EMERGENT WORLDS 02: Realms of Experience in the Self

Realms of Experience in the Self Transformations of the Subject EMERGENT WORLDS BEING, EXISTENCE, MANIFESTATION AND DEEPER NONDUALITY Kent D. Palmer, Ph.D. [email protected] http://kdp.me 714-633-9508 Copyright 2010, 2016 K.D. Palmer. All Rights Reserved. Not for distribution. Started 5/31/2010; Version 0.6; 6/05/2010; bem02a07.docx Edited 2016.04.24 http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5298-4422 http://schematheory.net Researcher ID O-4956-2015 Keywords: being, existence, manifestation, amanifest, Western worldview, nonduality Realms of the Self We begin with the explanation of the realms of experience within the Self. We take the Jungian view of the Self that it is the totality of our experience of ourselves while the Ego is a unity within that totality. But there are specific realms of experience within which trauma might manifest and in the model of Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing those are signified by the acronym SIBAM, which stands for Sensation, Image, Behavior, Affect and Meaning. To these we add two not covered in their system which is Dreamtime and Spirituality to get DSIBAMS and we note that there are dualities within this structure in which Dreamtime and Spirituality are duals, Sensation and Meaning are duals, Image and Affect are Duals, and Behavior stands at the center and indicates the duality of Mind/Body. If we were to relate this to the Meta-levels of Being then we would see that the Mind is Pure Being, while the Body is Process Being, and then we can see that Imagery/Affect is Hyper Being, Sensory/Meaning is in Wild Being, and Dreamtime/Spirituality is in Ultra Being. The kinds of Being are meta-levels of the concept of Being which starts from Ontological difference between beings and Being. This difference is the beginning of a hierarchy of meta-levels which includes Parmenidian Pure Being (pointing, present-at-hand), then the Heraclitian Process Being (grasping, ready-to-hand), then the Third Kind of Being Plato mentions in the Timaeus which I call Hyper Being after Merleau-Ponty’s ‘hyperdialectic between process being of Heidegger and nothingness of Sartre) (bearing, in-hand), then Wild Being of MerleauPonty (encompassing out-of-hand), and finally Ultra Being (singularity, no-hand). Each of these levels of the realms of experience corresponds to a level of subjectivity. Pure Being is the place of the Subject associated with the Mind and Objectivity toward the thing of experience. Process Being is the realm of Dasein who is prior to the differentiation of Subject and Object. Dasein is 1 defined by Heidegger as being composed of Talk (Rede), Understanding (Verstehen), and Discoveredness (Befindlichkeit) which together produce the core of Dasein as Care (Sorge). The next level associated with Hyper Being is the Query which is expressed by the Differance of Differing and Deferring as defined by Derrida, the slip-sliding away which is the difference between Pure Being and Process Being. Differance was originally defined by Heidegger as Being (crossed out). This is the realm of traces, and hinges which is beyond representation and repetition. Were Dasein is oriented toward Death when it realizes authenticity, the Query asks the question: Why is there something rather than nothing? of himself and others in each moment. The key figure that exemplifies this is Oedipus, the philosopher who asks the question concerning who polluted the city bringing the plague. Of course it turns out to be him, the one who failed the initiation of the Hero1 and who in his fate defines the limit of human experience by killing his father and marrying his mother. For the Query every question toward what is external is a question about oneself. The pursuit of the answer is a differing and deferring with respect to the arrival of the truth. The next level is the Enigma, i.e. what cannot be answered. Following Churchill’s famous quote about the Russian Communists, "I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest." We can think of Dasein is a riddle, and the Query is a mystery, then there is the Enigma at the level of Wild Being. We note that Oedipus after killing his father at the crossroads, and marrying his mother in the city he confronts the Sphinx and the riddle of the Sphinx. The Sphinx asks a question of Oedipus before he asks the question of the source of the Plague on his city after he become King. He becomes King because he could answer the question of the Sphinx. The Sphinx is between the two limits of killing the father and marrying the mother. So the Sphinx who asks the riddle is between the Father and Mother. If we think of the Father as Patriarchal Subject and the Mother as Object then the riddle is between these two poles at the position of Dasein. The riddle concerns the nature of man in time having four, then two then three legs. This question is asked of a lame person. And the answer is Man. After the riddle is answered the Sphinx died. In the Hero’s initiation there is the sexual, knowledge, and prowess initiations as asserted by J.