The Hum of the Real: Platonic Emergence, Biological Relativity, and The Transpersonal Memory Complex
Observing the universe around and inside us, through ordinary perception or the lenses of physics, biology, and psychology, what we really “see” are organizing principles. The world we sense is assembled by our body and brain, the world we perceive is assembled by our emotions and inner senses, while the world that actually exists remains unassembled. Or rather, it can be inferred through essential organizing principles: archetypes.
It is easy to assume that archetypes are only abstract, imaginary, and immaterial. Concepts with no real bearing on our lives. In fact, we don’t ordinarily credit archetypes with our natural ability to sense, perceive, and relate to the world around us. But in archetypal psychology, they are studied through dreams, life patterns, and choices. For storytellers they help evoke meaning. In science, archetypes are called laws—theories that are so persistent and reliable that new fields of research can be built upon them. In philosophy, they are perennial and essential experiences that define a shared ground of being all people and the universe constantly cycles through: birth and death, cycles and orbits and seasons, singularities and black holes, creation and destruction, etc.
Archetypes, in fact, are the thresholds of The Real. They are the foundations of the cosmos that we take for granted. Archetypes are vast, deep, and powerful. They stream and emerge. From archetypal matrixes of information and energy, the universe extends itself through countless derivative movements, changing shapes and geometries, and an ever flickering dance of relativity. The world of form we inherit, thanks to archetypes, is stable but also makes The Real feel far away. In order to exist, we only hear the echo of archetypes through the organizing principles that make our universe look and feel the way it appears to.
Like Plato’s World of Forms, archetypes represent an extremely efficient, finely tuned architecture. These “forms” are powerful essences that unpack into time, variety, and degree. They are also bridge structures that interconnect substance and pure information, making them highly energetic transformers and translators. For a human body, they are the source of its vitality and volition. For the cosmos, they are constant push and pull of the forces. However, because they are bridge structures, they are also limits. Because they are thresholds, they are also guardians. To transcend their limits and gain the power of their guardians, we must enter archetypes directly, assembling them with our sensation and perception.
It is not enough to assemble ordinary thoughts and emotions. If we reach the heart of archetypes, we touch metamorphosis. It is the equivalent of turning the universe upside down and inside out. Ordinarily, we cannot pass through the sheer complexity and unpredictability of everything happening all around us. The higher-level behaviors that govern and structure our world–and our own inner world–are hidden by their constituents, their individual parts and details. But when we challenge perception, dilating its channel, an overwhelming flood of information begins to assemble genuinely new behaviors visible only at greater scales. This participatory emergence renders new landscapes that live in higher and higher dimensions concrete and tangible.
It is the realization that, in order to be a person, all other people must be living inside you, and likeways in order for other people to exist at all, you must be present inside them. In order for the universe to exist, its laws must also somehow be an essential piece of a mosaic that composes your cells, organs, and tissues. Conversely, every cell in your body must be somehow compatible with even very large forces, like dark matter and energy, gravity, electromagnetism, and nuclear force. Amazingly, archetypes are not only vast reservoirs of organizing power and intelligence, but also tiny quanta, the building blocks of matter, the weight of mass, and the engine of life.
Archetypes can be hard to understand. In fact, the emergence of super complex systems through lower dimensional order can also be described as chaos. However, no creature is ever truly alone or at odds with the universe, except in their own mental projections and emotional associations. Even then, there are thousands and thousands of hidden lifelines, buzzing and humming everywhere. Archetypes also define the existence of protons and electrons, of cellular respiration and DNA replication, and of a mesh network of interconnected systems that lasso single celled organisms with intergalactic tidal tails.
In the World of Forms, The Real is hidden in the hum of Platonic Emergence and Biological Relativity. This is a gnostic truth but not only a philosophical one: It is a realization humming in our bones, flowing in our blood, and channeled through the nature of our being. The doorway to archetypes is paradoxically far away and also impossibly close—closer than close. There is a fundamental interactive nature that everything in the cosmos has in common, and if we place our attention there, the physical world of substance will vanish, revealing higher and higher dimensions of form, until everything melts away into archetypal purity. At the highest level, there is a single living system in which the distance between chaotic variability and absolute synthesis are unified.
