is about energy, not personality. The Devil represents for us what Jung has called the collective shadow. It is a truism that we disown and project our own negativity through the shadow. "The opposite principle" splits the ego at work seeking to privilege its own insecurity. A healthy ego is capable of living with anxiety, ambiguity and ambivalence, without trying to always solve them. The spirit of evil is fear, negation, the adversary who opposes life, bondage, dissolution and extinction in the unconscious.
The reality is that life is anxious, life is ambivalent, life is ambiguous -- not just good or bad, black or white. The more we try to solve or resolve that or split it off, the more we're going to fall into a fundamentalism of some kind—military, political, theological, economic, psychological. The greater the light, the greater the shadow.
What we need is a more nuanced approach to the field -- the myriad psychological forms of gods and goddesses in dynamic interaction, in contemporary terms.
Jung believed to be spiritually alive and balanced we must perceive ourselves as part of a cosmic purpose. Our symptoms and difficulties are trying to transform us. We can renew our personal consciousness by examining all of our assumptions about ourselves and our lives, to assist us in growing beyond our difficulties to uncover our hidden potentials. Archetypes, embody our adversaries and allies and allow us to take up a conscious relationship with them.
Archetypes are universal principles, or forces that affect, impel, structure, and permeate the human psyche and the world of human experience on many levels. We can think of them in mythic terms as gods and goddesses. Essentially, archetypes are living symbols we all share in common. They reside in our psyche as patterns of potential but they also manifest in the physical world and in the depth dimension of soul through the imaginal process -- our stream of consciousness.
There is always an imaginal subtext or mythic overlay to the objective physical experiences of our lives. We react to both realities. Mythological motifs and recurrent expressions reawaken certain psychic experiences, formulated in an appropriate way.
The remarkable thing is that 'the cure is in the poison'; that is, the healing is contained within the very process that plagues us through sickness, self-delusion, stuckness, fear, despair, pain -- and a poor self-image. Jung's individuation process, separating ourselves consciously from archetypal roles and collective imperatives, challenges us to become more fully engaged in life and a transformative way of life.
Analyst Bud Harris says, "Jung considered these things—that we usually dislike or despise about ourselves—as containers of a divine spark. At first they appear as blocks to our full development, such as the achievement of our goals or hopes and dreams, including those of having relationships built on love and trust. But, within these very blocks are the seeds, even the roadmaps and the energy, that when opened and tapped lead us to wholeness, which means the ability to live as fully as possible." He suggests we (1) Fully engage in life, (2) Reflect upon life, (3) Bear the burden of that conflict, and (4) Live the transformation.
Loss of soul is loss of self. If you are depressed, you have disconnected from the life giving place of energy, the bridge between the conscious and the unconscious. "Being that has soul is living being. Soul is the living thing in [us], which lives of itself and causes life" (Jung, CW 9/1, par. 56). Living spirituality grants us access to the numinous. Spirituality, allows our consciousness to be changed by the experience of the numinous. This is essential to confront and counteract the depression and confusion resulting from our existential condition.
We learn to listen more to the unconscious and its expressions, to discover and integrate our disowned parts and pursue an ultimate wholeness and balance. through continuous transformation. Difficult at times, it forces us to question our basic assumptions about who we are and what we value, again and again, even though our ego always prefers comfort and safety to transformation.
In mythology, defeating the dragon and winning the maiden is a metaphor for being heroic enough to leave the passive, dependent world of the illusory security of living unconsciously. We win our engagement with life through consciousness, mindfulness, and diffuse awareness -- unifying masculine and feminine energies within. When we experience ourselves, our being, as rooted in the unconscious and our instinctual lives, we are rooted in the feminine principle or the ground within ourselves. Becoming whole and renewing mystic vision is a spiritual necessity.
This is not self-improvement nor self-actualization, because it is not a heroic developmental process with a mundane social goal of security and prestige, but a way of life. It is about transformation and breaking through limitations -- conscious realization of our complex unique personality, including its strengths and weaknesses. Self-knowledge helps us recognize the importance the unconscious as a partner in informing our lives.