-J. Gaux. Oedipus showed prowess when he killed the stranger who happened to be his father at the crossroads. He was initiated sexually by the queen who had no husband in Thebes who turned to be his mother. So the Sphinx was the Intellectual component of his initiation. Oedipus who was lame and thus particularized answered the question about the changing number of feet with the Universal “Man”. What never seems to get answered is why did this lead to the death of the Sphinx. The Sphinx was female and stands in for the proper sexual object which is thwarted when Oedipus marries his mother. But the Sphinx is asking who are you? in this question. The answer, of course, is that Odysseus is a Man who will define the limits of human experience by failing to become a Hero, and to pass the initiation of the Hero. The riddle of the Sphinx which focuses on ‘who Oedipus is’ forces on him a reflexivity in order to answer the question. He must recognize himself as part of the universal Man despite his particularity of being lame. This reflexivity which he successfully negotiates is the opposite of the reflexivity that reveals that he is the source of the plague in the city when his origins are revealed. Oedipus is the polluter of the city for which he searches, and when he finds himself then he exacts punishment on himself. So we have to understand that what he discovers is his own particular origins which are the opposite of his being a Man despite his lameness. So when Oedipus is between Subject and Object at the Sphinx he is in answering that universal question Dasein. Dasein mediates between the Universal of Being and the particularity of beings, as a being that projects the world, and thus encompasses the world despite being a part of the world. Dasein is not Man, but nor is Dasein an Individual with particularities, such as gender. Dasein is the mark of Ontological Difference and thus between and prior to the difference 1 See J.-J. Gaux Oedipus, Philosopher 2 between beings and Being. The riddle is: how can a particular man who is lame, understand the stages of the unfolding of life with different numbers of feet in the various phases. Odysseus was lamed when he had four feet. When he is blinded he will walk with a stick to feel his way as do the blind. When he stands in front of the Sphinx he displays his wound, his lamenss. Yet he knows that he is a Man, which is part of the Universal despite his pecularitity. This shows that Odysseus can understand the position of Dasein which is between Universal and Particularity. When he answers the question of the Sphinx she dies. It is the riddle she asks that sustains her because she eats the flesh of those who fail the test. This is a quintessential marriage test. And that is why it is believed that this is a failure of Oedipus to recognize the feminine which is the natural sexual partner. In the Sphinx animal and human are mixed and sex and death are mixed. It is this paradoxical mixture that Oedipus stands against with his answer of the Universal, Man where “Man” is equivalent to Human. Woman is not included in this human definition. Woman is the Monstrous as such. By this reflection Oedipus becomes a Monster himself. Dasein which is without gender is the monstrous as such. The Sphinx dies because it is Oedipus that then absorbs this monstrousness within himself as his own paradox in his origins. He does not recognize the monstrous paradox outside himself so he must take it within and realize it in himself. So when Oedipus comes to Thebes and becomes king and marries the queen then his paradoxicality reflects within the city and the city finds within itself a plague. The king sets out to find the source of pollution in the city that is causing the plague. The source of the plague is a mystery. Oedipus plays the part of the detective and begins hunting for the answer to the mystery of the source of the plague. Thus Odysseus moves to the position of the Query who is reflexively looking for himself. From this position everything is seen as a differing and deferring of differance. His search is deferred as long as he does not find the culprit is himself. He as king is different from the pharmacon who will be the one he will cast out of the city once the culprit is found. Dasein responds to the riddle coming from outside, while the Query is the question concerning oneself. By answering the riddle we are forced to the next position which is the Query and thus we move from Process Being to Hyper Being. Eventually this gap of difference closes and Oedipus discovers that he is the source of pollution in the city. His mother hangs herself and he puts out his own eyes. He is blinded by his own source when he finds out the truth about himself. He makes himself an outcast and the king becomes the pharmacon. His own law falls on himself. But the next step deeper is the Enigma. Notice that Churchill says that the riddle is wrapped in a Mystery in an Enigma. So the Enigma is on the outside. The enigma is the question of the fate of Oedipus. Why did