One of the main reasons this metamorphosis remains abstract or “spiritual” is because we have already divided our understanding of the world and our relation with it many, many times over. We have created artificial membranes that insulate our perception and sensation. We have wrapped our organs in cellophane and doused our brain with wax. There is undue stress, strain, and friction on the systems which ordinarily are extremely efficient and also elegant and beautiful.
The truth of the matter may in fact be that we do not want to live close to The Real. Perhaps we have grown too accustomed to a worldview that denies the interactive nature of fundamental processes, rendering our brains lifeless machines, our hearts lonely beating drums, and our DNA random floating “junk.” The more we reduce, the less we perceive. The truth is, we are much dumber than our bodies. Our bodies can teach us how to soar across transpersonal infinities, but we are too convinced of the status quo we have invented for ourselves in order to build a shared sense of “civilization.”
When we look in the mirror, it is tempting to see ourselves as a bundle of associated feelings, thoughts, and memories. From an early age we are trained to refer to ourselves in this way, which over time becomes reinforced by intense emotional content, organized around a common theme (“me” and not “you” or “we”), which then exerts an even stronger reinforcing influence on our personality and behavior. We call this reinforcing influence the "unconscious,” but in truth it doesn’t exist!
The complexes that significantly shape a person’s sense of self and identity are not the physical body. They are barriers and traumas. Perhaps, more optimistically, we can think of them as meaningful or artistic contributions to a life imbued with meaning and happiness. However, the fact remains that if these conditionings create a sense of unconscious limitation, they put archetypal power and the knowledge of our humming bodies out of reach.
Without these limitations, we would instead “see” in the mirror something closer to a social memory complex. It would not only be a sensation or perception, but an innate experience of knowing and being extending beyond the delusion of individuality. It would not eradicate but enhance individuality, however it would also allow free range of faculty, bridging individual memory with collective memory. Any individual sense of behavior, identity, and implicit social cognition would be anterior to a superior lucidity, rooting one’s psychological narrative and also physical hormones, brain circuits, etc. within a social, species phenomena. In short, what before was “subconscious” would be conscious, and before what was “conscious” would be a derivative, interconnected system.
However, to approach The Real, we must take even a step further, crossing the threshold of archetypes and a limit of perception defined as much by transpersonality as transobjectivity. This means moving from interoceptive capacity as a social memory complex to a transpersonal memory complex. Here, individuality still manages to persist, however it becomes the thin skin of a larger body in which the collective identities of whole species are also only tiny organs. Here, there is no quanta qualia barrier, and the living organizing principle of The Real is revealed by the leaping of a vast body, stretching between clusters of millennial memory, perception, emotion, and volition.
Again, it is impossible even to imagine or conceive of this possibility until we turn the ordinary universe on its head. From a reductionist point of view, none of this is intuitive: Life is an accident, systems are only connected by theoretical math and not physical membranes, and the consciousness of brains are discrete, flickering flames that mysteriously self-ignite at birth and self-extinguish at death. This dangerous ideology remains incapable of perceiving or relating to living organisms on their own level. It is a prison of the mind that denies people a chance to experience their own identity as a spectrum of multi-scale, relativistic perspectives.
The archetype of a transpersonal memory complex, meanwhile, remains a valid way of modeling a living network distinguished by biological, physical, and existential levels of being without reduction. It empowers consciousness to recognize itself as singular and plural, as temporal and timeless, as immortal and fragile. What ultimately emerges as a dominant sensation from the realization of this hyperidentity is a way entering evolutionary stages which span four quarters of threshold complexity: From The Real to The World of Forms, from The World of Forms to Platonic Emergence, from Platonic Emergence to Biological Relativism, which leads back again to The Real.
The archetypes have journeyed into myriad forms, into atoms and elements and compounds. The forms have journeyed and evolved through chaos and relativity, reincarnating also through biological relativism: plants, trees, animals, sapiens… And with the arrival of collective species that dream and relate to themselves on equivalent terms, the possibility of crossing the final level of justice back to The Real. As human beings, we are at the last threshold of a very important journey—and all we have to do is listen.