THEURGY 2 - Theurgy

From 'the Ground' Up

Primordial consciousness is the internal aspect of the fundamental quantum field of potentiality. Many contemplatives throughout the world report that introspective inquiry can lead to knowledge, not only of the ultimate ground of being, but of the fundamental laws of nature as well. (Wallace)

Physicist Archibald Wheeler suggested the 'imagination' of primordial consciousness (an empty energy field of potentiality with luminous clarity, self-awareness) "brings all of creation into being." Emptiness understands and illumines itself. Self-understanding is self-clarity, is self-awareness. By observing itself, psyche somehow transforms the properties of both bodies and unconscious contents -- the development of the soul as an individual self.

The most basic state of consciousness is essentially an absolute vacuum of consciousness, analogous to the absolute vacuum of physics. Vacuum fluctuations cannot explain why spacetime arises and mystics call primordial awareness 'self-arising.

Continuous direct experience of the ground level of awareness is an experience of enlightenment, timeless awareness. Limited awareness dissolves into its universal source. Jung said,"I simply believe that some part of the human Self or Soul is not subject to the laws of space and time."

Uncertainty is reflected in the ultimate foundations of the quantum and its implications. We cannot know it anymore than we can know the ineffable, the unconscious, or the self. The medieval metaphor for God or the God-image was 'the Cloud of Unknowing.'

THE SHADOW OF GOD: "The higher sense, however, is the path, the way, and the bridge to what is to come: this is the God who is yet to come, not the God who is to come, but His image, which appears in the higher sense. it is an image, and those who worship it must adore it in the image of the higher sense. The higher sense is neither a sense nor a contradiction, it is image and strength in one, magnificence and strength together. The upper sense is the beginning and the end. It is a bridge of passage and fulfillment. The other gods died because they were in time, but the superior sense never dies, turns into meaning and then into contradiction, and from the flames and the blood of the clash between the two rises the higher sense, again rejuvenated. The image of God has a shadow. The upper sense is real and casts a shadow. In fact what is real and physical that does not have a shadow? The shadow is nonsense. It is impotent and has no consistency in itself. But nonsense is the inseparable and immortal brother of the higher sense. Like plants, even men grow, some in the light, others in the shade. There are many who need shade and not light. The image of God casts a shadow, which is as big as he is. The upper sense is big and small, it is as large as the space of the firmament and tiny as the cell of a living body. " --Jung, The Red Book

Specific forms of consciousness emerge from a latent mode of consciousness when the appropriate conditions are met. That underlying consciousness is “the ground of becoming,” the nature of beginningless, naturally pure, radiant awareness.

The ‘individual self’ is merged with the ‘universal consciousness’, the liberated state -- static, undifferentiated and universal. This superconscious state is a superposition of the awake, dream, and deep dream states (gamma, alpha, and theta brainwaves). There is no object-subject polarity (duality) in this universal state and it is unitary or singular.

Our awareness of the physical universe moves into the quantum level and subquantal substrate as awareness of conscious mind moves into the unconscious. We discover soul as a transcendent element linking conscious and unconscious, both physical and psychic that creates radical shifts in consciousness. It elevates understanding from the concrete to the symbolic image and beyond into the transcendent and invisible worlds. (Jane Weldonour, Platonic Jung, 2017)

All of Nature and our own nature arises from the omnipresent centerpoint of Zero-Point Energy or vacuum fluctuation, beyond energy/matter. There is an infinite realm of pure potential beyond the threshold of the Mystic Veil of manifestation. It is the primal Source of all light and life, love and wisdom, passion and creativity, healing and well being.

The strength of our connection to Source determines our relative psychophysical health, our freedom to be and express our essential nature, and to manifest our own potential. The "software" of human personality is a construct of interlocking concepts. "Reality" is what our brains make of the sensory input fed through biological transduction.

Massless virtual particles are constantly being created and destroyed everywhere, including our bodies. They arise from and sink back into the void. Our whole body flickers in and out of existence at the quantum level in trillionths of a second. Quantum mechanical zero point oscillations are real; an incessant dance of subatomic particles flicker into and out of physical existence. Each of our quantum re-creations is an opportunity to transform utterly. Given the equivalence of mass and energy, the vacuum energy must be able to create particles.