the oracle come from Delphi about the son of his father. It was this oracle that brought his father to expose the infant, and thus produced the self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the enigma of the fate of Odysseus, because Oedipus did nothing to bring this fate on himself, but he fulfilled it. What we discover in the end fulfills the fate that the oracle sealed. So the position of the Oracle and the fatedness of Oedipus is the fourth deeper position in Wild Being in our exploration of the meta-levels of subjectivity. It is the enigma of the oracle that comes from Delphi that encompasses the situation, within which is the Query of the origin of oneself, and within which is the Riddle of the Sphinx which comes from the outside yet is also self-reflexive. Finally there is the primordial level of Ultra Being and the singularity that is the stone that marks Delphi. At the primordial level there is the question of Delphi itself as the source of oracles that determine fate. How is it that these oracular sites open up. There were many of them in the ancient world. How is it that they have the ability to seal the fate of humans with their pronouncements which lead to self-fulfilling behavior on the part of humans that bring about the fate that is proscribed, merely by reacting to the oracle itself. This is the level where the singularity of Ultra Being appears which is the ultimate causal source of the story about Oedipus. Oedipus in this story pushes subjectivity through all the layers of its unfolding at the various meta-levels of Being. The thing that crosses all the meta-levels of Being is the aspects of Being, i.e. Truth, Reality, 3 Identity and Presence. These aspects and their anti-aspects transform at each meta-level of Being. And it is in response to this transformation that the Subject transforms as well. What is Truth and Reality or Identity and Presence is different at each meta-level and thus who the subject ‘is’ is also different. But what we are concerned about here is how the various traumatic regions of experience exemplify these transformations of the subject. The Oedipal conflict comes out of the wrongs of previous generations in the family of Oedipus. This miasma is passed down in the family transforming at each generation. But the trauma leaves its traces in various regions of experience, and these regions are related to the meta-levels of Being. Thus we see that Mind is the level of Pure Presence of the Subject to itself (what Derrida calls auto-affectation) which we see in Kant’s Transcendental Subject’s Apperception, and Husserl’s Transcendental Ego. This realm of pure reason is divided off from Practical Reason that concerns the body and ultimately morality. The body is exemplified by its behavior and lives in the realm of Process Being. Phenomenology as it moves form Husserl, to Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty delves more and more deeply into the Body. This gives rise to Genetic Phenomenology that starts with Husserl and then is taken up by Heidegger, then Merleau-Ponty and finally Deleuze. Heidegger’s dasein concentrates on the paradox of the being which gives rise to the world but is part of the world, which is another way of thinking about the paradox of Christ as God in human form on a mundane level. In Heidegger’s Being and Time we do not see the body and we do not find space treated fully. It is only with Merleau-Ponty that the role of the Body is taken seriously. MerleauPonty tries to translate the modalities of grasping of Dasein from present-at-hand to pointing and from ready-to-hand to grasping and thus put them into psychological terms that can be related to the body beyond mere instrumentality. Dasein may be thought of as the touch of the object between pointing that does not touch it and grasping that holds it. But in writing Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty discovers that there must be something like the expansion of beingin-the-world, which we see in a musician who becomes one with their instrument, or in the blind man with his stick. Thus Merleau-Ponty discovers Hyper Being on his own as the expansion of being-in-the-world, and that leads to the discovery of its opposite which is Wild Being that is the contraction of being-in-the-world in The Visible and the Invisible. The various kinds of Being drive deeper and deeper into the Body. The ultimate contraction of being-in-the-world is into the singularity of Ultra Being. When we think of Space and Time as singular, then we see that the singular is beyond expansion and contraction. The Body in process expresses itself as behavior as mentioned by Bergson in Matter and Memory. It is the immanence that supports the transcendence of mind. The mind in Cartesian dualism is the dual of extension. The body is extended when viewed objectively and it moves in extended space. Traumatic movement of the body may express itself as tics and other involuntary actions seeking completion. But at the next level down there is image and affect which is in the realm of Hyper Being. This