Holonomic Alchemical Science

Holonomic Alchemical Science -- Kent Palmer

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HOLONOMICALCHEMICAL

SCIENCE

Kent D. Palmer, Ph.D.

P.O. Box 1632Orange CA 92856 USA

[email protected]

Copyright 2000 K.D. Palmer.All Rights Reserved. Not for distribution.

Version 0.01; 09/19/00; hsA00f00.doc

Keywords: Holonomics, Holon, SpecialSystems Theory, Emergent Meta-Systems,Autopoietic Systems, Reflexive Systems,And Dissipative Systems, Archon, Holoid,Archetypal, Jung, Alchemy, Imaginal,Hillman, Giegerich

Establishing the Context

This work attempts to make the case for anattempt to reinstate Alchemy as a vital partof our scientific and philosophical tradition.Unfortunately since Newton Alchemy hasbeen languishing as it has lost its directionthrough the myriad interpretations that havebeen projected on it and due to its ownmyriad interpretations by alchemicalpractitioners within our tradition. We haveactually lost our ability to understandalchemy so that it has become foreign to useven though it was a substantive part of ourscientific tradition for a long time. It is agreat secret that Newton who is seen as thefather of modern physics spent most of histime on alchemical experiments. It is onlyrecently that scholars have begun to delveinto this shadow side of the great scientific

hero. Here we will go back to the roots ofAlchemy in Egypt to find our starting pointfor the introduction of a new form of sciencewhich actually has very old roots within ourtradition. Hopefully this will vindicate thealchemical searching of Newton and otheralchemical practitioners within the Westerntradition who saw through a glass darkly thatsomething was missing in the WesternScientific perspective on Nature. Thatsomething is a new way to look at systemstheory that will be introduced in this essay.Hopefully by the end of the essay you will beconverted to the Alchemical perspectivepresented here yourself and want to consideryourself as an Alchemist as I do. Perhapsthat will give you a new perspective on thepossibilities of science itself that goes beyondthe narrow confines which is presented byWestern Scientific practice today. It is thisdehumanized Science that underlies thepervasive destruction of the earth based theuse of the out of control Technology whichcalls for a deep rethinking of our position onthe use of Science and Technology ingeneral. It is this rethinking that leads usback into our tradition to attempt to discoverwhat went wrong and why that caused us tobe alienated from our own place in thecontext of the earth. One answer to thatquestion might be that one of the placeswhere things went wrong was when weabandoned Alchemy which saw us as thesubject, instrument and object of our ownexperiments rather than nature which asBacon advised we torture on the rack to forceit to reveal it's secrets. Even though we aredreadfully cruel to other human beings weare less likely to want to torture ourselves,and if we see ourselves as connected to therest of nature then by extension perhaps wewould be less likely to want to torture theearth and our fellow inhabitants, if ourscience was not alienated from us as Husserldescribes in his book Krisis. Alchemy can bethought of as non-alienated and non-anomicscience prior to its reification. Alienatedscience means that through it we becomedecathected objects of other investigators that

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treat us inhumanly. Anomic means thatscience sucks the meaning out of life andleaves us as empty husks without soul orspirit. Through Western science we reifyourselves into alienated and anomic creaturestortured by our torturing of the earth and itsinhabitants. How do we get out of this deadlysyndrome by which we are destroyingourselves by destroying our home with theother creatures that inhabit this small planetwith us? The answer can only be through selfunderstanding. We need to understand ourown history and look back for the forks inthe road not taken that might have taken usto a different future than the one we are nowexperiencing. Alchemy is one of those roadswhich eventually, after Newton, wasabandoned for the emphasis of a small partof Newton's own work, i.e. the Principia.What did Newton see that we did not seewhich led us down another road than the onethat he himself pursued. We call him afounder of our approach to science yet we donot follow him. If we had followed him whatmight be different today in our relation totechnology and science? This is the kind ofquestion that we will attempt to explore inthis work.

Alchemy as we find it in the tradition ingeneral is very difficult to understand due tothe fact that it has meant so many differentthings to so many different people throughthe ages. Today when we read the alchemicalworks they are generally almost impossibleto understand because the way of thinkingthat they embody is so different from ourmodern way of thinking. Thus, here we willbe interpreting alchemy in a very specificway which will be called HolonomicAlchemy. We assume that the essence ofalchemy is related to what will be calledSpecial Systems theory and Emergent Meta-systems theory that will be presented in thisessay. We base this interpretation on theexistence of some scant indications in thehistory of Alchemy that these SpecialSystems may have been known and havebeen the focus of alchemy in the beginning