The essence of consciousness is described as a return to our origins, undifferentiated primordial consciousness. Primordial awareness is pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic nothingness, openness, emptiness or voidness -- the Absolute spaciousness of the ground of being. This "change of mind" implies making a decision to turn around toward the Light, to face a new direction -- a spiritually transformative change of heart.

Miller, Iona, Holographic Archetypes https://holographicarchetypes.weebly.com/

Neoplatonic Philosopher-Practitioners

Like Buddhism, Neoplatonism, a magical philosophy of nature and our nature, is a transformative theory and practice for uniting divided consciousness with its unified non-dual source, self-arising luminosity, the unconscious.

Both Plato and Jung described a natural world of opposites that have to be distinguished to reunite. We cannot understand Soul or our own cavernous inner recesses, with rationality or language. Soul is innately numinous, perplexing, paradoxical, but above all, experiential.

We can discover the soul for ourselves through imaginal experience of the existential and initiatory dimension, finite and infinite being, by building and living in our spiritual body. William Blake said, "Imagination is not a State: it is Existence itself." Heraclitus considered soul as 'limitless depth.'

We might add the epistemological necessity of Beauty in its archetypal and spiritual nature, as a means of experiential apprehension opening and embracing the aesthetic dimension of the soul. But even scenes of great beauty can also conceal deep darkness, including the dim light of mythic consciousness.

Our mistakes, imperfections, improvisations, and sorrows are woven into the beauty of it all with a life-affirming 'yes.' Hillman concurs that imagination is not a mere faculty, but more akin to being and becoming, a process of deepening and re-visioning, ensoulment or soul-making, rather than any final destination.

"The claim that it is a faculty has been precisely what has deceived us most about imagination. We have considered it one function among others; whereas it may be essentially different from thinking, willing, believing, etc. Rather than an independent operation or place, it is more likely an operation that works within the others as a place which is found only through the others — (is it their ground?)." (Hillman, J. (1979), "Image-sense," Spring 1979, p. 133)

The innate essence of being is transformed through active mentation in the act of Creation, cosmic consciousness, incorporeal levels of awareness. There is an innate intelligence and fundamental awareness that unfolds within us.

Soul shares the same nature as that which illuminates it, access to being and access to soul's truth. Illumination arises as rediscovery and remembrance -- discovery of the truth of oneself. Soul grasps the dual-unity of being and becoming.

The Transpersonal Self, unchanging in essence, is reality, sharing the same nature as Universal Reality. The Transpersonal Self on its own level must use the superconscious as its vehicle of experience and expression, as a means through which its energy is “transformed” or “stepped down” into a form that can be realized by personality (Assagioli).
https://kennethsorensen.dk/en/the-superconscious-and-the-self/#The_Self_as_the_Void

Our personal Zero-Point is our sub-atomic core self, our Essence or fundamental character present in each quantum which connects us directly with our hyperspace Source. The invisible Lifeforce behind the Mystic Veil of Zero Point fluctuation is formless and more fundamental than matter/energy.

We have our existence through this evanescence and in it as the infinite bound within us. It is the radiational and vibrational quanta in matter. ZPE correlates with the primordial mindfield. Psyche is not separate from matter. We are a psychophysical Reality. We are a microcosmic expression of the metaphysical axiom of scale invariance: "As Above; So Below."

THE ESSENCE OF BEING: This upwelling ZERO POINT creative process manifests cosmos, nature and consciousness. It dissolves and regenerates all forms. It is the source of formation, transformation, healing and creativity. It is the center of Being. The essence of this transformative, morphological process is chaotic -- purposeful yet inherently unpredictable holistic repatterning.

Healing is the psychophysical equivalent of creativity. Creativity is embodied inspiration and imagination. To the extent we intentionally commune with the source of infinite peace, love, health, bounty, and oneness we encourage their manifestation in outer reality. Their embodiment is the natural result of personal growth.

Creation is a co-creative act of life and sentience. “Communion,” suggests a shared identity that precedes any interaction. The divine influx of the higher spiritual world is experienced as luminous and numinous, an opening to the sense of eternity, infinity, and universality, as the aspects which help us proceed along that path.