is at the mammalian level of the brain. It is linked to language and thus we can use Metaphor therapy like that of David Grove to access it. On the other hand Sensory/Meaning levels are related to Wild Being which is related to the reptilian brain in which is encoded the fight/freeze/flight response. Then below that is the dreamtime and spiritual levels that we add to the SIBAM model which is related to the cellular level with all its myriad independent clocks that need synchroneity which is known only by expansion and contraction of the organism and related to Ultra Being. We can get an idea of how these various realms of experience relate to each other by looking at Blake’s four Zoas. Meaning is Urizen, Affect is Luvah, Behavior is Tharmas, and Image is Urthowna. The spiritual is the Nondual. So when we look at our series of regions of experience we see that Dreamtime and Sensation are not covered by a Zoa along with the spiritual level. But when we look at Hindu mythology we note that Albion who is sleeping is like Varuna. The Zoas arise from the Sleep of Albion. So the Dreamtime is the dream of Albion/Varuna/Hun Tun who is 4 a similar character in China. The Sensory is related to the reptilian brain, and we see in the Hindu myth that Varuna lays on a serpent in the ocean of the Nirguna Brahman. This serpent is the reptilian brain. Also there is no Zoa associated with the Sensory. The passage between the Sensory and Image is marked by the differentiation of Apollo/Brahma and Dionysus/Shiva the two fundamental opposites. In Primal Archetypal Wholeness I make the case that Apollo the wolf god of Initiation is related to the path way of individuation of Jung, while the Psychology of Nietzsche is that of Union with Dionysus. Beneath that is the nondual psychology of Varuna. Varuna dreams the illusion of the world that appears to us in sensory form that then becomes fantasy images. As the images separate from the sensations we get the split between the psychologies of individuation and union. Each Zoa has four parts which is the Zoa, his emanation which is feminine, and the shadow and the specter. The specter of Urthowna is the Poet Los. The specter of Tharmas is death which the body faces. The specter of Luvah is Orc the revolutionary. The specter of Urizen is Satan. It is the duality of Brahma/Shiva that splits to give rise to the four Zoas. Together they make up the archetypal field of the Quadrate of Quadrates that Jung discusses in Aion. At the end of the four Zoas there is the scenes of harvest where the Zoas work together that is an image of the Emergent Meta-system which is the image of the nondual. Interestingly Dreamtime represents Quintessence of the singularity of Ultra Being. The quintessence is the both X and ~X while Existence is nether X nor ~X. Dreamtime is shamanistic. Existence is nondual and thus spiritual. The arc of the regions of experience go from the singularity of the dreamtime to the nonduality of the spiritual. Similarly Sensory is transformed into Meaning. Image is transformed into Affect. And finally Behavior is the activity of the bodymind. It is interesting that Meaning as concept is without image of affect. It is the equivalent of the sensory within the mind. Meaning may be thought of as the fifth Aspect. Similarly image is composed of sensory bases but they are the precursors of behavior and lead to affect. Just as meaning cannot be captured by images so to the nondual cannot be captured by concepts. Deleuze talks about the fundamental fragmentation of the mind into faculties such as reason, memory, imagination etc. Here we are talking about the fundamental fragmentation of experience into regions based on the traces left by trauma. Blake’s four Zoas is the prehistory of the Bible narrative. It was recognized in his time that God in the bible has different names and different personalities and that in fact there are different Gods who claim to be the One God. Since the differences in God the transcendental is a reflection of the differences in Man we are seeing in the four Zoas a set of essential differences in the forms of life that become apparent in the ultraefficiency of “paradise”. Of course, the Zoas by their actions make paradise into a kind of hell. We can think of the four Zoas as four different Divided Lines. Plato’s Divided Line is that of Urizen, but there are different Divided Lines of Luvah, Tharmas And Urthowna which are invisible to us because of our emphasis on reason and the hell that it produces is though the repression of the other Zoas. It is only when Albion awakes that the Zoas can cooperate and then harvest and feasting occurs under the watchful eye of Albion awake. When we combine the four Zoas narrative with the mythology of the Hindus we get a complete picture of the span of the traumatic consciousness. And let us add quickly that there is no untraumatized consciousness. Birth itself is a trauma. Consciousness itself is “fallen” in this sense. But what we need to come to terms with is the fact that Words do not help heal the fallen consciousness. This