stages in Egypt. Over the ages this focus waslost and Alchemy was interpreted in variousways at various times without regaining thisinitial inspiration found in the work of Bolos(Pseudo-Democritus) and Ostanes histeacher. Bolos wrote in the name ofDemocritus, but did not adopt his atomictheory. Instead it was the theory of ediolonsthat was taken up by the neo-Platonistalchemists. Democritus thought that eachthing projected an image of itself thateffected animals and men. It was the imageof each thing that haunted that thing in ourimaginations which was the basis for thetransformational characteristics of alchemy.Bolos speaks of his teacher Ostanes who helost before the final secret of alchemy wasrevealed. In the story Bolos attempted toraise the image of Ostanes, but he could notsay anything, he merely pointed at a pillar inthe temple. They could not interpret this sign,but continued the research that had beenbegun under the direction of Ostanes nowworking alone. Later there was acommemoration of Ostanes during which thepillar opened up and was searched. Nothingwas found in the pillar except the words:Nature produces Nature, Nature conquersNature, and Nature delights Nature. Bolossaid that this aphorism summed up what hediscovered independently better than anyformulation that he had previously heard.This story is very illuminating. First of all wesee that it is the ediolon of Ostanes which isquestioned about the secret of alchemy. Thatediolon can not speak but only sign. But thesign is not adequate to give the message atfirst. Later the pillar is discovered to beempty when it pops open instead of full ofmanuscripts. But eventually it is found thatthere is within the pillar a saying whichOstanes meant to communicate with his sign.That saying sums up what Bolos discoveredhimself in the intervening years andsummarized his own discovery.

One point of this story is that you candiscover the secret of alchemy on your own,in other words you do not need the


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transmission from the master to comprehendthe secret of alchemy. A second point is thatOstanes cannot speak after death, but canmake a sign as an ediolon. He indicatessomething that appears solid. But later thisthing is discovered to be empty and still laterit is discovered that it holds the inscription ofthe saying in question. Thus, words are notnecessary to transfer this knowledge, onlysigns. But the signs point to somethingseemingly solid like a pillar but which isactually empty. Then we find that the pillarhas inscribed within that emptiness thesaying. This transformation from solidity, toemptiness, to inscription is also veryimportant for our understanding of the secretof alchemy. We might say that the secret ofalchemy is bound up with the move fromform to formlessness and beyondformlessness to the order inscribed within theformless.

The inscription is extremely peculiar. It saysthat nature produces nature, then natureconquers nature, and finally that naturedelights nature. The first of these statementsmight be said as Francis Bacon says it usingthe phrase Natura Naturans. In other wordsNature Natures. This statement alludes to afundamental way of looking at thingsendemic to the Indo-European worldview inwhich the highest state is when the samething is both a noun and a verb. We mightsay Form Forms, Shape Shapes, or Being Is.Nature Natures, i.e. nature unfolds itselfnaturally and thus produces nature fromitself. This state of self production unfoldsinto the state of self-conquering and self-delighting. Conquering and Delighting areclearly meant to be opposites that unfoldfrom Self-production. In what follows wewill give these two further states beyond selfproduction very specific interpretations. Butat this point it is possible to see that in orderfor something to conquer itself or delightitself it must first be produced. Selfconquering has to do with control of the self,which can be thought of in terms ofcybernetics, or dissipation by something

through a medium of something else. Delightmeans more than mere control but mutualrecognition which suggests the social.

There are two directions to go in theinterpretation of these sayings of Ostanes.One way is to think of the sayings asreferring to physical nature and the otherway is to think of the sayings as referring tothe logos nature indicated by Democritus inhis use of the term eidolon. In other wordswe can think of nature producing itselfphysically or we can think of natureproducing images of itself in the logos.Similarly we can understand the conqueringand delight in this way as well. If we think ofthe conquering of self physically then wewould concentrate on control whereas if wethink of the conquering in terms ofdissipation we can think of the dissipation ofthe images throughout the medium of thelogos among things. Similarly we can thinkof physical delight which is a sensation andthe delight on the level of logos that perhapsmight be expressed in terms of languagethrough poetry.

Both Plato and Aristotle suggested that itwas possible to change the nature of thingsby changing their constitution in terms of theelements earth, air, fire, water. Neo-Platonism projected this suggestion out ontonature and attempted to found a science thatcomprehended changes at the elementalstructural level. It thought that it had foundin Alchemy the experimental evidence forsuch transformations. Alchemy was built onthe craft tradition of Egypt whichtransformed base things into things thatappeared golden. There was never anyquestion about actually turning things intogold beyond the appearance of gold untillater. Rather Egyptian metallurgy built upondyeing industry and attempted to do the samething with various metals, using one metal toproduce the sheen of another. Eventuallythese formulas for giving the appearance ofgold were related more and more closely tothe philosophical belief in intersubstance


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transformation of the neo- Platonists andeventually this gave rise to the suspicion thatit was possible to really transform somethingfrom one metal into gold or silver as we findin the works of Gerber.