But, “co-creation”specifies the making of something new. Such a spiritual ecology enables such co-creations or synergies. We are awash in an ocean of symbolic manifestations and imagery of the timeless patterns of human life. The the absence of specific quality is the void in a positive sense, which contains all life, to which everything belongs, and in which all is combined (Assagioli).

Metanoia, a fundamental transformation, catapults us out of ordinary awareness into a state of ecstasy and bliss that is transcendent experience of the reality that everything is connected in a 'participatory universe.' A microcosm of the 'continuous creation,' we renew and rebirth ourselves in a continuous process of Metanoia.

Metanoia is access to being, access to its own truth, and a complete transformation of the soul. It is a reorganization of memory in relationship to the truth and the self. Focus changes from rediscovery of the depths of the self to the soul's obligation to say what it is. The injunction becomes 'go to the truth, but on the way don't forget to tell who you are authentically, or you will never arrive at the truth.'

"I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet – a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from very far away. Bringing into human life the vastness and the fearful passionless force of non-human things," (Bertrand Russell, letter to Constance Malleson, 1918).

The Neoplatonic worldview is the basis of metaphysical insight and visionary revelations through contemplation. Cosmos pervades all aspects of existence; each human soul participates consciously or unconsciously; and we can embody divinity through visionary intuition and experience even in the mortal life. We transcend ourselves by overcoming our limited domain.

In the Neoplatonist view we have a certain strength of reality of our own but need to participate in a bigger strength and story for understanding greater or higher things -- participating in operations of the gods. The mechanism of self-excitation, self-observation, and self-reflection is a fundamental aspect of non-individuated primordial consciousness.

In post-traumatic growth, the intense experience of crises creates an opportunity for the conscious and volitional rearrangement of the self, including a reformulation and reprioritization of one's values and beliefs. We can form a new image of our ideal personality. With this ideal as a guide, the lower aspects of the self are inhibited and higher goals and aspirations emphasized.

Rituals and magical practices of Platonic theurgy transform consciousness by traversing the porous boundaries of the objective and subjective, subliminal and supraliminal. Theurgy is facilitation by 'hidden' correlations and correspondences between mind and matter. An inborn latent pattern of the individual self is capable of uniting all levels of Being in the soul.

States of identification with those realities include the visionary insights of ineffable union. When mind reflects on its own operations, it inevitably generates active forms of transformation of information, which do not have to have “come from” anywhere.

The psychic and physical, psyche and substance includes nonlocal interconnections and interdependencies underlying consciousness. Consciousness is more than a retrospective narrative. The narratives of religion draw upon thousands of years of narrative in mythology and ritual. Quantum cosmology continues to echo and substantiate in the macrocosm what also takes place in our microcosm -- vacuum fluctuation of the ground state.

The core aim of mystical paths is direct experience of deep and transcendent aspects of reality. The Path of Return is described in many ancient metaphysical doctrines by encounters with the World Soul, the Demiurge or Universal Mind (cosmic consciousness), and the Good or the One, the hidden source beyond being, the undivided source of manifestation.

How do we explore the depths of our reality and experience, seeing underneath that which appears on the surface? We are mostly unconscious everyday, thrown back on unknowing, seeking the as-yet-unknown reality of our unknown possibilities.

Chuang Tzu said, "In the deep dark the person alone sees light." Traditions of 'Light' continue to inform our conceptions of reality. What we call reality and consciousness depends on our level of observation and mystical penetration. Kabir says, "Wherever you are is the entry point."

The most common error is conflating 'consciousness' and 'awareness'. Consciousness is a product of widespread communication, while awareness is a focal capacity. Jung said, "Consciousness is essentially the psyche's organ of perception, it is the eye and ear of the psyche." (ETH Lectures, Vol. II, Page 98).

There are many natural approaches to the unconscious, to the paradoxical mystery of Self and non-Self -- conscious, unconscious, ritualized, hermetic, religious, therapeutic, philosophical, psychological, magical, and artistic. This approach to the ongoing flow of experience is post-analytic and extra-analytic, aesthetic, and poetic.

What is philosophy for? How should philosophy be done? Should philosophy protect us against dangerous illusions by being a kind of therapy? Should we loosen the grip of the assumptions of previous, metaphysical philosophy? Nature has an aesthetic sensibility and a sensuality that is visceral.