Facing the unpleasant reality that the pursuit of self-knowledge, we question every aspect of conventional wisdom, of our religion, or lack of religion, our notions of what love is, our approaches to problem solving, our ideas of peace and the value of struggle, of the value of suffering, and the meaning of unhappiness in our lives.
Jung suggested that the layer in our psyche he called collective unconscious provides the archetypal "geological" structure. Long forgotten memories strive to reveal itself in coded images and symbols, Jung called “archetypes.” Myths, fairy tales, legends, fantasies, and dreams give content to the events in our psyches. They underlie historical continuity and 'inhabit' a timeless, transcendent dimension. The collapse of time and space is characteristic of psychic experience. The energy created by the tension of opposites forms the raw material for a process.
The imaginal is a natural alternative level of reality, which is the spiritual aspect of our soul, but that doesn't mean we have to take psychic reality literally. We are part of a bigger reality that can change our perspective that has been within us since the beginning of time. We can learn the artless art of watching images in the psyche's mirror.and mindfulness of self. The imaginal is the voice of the transcendent. Imagination mediates between conscious and unconscious (outer and inner). It embodies the first images and the common matrix of myth and language.
Psyche "dresses up" the archetypes with our personal experience. Because they affect our attitudes, they impact what we believe, how we think and feel and our subsequent behavior. They are patterns of meaning and order that extends through every level. We know them largely by their EFFECTS. Images themselves are the embodiment of meaning. Metaphors of nature mirror our nature and processes of birth, death and renewal.
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.
'Hologram' may be more than a metaphor for the emergence and expression of manifestation. Metaphors provide a reference point without defining reality. Thus metaphors are instructive. They are a central Way of leaping the epistemological chasm between old and new knowledge, old and new ways of essential being. Metaphorical understanding is the norm.
Metaphors help us make this leap. A metaphor is the expression of an understanding of one concept in terms of another concept, where there is some similarity or correlation between the two; understanding one concept in terms of another. Perhaps universal history is the unfolding of several metaphors. Mental pictures and verbal processes meet in metaphor which promotes retrieval of images and verbal information that intersects with information aroused by the topic -- implying meaning.
Metaphors Be With You
Archetypes developed over millions of years to provide us with information about life's experiences. Myths are metaphorical representations of the content of the archetypes and can be used to provide us with information about life's experiences.
One value of myth and ritual is the unbidden psychological effect of having the archetypal forms pulled from the unconscious world into the conscious world. It enables us to gain insight into the sources of our fears, reactions, behaviors, and perceptions. Another value is as blueprint for handling specific situations that we experience in the cycle of our lifetimes.
Archetypes are root metaphors. Metaphor is not merely a superficial phenomenon of language, but shapes our judgments, and structures our language. Displaying many facets, metaphor pervades our everyday non-theoretical language.
A metaphor is a holistic schema, a unifying framework that links a conceptual representation to its sensory and experiential ground. It embodies the gestalt and ecological properties of thought. We can even imagine the physical as a metaphor for psychic transformation. Intense physical experiences go deep within our being and those memories are stored deep within the tissue and organs. Such experience is accessible as epistemological metaphors - how we know what we know, and what that experience is "like".
The network of underlying metaphors form a cognitive map, a web of concepts organized in terms which serve to ground the abstract. Archetypes embody this metaphorical quality. They help us enter a problematic situation in order to solve it, to explore it, and explore the world restructured by the metaphor. We can tap the source of creativity, healing and holistic restructuring through imagination and metaphor.
The possibilities for concepts and for thought are shaped in very special ways by both the body and the brain that evolved to control it. Each archetype can be literally or metaphorically illustrated by a consciousness state, particularly if we include dreamlife.
In fact, they are all present within each and every one of us when we turn our attention inward. It is as if archetypes 'happen to us'. We can observe what appears while we were just 'allowing it to happen'. But then don't just leave it there, engage it, grapple with and challenge it, confront it, enter into a dialogue with whatever you have come face to face with.
In Jung's biological model, archetypes exist embedded in the collective unconscious. The archetype is a primordial image whose content manifests only when it has become conscious and therefore informed by the material of conscious experience. The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a capacity or potential. The archetypal image makes the archetype appear in consciousness allowing us to form an active relationship with it.