is the insight of Peter Levine that it is the reptilian brain where the trauma is stored and that accessing that is completely different from what the higher brain and the mammalian brain can access. Essentially Somatic Experiencing spans the range of SIBAM but they have forgotten dreamtime and spirituality. Dreamtime is approached by Robert Bosnak in his work on dreams though alchemy. And so this is an essential addition to the SIBAM model. But also we much add the nondual of spirituality as something that exceeds meaning. And we recognize that these two limits have to do with the difference between paradox and supra-rationality and thus present to us the limits of the divided line. However, the divided line itself only arises slowly as we move from the deep sleeping dream 5 of Vishnu through the snake or dragon of sensation and though the split between Brahma and Shiva, i.e. creation and destruction, one and many. At that point the arc of the four divided lines begin with Urthona, then Tharmas, then Luvah, and finally Urizen. The divided line of Urizen is the one that Plato discusses in the Republic, and that is the foundation of the structure of the Western worldview. When we go beyond the Divided Line is when we ask what is the nature of the lines that divide it. Those lines are the nonduals emptiness, manifestation and void. The Divided Line separates doxa from ratio, and within doxa it separates grounded from ungrounded appearance/opinion on the one side and representable from non-representable intelligibles on the other side. The Geometry of Euclid is the central example of the power of reason which finds proofs that are eternal within an axiomatic system. Geometry of Euclid produces an image of the persistence of Being within Becoming. If we map the divided line on the DSIBAMS model then we see that sensation maps to void, and meaning to emptiness, and behavior maps to manifestation. Dreamtime is ungrounded opinion/appearance. Image is grounded opinion/appearance. Affect is representable intelligibles. Spirituality is non-representable intelligibles. The structure of the entire arc can be understood in terms of the structure of the divided line. Zoa is from the dreamtime. The feminine emanation takes up the position of Affect as Anima. The shadow takes up the position of Image. The specter takes up the position of Spirituality. The key question is what is it that separates the different divisions of the line from each other. In this case sensation separates the Zoa from its shadow. Behavior separates the emanation from the shadow and the Zoa. Meaning separates the Specter from the Zoa, shadow and emanation. Thus the specter is the spiritualization of the Zoa. Los is the spiritualization of Urthona, Death is the spiritualization of Tharmas, Orc is the spiritualization of Luvah, and Satan is the spiritualization of Urizen. For Blake the god of the Transcendental Naturalists (Spinoza) was Satan. But the field we are discussing is the same as that which Jung calls the Quadrate of Quadrates in Aion under the rubric of the Moses marriage story. It is the sixteen archetypes that appear as four times four. This structure appears in the sketches that were done by Jung from which the Redbook mandalas germinated that were part of the exhibition that came with the Red Book. The fragmentation of the archetypes from each other is primordial and is based on trauma, but the discontinuities between these elements are themselves nondual. This is the key point which is that the traumatic field is shot through with the nondualities. The possibility of healing the trauma through nonduality is interspersed with the traumatic traces themselves. Thinking of subjectivity as being the result of trauma is very different from thinking of it as naturally arising as a positive phenomenon in natural existence without trauma. Hegel begins with the Master/Slave dialectic and says that only the Slave has the chance of producing Selfconsciousness. Nietzsche tries to counter this by developing a genealogy that explains the development of the slave morality. But he also tries to develop the idea of a self-consciousness of the Master, who he calls the Beast. But both master and slave can experience trauma and it is trauma that leads to self-consciousness either in the master or the slave, because it is trauma that makes us rebound on ourselves due to the after effects of the devastation of the trauma that leaves its long lasting effects and traces. Attempting to deal with these traces becomes a major preoccupation of the traumatized. And the major insight of Peter Levine is that animals in the wild have a way to deal with trauma built into their organisms that allows them to erase traumatic traces. As humans in culture we have forgotten this path to healing of trauma that is within us and so we live with the trauma as it builds up over a lifetime. Those traumatic traces are at the reptilian level of the brain, which is below the mammalian level and the cognitive level. Thus therapies that resort to a talking cure or emotional catharsis