Can we steer clear of revisionary metaphysics? What are the psychological effects of believing in ideas? Here we have an account not just of concepts but of things or phenomena. Every belief has some connection to experience but the connection is never direct. Ontological beliefs about reality are answerable to experience.

The Roman Cicero thought the study of philosophy prepared one for death. The later and Neoplatonic thinker Plotinus asked, ‘What, then, is Philosophy?’ He answered, ‘Philosophy is the supremely precious’ (Enneads, I.3.v): a means to blissful contact with a mystical principle he called ‘the One.’

Nothing is isolated in this cosmos. We are not limited to space and time in a linear way. We become incandescent. A supernormal stimuli provokes a supernormal reflex, a transcendent response far beyond what we know begins to speak through you -- supersimultaneity. The autonomy of meaning is fused with the irreducibility of experience.

Why can we translate the patterns of nature into so many different symbol systems and different substances? Why do central metaphors work? We are literally as old as the universe, inchoate energy older than space or time, as old as the protons that make up our existence, pre- and post-linguistic. A material miracle turns nothing into something -- a soup of atoms: quarks, galaxies, stars, molecules, cells, and DNA -- an infinite well of souls.

How does the cosmos, of which we are part, create explosive novelties, electrifying inventions, colossal shocks and breakthroughs, astonishments? How does a cosmos of elementary particles and gravity make the impossible real, the ordinary into the new reality? What is our relation to a conversational cosmos that is the root of our identity? How does cosmic creativity work its wonders in human beings?

We're aware we didn't do this, that there is supernormal intelligence. But we are more than that. We work symbiotically with all the other human beings, bacteria, the plant and animal world, and it all contributes to us minute by minute, collective brain, reciprocally influencing one another. The gods are in our imaginations, emotions, passions, hearts, and minds, guts, and gonads.

We are embedded in nature and ensouled or rooted in the mystery of Being and Words to be spoken. To the ancients all language was divine, mythic, metaphorical language of participatory evocation and remembrance. Care of the soul was natural and instinctual, expressed through ritual, ceremony, sacred sites, an oral tradition of story, myth, and art.

We are concerned here with immeasurable interiority -- the fundamentals of images, imaginal and transformative aesthetics -- the relation of substance and image, and the 'divine darkness' (super-consciousness) of Pseudo-Dionysius. He says that after all speaking, reading, and comprehending of the names ceases, there follows a divine silence, darkness, and unknowing.

Living images come to light and life through transformation and theophanic revelation, received through encounter. In divine self-revelation God (unmediated Presence) manifests to humans, through “union” with the ineffable, invisible, unknowable godhead. Ours is a philosophical, psychological and transformative art that does not flee from the existential Abyss of the transcendent numinous.

Inner connectedness is the antithesis of the void. Dissolution of the boundary between conscious and unconscious states is unitive knowledge of the One Mind or One Soul at work both within and without. The unitive experience, Krishnamurti says, is not an experience since the experiencer has dissolved.

Myth is the key to our memory of deep time and our potential realization. Mythic forms, the polyphonic and mythical basis of the psyche, are stored in our own protean memory banks. Some operate as sophisticated unconscious behavior guidance systems: perceptual, evaluative, and motivational. Romanticism regards religion not as a body of truths and skills to be tested, but as an evolving expressive art.

Theurgy is doing divine things, performing sacramental works. Theurgy is a practice-led inquiry, mechanism of change, and a transformational mystery. It is one of many means for the liberation of archaic memory images. It presumes a deep knowledge of the secret nature of things and the hidden connections that hold things together.

The foundations of Platonism are the theory of forms and the immortality of the soul. Greek philosopher Thales said, "the whole world is full of gods." The idea that the world itself in all its particulars has soul was reborn in the Renaissance as Neoplatonism, a "mystical theology."

Its spirit phenomena include visions, revelations, ecstasy, prophecy, truth. Its metaphysics includes unity of the universe, hierarchy of being, transcending the cycle of birth and death, and becoming like god. Symbolic death leads to transformation (rebirth) through creativity.