Plato suggested we are each born with a unique daimon or guardian before we are born, and it has selected an image or a pattern that we will live on earth. The daimon is the soul companion that guides us, but at birth we forget. The daimon remembers, however, what belongs to us, and therefore, it is our daimon that is the carrier of our destiny. It is essentially identical with Jung's notion of the Self.
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho echoes Jung's theory in biological terms. She postulates that, "a pure coherent state for the entire system would be a many-mode quantum electrodynamical field with a collective phase over all modes. It may be attainable only under very exceptional circumstances, as during an aesthetic or religious experience when the ‘pure duration’ of the here and now becomes completely delocalized in the realm of no-time and no-space.”
Metaphorical analysis displaces the assumed meanings of metaphors, especially if we expect those metaphors to provide stable epistemological connections. Alternative readings of metaphors, like altered states of consciousness, illustrate how knowledge and truth are displaced once they are detached from habits, memes, positivism, intended meanings, or predetermined uses, allowing us to rethink the narratives of our lives. More important than the stability of any methodological labels or particular methods is the way in which a specific processing technique is used as well as how that changes our possible interpretations and outcomes, including our self-image.
When metaphors are synchronistic, emergent, spontaneous, self-organizing expressions of our dynamic stream of consciousness, they are an imaginal encoding of information that bridges the domains of conscious and unconscious worlds, material and transpersonal realms. Such metaphors can be deeply transformative--more than mere language, a technology for changing our behaviors, feelings, thoughts, and beliefs. Intentional contact and immersion in these metaphors can transform our spirit and soul.
How can we know or describe anything about the changes we have not yet experienced, change that by universal consensus takes us beyond the realm of everyday reality, for which our words and concepts have been fashioned? Metaphors contain a subtle communication by containing meaning in a delicate net of imagery. In psychotherapy and mysticism, both, it is characteristic of the Self to speak to the ego-personality in the language of myth and metaphor. It allows us to grasp some image of that which remains as-yet-unknown. The Self is an archetypal idea that coordinates and balances the relationship between the ego and psyche as a whole. One metaphor describes it this way.
Consider a symphony orchestra performance; the Self can be thought of as the conductor and the musicians coming together in an effort to extract the best music from the best talents; whereas the ego is the orchestra's manager who makes the humble but necessary decisions about bookings and tickets, hotels and transportation and meals. The manager is obviously not the music, and it would be catastrophic to confuse the manager's role with that of the conductor, but without the manager's services, the orchestra doesn't play. (Irene Gad, M.D., Ph.D)
Classical metaphors of transformation are embodied in the primordial wisdom traditions. Metaphors are strongly related to process-oriented psychotherapy and immersion in the stream of consciousness [itself a metaphor]. The process of individuation is largely coded in terms of metaphor and metaphorical transformations through the union of opposites. The notion and phenomenon of metaphor raises as many questions as it answers. Metaphors do not directly describe perceptual reality, but its language helps us imagine an "as if" reality -- the depth of the imaginal psyche.
The role of conscious and unconscious processes in metaphor production and interpretation is ubiquitous. The role of "seeing as" permeates the development of consciousness. It reflects interactions between archetypes, imagination, perception and cognition; how bodily and neural processes create and constrain imagination. Language, concept and world are the three realms of metaphor which is a mode of cognition.
In metaphorical reality, death and rebirth is a common occurrence. We die to our old form and waken to a new way of being. There are latent patterns and images that we recognize and give form to when they are activated, like seed potentials. New life comes from the darkness of our own unconscious creative process.
Archetypal Psychology
Jung modeled the Self as the harmonization of such opposites as masculine/feminine, good/bad, hero/adversary, etc. It also contains the patterns for experience of the cyclic nature of life's crises points. Its contents include the quest for meaning and the cycle of death and rebirth. Containing everything, it represents the maximal potential of any individual.