will not touch the traumatic core. That core can even be deeper at the cellular level where there is only contraction beyond the fight/freeze/flight responses at the reptilian level. Because of these levels of brain functioning 6 there is levels of subjectivity which we have outlined. The whole edifice stands on the Nirguna Brahman, which is the Godhead discussed by Master Eckhart. The first differentiation is the dreamtime and nondual spiritutality, i.e. the limits of the divided line that appears as paradox and supra-rational. The Nirguna Brahman is whatever is beyond these limits. These are the limits of human experience as differentiated. Vishnu is the nondual between the dualities of Brahma/Shiva. But within these limiting conditions there is a distinction between Dreamtime and Spirituality related to the singularity of Ultra Being, and the meaning and sensory related to the Enigma of Wild being. We see the opposites of Sensory/Meaning in the Meaning of Man of Sidi Ali alJamal as the opposites associated with man, differentiated from Inward/Outward associated with God and Celestial and Terrestrial associated with the Heavens and Earth. What we are seeing here in this differentiation is the articulation of the celestial from the terrestrial. The Body as the locus of behavior is terrestrial and the move up toward the Nirguna Brahman becomes successively more celestial. Spirituality and Dreamtime is the highest level of the self-moving toward the celestial without entering the undifferentiated. Sensory and Meaning is in the middle between the extremes of the Body and the Nirguna Brahman. They appear at the level of Wild Being. That means that these opposites are chiasmic and reversible. In the dreamtime you have mixture while in nondual spirituality there are opposites that are both effective simultaneously without interfering and thus there is separation between the opposites that cannot be breached. The nondual of Vishnu is the nondual between these two duals of paradox and supra-rationality. Vishnu is dreaming existence but at the same time Vishnu is asleep on the ocean of Nirguna Brahman. What separates Vishnu from the ocean is the snake on which he lays. This is the reptilian level which is both sensory and meaning chiasmically. At this level the subject is an enigma. After this level the subject splits into the impossible singularity of Ultra Being or the dual non-duals of emptiness/void. In the Mahabharata the Kauravas all come from an iron ball, they are the representatives of Ultra Being. The Pandavas on the other hand each come from gods and they are trying to follow the Dharma, but each of them violates the Dharma under the guidance of Krishna the avatar of Vishnu. Their downfall comes from the violation of the Dharma. The Mahabharata lays out the field of subjectivity in the conflict between these two extremes. It has the fundamental idea of Dasein at its core in as much as the author, Vyasa, of the tale enters into the tale to become the progenitor of the two sets of children of the two brothers who end up at war. Dasein is the one who makes up the world but is part of the world he makes up. That is to say Dasein is the one who in ecstasy projects the world but then lives in the world he projects. This is what lays behind the Kantian a prioris when considered from the point of view of finitude. The whole tale unfolds from an incident when an archer kills a pair of animals mating who are humans who have taken the form of animals so they experience sex and death at the same time. The male animal curses the archer and the tragedy miasmicly unfolds from there. So there is a trauma at the center of the story. In some versions of this story it is Shiva who is both the archer and the slain making the action that causes the trauma reflexive. The self is either a singularity or empty/void at the level of Ultra Being. Looked at within the dreamtime there is mixture but looked at from the vantage point of the nondual there is separation. The dreamtime is shamanistic while the nondual is prophetic. Shamanism is based on the accretion of personal power though the unseen, while the prophetic model is based on seeking to cling to powerlessness. The model of Shamanism is lucid dreaming in which one wakes up and takes control of oneself within the dream. The model of the prophetic approach is purification and annihilation of the self within the nondual. At the level of dreamtime and nondual spirituality the self wanders between these extremes. In the Nirguna Brahman, or the God-head these distinctions between the ultimate possibilities of the self vanish. But if we move to Wild Being then there is the difference between sensory and meaning and the self becomes chiasmic or reversible. The dreamtime clarifies as the sensory aspects of existence, and the nondual becomes more concrete as meanings. The minimal difference in meaning is the chiasm where you reverse two words 7 which are significant in their conjunction. Similarly when we have feelings within our bodies that are traumatic traces then we will oscillate