The path of our awareness is natural liberation, ecstatic transcendent dissolution. The distinction between the persona ("the mask of the soul") and the shadow (a sort of "counter-persona") is, from a philosophical perspective, akin to the difference between falseness (appearance) and authenticity (essence). What is the meaning of “light” in this context? The
persona is fake light for the authentic (but heavy and darkened) shadow.

"Fear of self-sacrifice lurks deep in every ego, and this fear is often only the precariously controlled demand of the unconscious forces to burst out in full strength.... It is possible to cut beyond ego-consciousness, to become aware of the enormous treasury of ancient… knowledge welded into the nucleus of every cell in your body." --LAM
https://ionamillersubjects.weebly.com/archetypal-light.html

Co-Emergent Process

"Before the soul can see, the Harmony within must be attained, and fleshly eyes be rendered blind to all illusion. Before the Soul can hear, the image (man) has to become as deaf to roarings as to whispers, to cries of bellowing elephants as to the silvery buzzing of the golden fire-fly.Before the soul can comprehend and may remember, she must unto the Silent Speaker be united just as the form to which the clay is modeled, is first united with the potter's mind. For then the soul will hear, and will remember. And then to the inner ear will speak." (Blavatsky, The Voice of the Silence)

Theurgy uses mental images, including memories and memory objects ultimately to facilitate cognitive-affective access to self-arising non-dual states of consciousness -- archaic primordial awareness. Within each of our vital experiences is an image, bearing meaning, that contains and structures it and directs us.

Speech is the groundwork of magic; being is the principle, speech is the means. Logos realizing itself is the revelation of speech confirmed by acts. The chain may be established in three ways by signs, by mystic speech, and by contact in Neoplatonic, Hermetic, and Kabbalistic theurgy.

Jewish mystics view the names as “access codes” that allow them to tap certain aspects of divine power (Mid. Teh. 3.2). To invoke God’s name in the world means you can invoke God’s presence—if you are in the appropriate moral and spiritual condition. The theology of divine unity that grounds all Jewish theurgy.

Theurgists are not asked to believe in a god, but called to meet them in living contact with Supreme Consciousness. Individual contact is the corner-stone of relationship with the Great Presence. Universal life fills and reveals all truth. It is the state of reality in which we become nobody and we remain as we are, which is deathless awareness. An enlivened world beckons toward cosmic space.

"Eternity is not something that has to come. Eternity is not even a long period of time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is the size of here and now that it is excluded from the thought that moves within time terms. If we don't get it here where we are, we won't get it anywhere else." (Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth)

The theurgist learns to function effectively at higher levels of arousal to amplify the experiential awareness field. Theurgists take on the forms of the gods that Proclus called the primordial and self-sufficient principles of being. When aroused we expand our sense of self even to the cosmic scale even as our focus narrows (cosmic consciousness).

Primordial awareness is your basic self, your subjectivity, your awareness. Awareness is non conceptual knowingness, light, or luminosity that illuminates itself and illuminates experience.

The paradoxical image of a darkness that shines mirrors the threshold of psyche and matter, the virtual vacuum fluctuation, where photons flit in and out of existence. Manifestation arises from the same dark source as the Mystery of illuminated darkness.

'...the mystery of the structure of the universe, was in themselves, in their own bodies and in that part of the personality which we call the unconscious, but they would say in the life of their own material existence. ...They thought that instead of taking outer materials you could just as well look inside and get information directly from that mystery because you were it. After all, you too were a part of the mystery of cosmic existence, so you could just as well watch it directly. Even further, you could ask matter, the mystery of which you consist, to tell you what it is, to reveal itself to you.' (M.-L. vonFranz)

This darkness filled with light or a shine contains the qualities of both light and darkness -- an ethereal body that is not simply material but also “subtle” and primordial. The subtle body links subjective and objective realms. Theurgy is a creatively emergent participatory self-organizing process.

The subtle body is consciously mobilized in theurgy, impacting physical, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual life. Heightened body awareness is the source of emotion and agent of healing. Subtle body is the same substance as Diamond Body, body of light, astral body, glorious body, the Self, or God. Soul for Plato was a body of light in dynamic motion.