The Self provides an inner model of oneself in an idealized future. It confers experiences of the highest value through powers beyond one's conscious abilities. It is a mode of transcending the mundane world. Therefore, Self is both personal and transcendent. This gives divine worth to each individual manifestation of human nature, and dignity to everyone's' personal experience. The archetypes, symbolized collectively by the Self, shape and define human behavior, attitudes, thoughts, feelings, and the very body itself.
Archetypes are vessels that inspire and contain our awe and dictate our emotions. In deliberate rituals, we contact or identify with them, and they permeate the psyche modulating and balancing the system. We begin invocations by creating the holographic image of the godform. In the reverse passive process of possession, the process is largely unconscious and may go unnnoticed. If you identify with an archetype, you lose your humanity, your individuality. You get inflated by it. You get taken over by it. And you may remain blind to or in denial of the whole cycle.
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. Imagination is unbound. 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 even in dreams. 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. 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.
With archetypes comes 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, self-delusion, and trancendence. Compensation may calm or disturb consciousness.
There is no imperative for the ego to integrate these alternative perspectives, private and public myths. The unconscious can produce deep wisdom and utter nonsense. It is up to the ego to discriminate. The value of myths is purely heuristic, not pragmatic. Mythological consciousness has a persona, cultural and archetypal dimension that manifest in dreams, fantasies, delusion and visions.
The concept of a God, archetype or god-form is not necessarily an absolute but appears to be more than symbolic. We perceive and label their symbol clusters which we identify through pattern recognition. Such energy is ontological and epistemological -- it informs us 'how we know what we know'.
Epistemological metaphors -- how you know what you know and what it's like -- are a gateway to the subconscious, as are dreams and symptoms. They veil our conception of reality. By analogizing, rather than interpreting, we simply ask, "What is this image like?" Analogies carry us into many meanings, amplifying, not restricting the image.
Epistemology is the study of knowledge; how we know something. Epistemological metaphors are the symbolic language of our unconscious and underlie every thought and feeling we have. When you are sad or when you are happy how do you know that you are sad or happy? There is a metaphor that contains all the history and memories associated with that particular state. It might be a deep dark hole or a bright blue sky; it could be a heavy weight or a bright shining light; it could be a bottomless pit or a shining lake, but every ‘sad’ or every ‘happy’ will be individual idiosyncratic and unique.
We can use our holographic minds to facilitate realization of our 3-D visualizations. Attitudes also are related to our body chemistry, to stress hormones and lifestyle. Emotions control the immune system. The psychosomatic network can be easily accessed through hypnosis. There is a biological, emotional, mental and spiritual aspect to healing. Interrelating metaphors enable a cycle of transformation between epistemological modes.
Multidimensional perception of deep natural processes informs our unconscious being and behavior. In the holographic model of consciousness, the processing of mental forms occurs within the context of a part/whole relationship, where the identified part exists within the code of the whole. This paradigm can be applied to the energetic archetypal field.
"Each grain (brain) of a hologram (pantheon of gods) contains the whole image at very low resolution. As more grains (brains) are involved, the hologram (pantheon) gains more detail. As the hologram becomes more and more detailed, those details influence the behavior of the brains." (Burt Webb)
The interactive dynamics of holographic gods are recounted in myths. They are our motivating factors, operating like cyclic, bipolar and strange attractors within our psyches, shifting our energetic gears. Some forces are more user-friendly than others. There are wisdom keys that help us understand these discrete states of consciousness more fully. They are the substanceless blueprints of all form, hinting at deeper Mystery.
Reality is fluid, dynamic process that is multi-dimensional, multi-leveled, multivalent, and meaning-full. That reality is subtle, expressing an ontological relationship between the self and the universe. To be human is necessarily to participate in reality, whose perception is potentially active, conscious, intentional, and creative).
Functioning like "psychic DNA", archetypes are the strange attractors organizing the psyche. The psychoid level of archetypes is analogous to the heritable DNA biohologram, whereas their expressive nature can be likened to epigenetics. Epigenetics is typically defined as the study of heritable changes in gene expression that are not due to changes in DNA sequence. Every cell in the body has the same genetic information. What makes cells, tissues and organs different is that different sets of genes are turned on or expressed.