between them in a titration as is done in Somatic Experiencing. The move from one to the other is not the same as the reverse movement of ones concentration and attention, there is some asymmetry between the feelings that comes out in the reversibility between them. What is interesting is that there is an intimate connection between the sensory configurations within the body that are the traces of trauma and the realization of meaning. Almost all the releases of the traumatic binds within the body are accompanied by deep personal realizations of meaning. This deep connection between the sensory and meaning within ourselves is enigmatic. This occurs at the level of the reptilian brain where the trauma is stored. But the release of the stored trauma opens up a deep realization with respect to meaning within our lives. If we go to the next level then we see the difference between the image and affect. This is the Mammalian level of the brain. The image is seen in terms of metaphor and Metaphor Therapy of David Grove and Cei Davies Linn unleashes the self-transformation of the metaphors within the ambience of Clean Language. This leads to tremendous releases of affect which are bound up in the metaphoric structures. The internal metaphoric life of the individual is a great mystery. But the confrontation of the mystery of oneself is the Query. The therapist puts questions to the metaphors in the manner seen clearly in The Metaphors in Mind2 in which the clean questions taken from David Grove’s innovative therapeutic work are enunciated. But as we explore the level of image and affect there are bonds to the level of sensation and meaning. The metaphors are experienced as sensations within the body, and the metaphors carry information across within their transformation. So the content of the affective metaphoric images is from the level of Wild Being. While the level of Wild Being deals with intensities and lines of flight which can best be captured by thinking about the Mandelbrot set, on the other hand Hyper Being deals with the Differance of differing and deferring which plays itself out in the transformation of the metaphors. There are differences that make a difference to the singular individual that are played out in the transformations of the personal metaphors. It is at this level that language becomes fully engaged. Both the Sensory and Meaning of the Wild Being level escape language, while the metaphors live in language itself. In fact our language itself is an archeological deposit of myriad metaphors which we make our own and use them to construct our own metaphoric lifeworld as a Personal Cosmology. In fact we use all the master tropes of Synecdoche, Metonymy, Irony and Metaphor to structure our understanding of our own world. This understanding (verstehen) appears in the slips of the tongue and odd language usages that appear in our talk (rede). We express our attitude and approach to the world as we discover ourselves to be thrown within it (befindlichkeit). The Query is the core of Care of Dasein. Care (Sorge) of Dasein is a deeper more long term level than the Lacanian Desire. The Enigma is beyond care because it is overwhelmed by the chiasm of sensation and meaning of the traumatic event. But the Query still cares (Sorge) and that is where its self-questioning comes from. On the other hand if we go up a level we find Dasein as the ‘subject’ as it is inscribed in Process Being. Dasein is the one who projects the world and then takes up a place within the projected world. Dasein finds itself subjected to the World through Das Man (They) in which it lives as Lacan also tells us using the term the ‘Big Other’. Dasein is thrown into the world it has itself projected as part of its Mitsein, i.e. its intersubjective community within which it shares its lifeworld. Dasein we see here as behavior of the body, in the manner of Merleau-Ponty looking at the body in the world which tries to give Flesh to the conceptualization of Heidegger’s dasein. Dasein is prior to the 2 Lawley, James, and Penny Tompkins. Metaphors in Mind: Transformation Through Symbolic Modelling. London: Developing Co. Press, 2000. 8 Subject/Object distinction being drawn. The body is subject to the dictates of the mind, the body objects to the abuse of trauma imposed on it by the Other. In Hegel Dasein is the determinate individual which appears out of Becoming, which in turn is the synthesis of Being and Nothing. For Hegel the Heraclitian flux is the synthesis of Being and nothing (in the Buddhist sense of emptiness/void). Dasein is the determinate individual that constitutes itself by constituting its lifeworld as an ecstatic projection. We see the traumatic traces of behaviors in the body, as tics or restless motions, or involuntary actions of the body. These are all the things that the Mind would like to forget in its dissociation as it is floating in an illusory Pure Being which is Parmenidian stasis. But, of course, this stasis rejects all motion, and it posits the paradoxes of Zeno to prove that all motion is an illusion. But this