Jung considered subtle body a transcendent idea beyond language and philosophy, because it is beyond time and space, i.e. the virtual substance of the Self with the qualities of light (virtual photon flux).
https://books.google.com/books?id=AW--DgAAQBAJ&pg=PT134&lpg=PT134&dq=,threshold+of+psyche+and+matter&source=bl&ots=GcMgm33ggg&sig=YYdyHYBGfK3OPIfIjSgyyq9r7ro&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwigzJbXy6nbAhXky4MKHXlpAEI4ChDoAQgoMAA#v=onepage&q=%2Cthreshold%20of%20psyche%20and%20matter&f=false

The divine darkness is light-giving, a fertile darkness from which all things of the world shine forth, its own intrinsic luminosity is lumen naturae, the light of nature. As he died, Goethe said he saw 'black light.' Jung called the soul “an eye destined to behold the light.”

Light is another way of speaking about knowing, consciousness, openness, a sense of potentialities. The metaphysical theory of light is also known as the Neoplatonic principle of emanation. Light is the primary metaphor for consciousness (naturally manifest awareness, luminous and empty) that drives our spiritual and therapeutic sensibilities.

Dzogchen teacher, Dudjom Rinpoche writes, ”although hundreds or thousands of explanations are given, there is only one thing to be understood. Know the one thing that liberates everything -- awareness itself, your own true nature.”

Exalting the entire perceptual field with stimulation evokes a paradoxical switch to transcendent cosmic emptiness -- the beingness of all being. Nothingness or openness, voidness, or spaciousness of the ground of primordial awareness is openness to light, luminous radiance.

The metaphysical theory of light is also known as the Neoplatonic principle of emanation. Light is the primary metaphor for consciousness that drives our spiritual and therapeutic sensibilities.

In Neoplatonism, the unified Divine Principle, which Plotinus calls ‘the One’ and to which the Areopagite refers as ‘the ever-radiant Light’, descends into the lower world and becomes absorbed by material objects and particular forms. Each material form contains a particle of the ideal Light. The whole universe becomes the world of lights, each of them striving to return to the One, to reunite with the source which endowed them with radiance. (Roklina)

The primordial ground of all that is becomes the nucleus of radiant light at the heart of all beings. Extremes of hypo- and hyper-arousal create mystic experiences of the Self, which are interpreted as bliss whether as an experience of the Plenum of cosmic consciousness (hyper-arousal) or the Void (hypo-arousal).

At their extremes, meditative and exalted states reflect psychological and physiological paradox. At the moment of ritual climax or “eureka” there is a dramatic switchover to the sympathetic system in the experience of the unborn and undying nature of luminous awareness, awareness of awareness which is awareness itself. After the ceremonial act there a return to the recuperative parasympathetic system. https://ionamiller.weebly.com/emotional-alchemy.html

Psychic Archaeology

Jung's individuation is a process of transformation that brings the personal and collective unconscious into consciousness to be assimilated into the whole personality. Natural individuation is an unconscious process that follows the natural course of a life and passages in which individuals become what they always were.

Transformation in individuation is often experienced, and described, as a process of turning inwards. It emerged partly due to the renaissance and post-renaissance epistemological need to interiorize psychological life (Romanyshyn 1982, 1984) We need to take “inner” literally so. We can also look outside with an interiorizing vision, rooted in an increasingly interiorized soul life -- an interization of self, community, world, and cosmos.

While Jungians and post-Jungians stop short of promoting unitive experience, some of its philosophy maps onto and provides a contemporary context for Neoplatonism. Life-changing experiences, unitive mystical experiences are generally spontaneously occurring states of consciousness characterized by a sense of unity or “oneness” that transcends sensory or cognitive apprehension (Stace, 1960).

Stace explained that in profound spiritual experiences the complex multiplicity of normal consciousness collapses into a simpler state where a sense of an all-encompassing unity or “oneness” with others, the world and/or “God” is felt. He emphasized that there is a collapse in the most fundamental dualities of consciousness (i.e., self vs. other, subject vs. object and internal vs. external) in the unitive state.

Stace identified seven core characteristics or universal components of the spiritual experience: 1) diminished spatial and temporal awareness, 2) diminished subjectivity (equivalent to increased objectivity), 3) feelings of profound joy and peace, 4) a sense of divinity, 5) paradoxicality (where two opposing things appear to be true), 6) ineffability (the difficulty of expressing the experience in words) and 7) a sense of oneness with the world, otherwise known as “the unitive experience.”