Environmental factors and our choices alter the way genes and archetypes are expressed and characterize our being. Jung claimed that "the gods have become diseases." The field of epigenetics is now revealing a molecular basis for how heritable information other than DNA sequence can influence gene function, morphology, and plasticity. These advances also add to our understanding of transcriptional regulation, nuclear organization, development and disease.
Archetypes characterize and particularize perennial wisdom, language, images and ideas (theories), and emotion-laden complexes. Sometimes, such complex expression looks like pathology or pathologizing but psyche is trying to tell its perennial story in particularized form. We exist in relation to ourselves, to others, to myths, to images, or to archetypes. Their expression is the essence of our being.
Typical archetypal correspondences come alive through direct conscious experience. The sight of even one aspect of the hologram is enough to grasp the unity of the macrocosm. Pure and abstract energetic forms, like holograms, contain within themselves all possible combinations and expressions. Aspects of nature are reflected in our own natures. But we don't recognize and fully act in accordance with our divine nature, so we are subject to the severe and often capricious rule of "divine forces", and the corresponding passions within ourselves. By its very nature, gnosis permeates and enlivens all things.
"...it can only be embodied, i.e., manifested, actualized, in time and space. Less a method of knowing than a fluid way of knowing, "feminine" gnosis is deeply rooted in the body and in Nature, which contains the body. "Feminine" gnosis is produced by Nature, supported by Nature. Like Nature, it is characterized by emergence, process, and infinite creativity.
Like esoteric gnosis, "Feminine" gnosis approaches Nature as a repository of signs, a book which must be read, interpreted; more than that, however, "feminine" gnosis approaches Nature not only as a repository of actual signs, but as a repository of potential signs, like a book which is still being written by us in participation with Nature. "Feminine" gnosis places great value on personal experience, i.e., the subjective. It is a way of knowing which entails opening, not closing. It is a way of knowing in which a subject opens onto an object, and thereby enters into relation with it, and experiences a change in being as a result. " (Karen Clair Voss, http://www.istanbul-yes-istanbul.co.uk/gnosis/istanbul.htm)
Holographic Gods
Over aeons, ritual observances produced reassuring order and security in a very uncertain world. If you had a problem, chances are some mything being had it first, and moreso. Christianity suppressed, reviled and demonized the ancient pagan gods but could only reallocate rather than eradicate their forces. Their primordial correlates remained. Because they are invisible and subjective doesn't make them any less potent.
The Age of Enlightenment dismissed their spirituality, and Freud's psychology reduced them conceptually to projections. But we err if we think of them as evil or nonexistent. Jung saw them in a more positive, if abstract, light, as unconscious symbols. But the gods are in no way limited to this and continue filling the space between primeval Divinity and mankind.
It is our comprehension of their deepest meaning that remains primitive, even though we know that they aren't agents of Satan. Debate about the reality and nature of spiritual entities continues. The old biases and contempt for anthropomorphic deities is still with us, even as those very forces inform and deform as continuously as ever. To what degree and how they are real has been codified in archetypal psychology, extending Jung's theory of the heroic monomyth and Self into a dynamic polytheistic field.
Archetypes as described by Jung , play out their eternal patterns with little regard for our puny human personalities, which are both their medium and their externalization in the mundane world. Collectively, they house or encode our diverse identities in their shifting dynamics. All these essential qualities exist as potentials within us. Which ones get expressed depends on circumstances and the environment.
Functioning like "psychic DNA", archetypes are the strange attractors organizing the psyche. The psychoid level of archetypes is analogous to the heritable DNA biohologram, whereas their expressive nature can be likened to epigenetics. Epigenetics is typically defined as the study of heritable changes in gene expression that are not due to changes in DNA sequence. Every cell in the body has the same genetic information. What makes cells, tissues and organs different is that different sets of genes are turned on or expressed.
Environmental factors and our choices alter the way genes and archetypes are expressed and characterize our being. Jung claimed that "the gods have become diseases." The field of epigenetics is now revealing a molecular basis for how heritable information other than DNA sequence can influence gene function, morphology, and plasticity. These advances also add to our understanding of transcriptional regulation, nuclear organization, development and disease.