illusion reflects back on itself, because there is no illusion without some embodiment supporting it. These very illusions as Zizek says are the nature of fantasy. Pure Being is an illusion projected on the screen of Pure Being. The projector is in the body and has embedded in it all the other meta-levels of Being. The projection must assume the blank screen (the anamorphic object petit a of Lacan) and its nihilistic opposite the master signifier (Phi) which intrudes to organize the content that appears on the screen which we know as the unity of the Ego (but is called by Lacan the phallus, due to the patriarchal nature of our culture). To Lacan (as seen through the eyes of Zizek) both the Big Other as the Symbolic structure of language itself and the Subject are empty, or crossed out. On the other hand the Real is what cannot be reduced to a symbolic structure and represented or repeated in language. Between these two extremes of the aspects of Truth and Reality appears the Imagination, which is fictional and illusory at the same time. That is the realm of the fantasy itself which is projected on the screen of Pure Being. Of interest are the anti-mediation of the anamorphic objects within the Borromean Knot of the three registers Symbolic/Imaginary/Real. Object petit a is the lack that appears opposite the imaginary projection of fantasy, it is the lack that can receive the projection which is the screen of Pure Being itself. It is called the object cause of desire, because it is the receptive lack into which the desire is projected. On the other hand the phallus as master signifier appears as an anti-mediation opposite the Symbolic, because it is the source of the organization of the symbolic system which is flawed, inconsistent, and fragmented in itself, but is organized by the excessive power of the master signifier, which we can think of as the ego, yet it is always displaced from the center of the Ego as if it were alien to it. Opposite the Real as an antimediation between the Symbolic and Imaginary is the little piece of the real which intervenes as an interference between the fantasy and the Symbolic structure of the Big Other. This is the symptom that shows up to point to the trauma of the Real which cannot be absorbed into the symbolic structure. These anamorphic objects that appear as anti-mediations in the overlapping and interference of the three registers as they knot together are nodal points that center around the ecstasy of projection itself which Lacan calls jouissance, overflowing sense-meaning that fills up the lifeworld of the individual. Jouissance is an excess that overflows from what is merely satisfying. It appears in the transformation from drive to desire. Drive is the circling around a hole in the symbolic fabric where the laws of existence no longer apply. Desire is being caught up in the ecstasy of the fantasy projection that overflows within the lifeworld. Dasein projects the subject/object split in all its messiness and all the permutations that produce the field of fantasy that allows our lives to be organized. The subject as impassive observer of the object, but also the one subjected to the trials and tribulations and traumas inherent in life to which the body objects. The ananomorphic anti-mediations within this field are the key turning points of our perspectives that transform our experience when the realizations bubble up from the projection mechanism at the deeper levels of the self. The Jungian Self is a totality dreamt of as ultimately a mandala when it reorganizes itself in the individuation process. But this Apolloian process of initiation and individuation is only half of the process which is counterbalanced by the Nietzschian envelopment in the Dionysian, which is self-destructive immersion in the All. But these opposite poles represented by Brahma (unity, creation) and Shiva (multiplicity, destruction) play out around the nondual center of Vishnu who is dreaming at the very depths of our self on the verge 9 of the Godhead (Nirguna Brahmin). There is an arc of unfolding by which the dreamtime unfolds into the sensory, which then gives rise to the four Zoas, and eventually return to nondual spirituality. This arc of the self is at cross purposes to the flow of the ecstasy that projects the fantasies on the screen of Pure Being from the depths of the other meta-levels of Being. The Self is not merely a totality as opposed to the unity of the ego. Rather the self is a dynamism of projection that surges up from the depths of ourselves which can be explored because of the interferences and blockings that are produced within ourselves by Trauma. Looked at in reverse our Self has the imprint of the traumas which we have experienced and their traces we carry around with us where ever we go. The self is the entire dynamic field within which this tragicomedy unfolds. But that Self is inscribed in a worldview which it projects. In order to understand the Self fully we need to explore the structure of that worldview, and also the interspace between them which is the Pleroma. 10