Jon Mills suggests, "Despite it being the focal point of his theoretical system... Jung vacillated between viewing archetypes as analogous to primordial images and ideas inherited from our ancestral past, formal a priori categories of mind, cosmic projections, emotional and valuational agencies, and numinous mystical experience, but the question remains whether a ‘suprapersonal’ or ‘transubjective’ psyche exists."

Lionel Corbet says, "Some of Jung's writing reveals a non-dual sensibility, especially when he describes the Self as the totality of the psyche, and in his stress on the unus mundus and synchronicity. But overall he tends to favor a dualistic approach to the psyche; he never relinquishes the importance of the ego, he believes that the Self needs the ego to become conscious of itself, and he does not focus on pure consciousness beyond its images."

Without hypostatizing the idea to some otherworldly plane, Jung suggested our primordial behavior is informed by archetypal images. This is the difference between a psychological and a metaphysical, "spiritual," or religious approach and worldview. Jung saw consciousness as "essentially the psyche's organ of perception, it is the eye and ear of the psyche." Even the scientific view is still infused with unconscious myths and symbols, as "all that comes into our heads proceeds from the unconscious." (ETH Lecture II, April 27, 1934, pg. 98).

Metaphysics is a broad area of philosophy marked out by two types of inquiry. The first aims to be the most general investigation possible into the nature of reality: are there principles applying to everything that is real, to all that is? We can abstract from the particular nature of existing things what distinguishes them from each other, and what can we know about them simply because they exist?

All it takes is literally looking at the matter more closely. In Matter and Memory (1896), Henri Bergson suggested that memory 'imports the past into the present while contracting many moments of duration into a single intuition, while reshaping it. Multidimensional memory resonates in many directions, intersecting pasts and undefined futures. When the personal level collapses into the archetypal core, we have a unitive experience. We look forward and backward in a different way.

Paradoxically, it requires digging down into the unconscious strata of the deep past with 'psychic archaeology,' with its intrusions, excursions, and displacements.

Such a journey implies the creation of a set of beliefs and emotive issues imperative for such an irrational underground journey where time is abolished. There is always a context for a process. Enduring pressures must have kept driving people underground, as they drive our emotional descents today.

Relevant artifacts may or may not be found in definable layers of exposed strata. The archaeological matrix has distinct features revealed in the ways that ancient societies thought and their symbolic structures. The cave itself is an integral part of the image. Picasso implied inherent genius when he said of the cave painters, "None of us could paint like that."

We can only attempt to discern the context and thought processes of ancient people. Cave and community were once synonymous. Parietal art is the archaeological term for artwork done on cave walls or large blocks of stone. Of prehistoric origin, some date to 40,000 years or more. The deep realm of no light gives birth to the creative impulse. Every color is an illumination in ensembles of images stacked upon one another.

We should remember such art was dynamic not static, likely accompanied by music and chants, as well as flickering light that encourages pareidolia. The image-maker interacts with the animated cave wall, which comes alive with imagination. This is not just making art, but making something special.

We can respond to a stimulus, usually an image or a sound, by perceiving a familiar pattern where none exists. Was this the suggestive template of early art as well as nature, dreams, and rituals? We still see creatures and faces in unusual places; they inhabit and enliven our imaginal world. Just because you change your religion, or change your gods, doesn't change that special places remain sacred.

We're still somehow squeezing through narrow openings in the translucent material of our depths. We may hear the thunder of underground streams doing their own sculpting in the depths. It forces us to crawl again, even to slither down mud banks, little realizing a confrontation awaits informing our exhausting journey. Each nook and cranny a potential revelation, such crawlspaces can even lead upwards to new passages at higher levels.

Is it any wonder that when we turn within we still grope our ways through the dark of the labyrinth of subterranean passages and chambers with metaphorical flaming torches and delicate tallow lamps? Is the entrance to our underground passage blocked by ancient debris, by the Paleo- and Neolithic baggage of our remote ancestors? The questions we can ask about those original artists are the same ones we can ask of ourselves today.

Why did they undertake such a hazardous journey 13,000 years ago; what emotions did they experience; why did they believe their art was important; what did they believe about the images on the wall; what did the subterranean journey do for them?