Archetypes characterize and particularize perennial wisdom, language, images and ideas (theories), and emotion-laden complexes. Sometimes, such complex expression looks like pathology or pathologizing but psyche is trying to tell its perennial story in particularized form. We exist in relation to ourselves, to others, to myths, to images, or to archetypes. Their expression is the essence of our being. When our dominant archetypes change we go through transitions.
Archetypes are formative principles and structural elements, as well as typical preconscious modes of apprehension and action. Frey-Rohn characterized them as, "...not only the focal point of ancient pathways but also the center from which new creative endeavors emanated... "The archetypes, then being inherent in the life process, represented forces and tendencies which not only repeated experiences but also formed creative centers of numinous effect ".
Archetypal images designate typical basic forms, prefigurative determinants, and the tendency to repeat the same psychic experiences. They conceal the unborn eternal archetype while they reveal particularized meaning and form.
Holographic archetypes effectively echo their nested-structure and resonant patterns throughout the field as phenomenological, biophysical, literal and symbolic "reflectaphors". They are fractal expressions and reiterations of psychic life. Archetypal morphogenetic fields (or attractors) arise harmonically within nested domains.
The interweaving transient forms of the holographic archetype include the hologram, psychic structure, wave-genetics, and synchronicity. As cosmic forces and patterns, the archetypes are holographic, existing in their own dimensional spaces, unfolding as nature presents opportunities for expression. When we embody them, and can see through the process, they become manifest, living realities -- a meta-text to our own desires and lifestyles.
For millennia priests and shamans have taken on the sacred roles, embodying the purely spiritual for their communities, uniting the heavens and earth. They manifest their divine splendor and awesomeness in our microcosmic lives. Light, energy and life-force span the cosmos as holographic connectors with the whole. Holographic patterns in the mindbody manifest in the outer world, from essence to synergistic tangibility.
Holographic gods remain true to their own primordial patterns and domains of influence, effectively exerting their wills over our own and apparently usurping or overriding our rational agendas and plans for our own lives. Which of these patterns intrudes on our lives determines whether we are in resonance with the broader environment or at odds with it and ourselves. Try as we might, we cannot separate ourselves from this spiritual component that underlies our existence and all existence, as archetypes are in no way limited to the human sphere.
Holographic Gods produce their own forms of archetypal intoxication; they can possess, frustrate and even defeat our best intentions. But we are not the eternal slaves of these behavior paradigms. Jung's methods of individuation and other transpersonal therapies open the way to developing more conscious relationships with these cosmic patterns, leading to more individual freedom from archetypal role-boundedness and spiritual parochialism.
The story of gods in our lives and the universe is still being written. Extra-dimensional truths are encoded in the descriptions traditionally described as gods and goddesses. The ancient classical gods are well documented, but the Gods of the gaps are less well-known, occupying those parts of the Universe that are unexplored and unexplained, that science is just beginning to explore, such as the so-called god particle.
Holographic Gods challenge own own beliefs in God or not, putting them to the secular acid test. The catch-22 is that even all those notions are conditioned by the very archetypes we seek to illumine, whether or not we identify with them consciously. They are just as likely to produce misguided inner authority as perennial wisdom. Whether we like it or not they enter us, intrude on our personal dramas, by modulating the playing field in the game of life.
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, other 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 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.
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.
Jean Shinoda Bolin describes the unfolding process of individuation: "As you get older, your path becomes increasingly a realization that you have moved in an authentic way along the journey. There are the archetypes in both men and women: goddesses in every woman, gods in every man. . . Most men and women find that they’re a mix of different archetypal energies, much as we are all mixes of human talents."
In a holographic universe, even time and space can no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else. Time and three-dimensional space also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. Core mystical experiences of transformation usher us into this holographic domain of pure frequencies, altered states of consciousness, and revelations.
Altered states open the way to polyphasic depth, expressing 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, informed by the depth dimension of psyche or the imaginal.
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 phenomena inside the head is not the same as that penetration. A fantasy of enlightenment is not stabilized enlightenment. But it may be pro-active step in the right direction.
More HOLOGRAPHIC GODS: http://holographicarchetypes.weebly.com/pantheon.html