Why does the human mind fashion unseen forces and spirits? They take us to the heart of what it is to be human today. Like geological history, our lives can be punctuated with virtually catastrophic events from which we rise or fall.

The way we answer these questions leads through the labyrinths of Western thinking, cultural circumstances, and philosophy Long before Plato, the 'mind in the cave' was the oldest image of the emergence of consciousness and art.

Areas of interest revealed in discovering our human antiquity include personal identity, selfhood, subjectivity, memory, consciousness, spirituality, emotion, motivation, cognition, madness, and mental health.

Psychological anthropology and archeology is the study of human mental activity in the past. The archeology of our current behavior uncovers hidden sources. The “ruins” of personality architecture and cultural landscapes are hidden sources, including intentional and nonconscious motivations.

The in-depth surface may be tilted or contain burrows, or other anomalous features, metaphorical and real. We have to keep digging underneath the obvious and questioning meaning and our interpretations, mining for psychological gold and the fossilized bones of our ancestors for their lived and unlived lives.

Psyche exists as a source of knowledge: "…nature exists without human aid, can deal with her processes herself, has everything in herself to bring about transformations, to move from the depths to the heights and down into the depths again." (Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 42).

The secret is inside the creation and based in the study of nature and our own nature. We become more integrated by bringing more of the unconscious and mythic into consciousness. Fundamental awareness has no intrinsic form, content, or characteristics. So awareness is less about the dualism of mind and matter, light or dark, or polarized good and bad, but more about the dualism of awareness and the contents of awareness.

Continually recurring fundamental ideas can arise from the archetypal potentials of objective psyche. Generally similar ideas are modified by era and context. We can recognize their archetypal core. We live in archaic identity with the absolute unconscious. Archetypes are the psychophysical interface of emotion and energy, linking inner and outer realms. The form of opposites become distinct but conjoined as they enter consciousness.

Such numinous assertions and feelings produced by psyche may or may not express universal 'truths'. We perceive the psyche with intuition, but not everyone has discriminating intuition and clarity. Our universal vision is as limited as our rational and irrational human vision. Intuition exalts and redeems us through connection with our core -- the midpoint of our internal Cosmos.

Sacred symbols resonate in the archetypal levels of the human psyche and can cause spiritual change and expand consciousness. Transformation is from a mechanical or conditioned mode of being to a lively energetic being.

We learn to function at coherent energy levels that can be manipulated with various subtle methodologies to harmonize the flow of vital energy, letting us know and be known in the inner realm. Novalis said, "The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap." (Blutenstaub, Pollen)

Individuation is “coming to selfhood” or “self-realization,” the act of becoming a distinct and integrated unity. It is the explicit realization of what was previously implicit and latent, the extension of personhood beyond the human. It is a completely natural process necessary for the integration of the psyche -- patterns, coherence, connectedness.

The Jungian process of individuation involves the addition of unconscious psychic tropes to consciousness in order to achieve a trans-conscious center to the personality. Jung never intended this addition to take the form of a complete identification of the Self with the Unconscious.

Passage through adulthood reveals the need for the realization of natural potential to be an innate process. We exercise it without conscious awareness. The psychological approach echoes ancient philosophy, healing, and magic disciplines. Those lacking such experience can never understand it, but that does not nullify its existence. Getting it conceptually is not the same as knowing it experientially, thus, all "esoteric" secrets remain concealed from the uninitiated.

“The difference between the "natural" individuation process, which runs its course unconsciously, and the one which is consciously realized, is tremendous. In the first case consciousness nowhere intervenes; the end remains as dark as the beginning. In the second case so much darkness comes to light that the personality is permeated with light, and consciousness necessarily gains in scope and insight. The encounter between conscious and unconscious has to ensure that the light which shines in the darkness is not only comprehended by the darkness, but comprehends it. ...the source from which the individuation process rises and the goal toward which it aims is nameless, ineffable.” (C.G. Jung, Answer to Job)

Jung calls individuation an unconscious natural spontaneous process but also a relatively rare one, something: “only experienced by those who have gone through the wearisome but indispensable business of coming to terms with the unconscious components of the personality.” (1954, para 430).