But what we really want to do is to try tounderstand what the phrases of Ostanesmeant within their proper context of thetransformation of appearances. We mightsuspect that this had something to do with theeidolons that appear in the theory ofDemocritus. In other words it has somethingto do with the imagination of imagesemanated from the things. Nature producesnature through images. Nature conquersnature through images. Nature delightsnature through images. This makes us thinkthat there might be some connection betweenAlchemy as originally constituted byDemocritus, Ostanes and Bolos andArchetypal Psychology such as thatadvocated by Jung and Hillman andGiegerich1. Archetypal Psychology relates tothe images that are intrinsic to the things,including ourselves, as discovered by us. ForArchetypal Psychology there is a deep orderto the production of images that appear inour psyches. That order is the production ofnature within ourselves for us. Those imagesconquer us and delight us. And ultimately itis the primal images that come first beforethe logos of poetry and the physus of ourbodies. These images tell us about our souland its relation to the worldsoul. So thatAlchemy becomes the work of bringing tomanifestation the soulfullness of the worldand our selves.

But this view of Alchemy traps us in therealm of psyche and does not allow us tointegrate this understanding with WesternScience as it stands and thus leads us into themire of subjectivity and cuts off any relationto the objective world of science. In otherwords Democritus is prophetic for usbecause he came up with the theory of 1 http://mythology.org/publications/Paris2000.pdf

eidolons and atoms. Presumably in his theorythey were related intrinsically to each other.But for us the two realms, the imaginal realmof the soul known through archetypes and theobjective world of science that studies atoms,particles and quarks have become utterlyseparated. As Giegerich says Psychologyproper is a study of the soul of the soul whileall other subjects study the soul of somethingelse. Thus Giegerich says that we must riseabove images to realize the logical basis ofthe split between the science of the Psycheand all other Sciences. But this onlyemphasizes the split even more than merelydiscussing the archetypal images.

Our question becomes whether there is a wayout of this impasse. Is there a way tounderstand the Psyche in the context of theother sciences which takes seriously theimages and ideas of the Psyche but also isgrounded in the experimental approach toother phenomena that is cherished byWestern Science. What we are looking for isa bridge or a rosetta stone that will allow usto move between these two very differentforms of science, i.e. the alchemy of imagesand the experimental science of the atoms,both of which Democritus founded. How dowe manage to integrate the two as wepresume that Democritus must have done?

Warning Alchemist at Work

How does one become an alchemist? It iscertainly not by studying alchemy itself. Thisis because alchemy itself is a lost sciencewhich has become mired in multipleinterpretations that are all in conflict witheach other. However, this lost science needsto be reclaimed because modern WesternScience has blindspots that cause manyproblems both intellectually and practicallyin our world. Alchemy represents a historicalalternative path in which human experienceis valued as part of the scientific endeavor.Alchemy as represented by Democritusattempts to bridge the gulf between the


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atomic quantitative view of the world and theeidolons which give us a qualitative view ofthe world through images projected by thethings. But finding that bridge is not an easything to do in a world split into dualities thatrelegates Alchemy to the dustbin of historywhile it exalts quantitative science andforgets about the need to balance quantitywith quality.

As for myself, I did not start off attemptingto resurrect Alchemy. I only discovered muchlater that what I was up to corresponded towhat the earliest Alchemists had in mindwhen they formulated their science in Egyptlong before the Arabs and the Europeansbecame interested in the Alchemical project.In fact, what I was interested in was therelation between Western Science andAlternative Sciences. I have pursued thisquestion with some vigor and to some depthover the last twenty five years or so. Onlyrecently did I realize that the conclusions thatI had drawn were related to Alchemy, as itwas originally conceived. In this work I hopeto put forward the answers that I havegleaned by these years of study and hopefullyin the process produce a new form ofalchemy on a strong scientific basis which Icall Holonomic Alchemy. This newfoundation of Alchemy solves the problem ofthe relation between the ediolons and theatoms posited by Democritus, as a form ofthe logos/physus split that is endemic to ourworldview.

Let me explain the progression of my ownstudies that led me to claim Alchemy as anew basis for a more subtle science that whatexists now in terms of the development ofWestern Science. When I went to London Idid my Ph.D. dissertation on The Structureof Theoretical Systems in Relation toEmergence. In this thesis I consider aradically different kind of scientific endeavorbased on what I called the Logic ofDisconnection, which is radically opposed tothe underlying continuity posited as Beingand assumed by modern Western Science. In

that dissertation I analyzed the kinds ofBeing discovered in modern ContinentalPhilosophy and showed that what they weretalking about were various meta-levels ofBeing. I noted that these meta-levels of Beingstopped at the fifth meta-level and at thatpoint we leave behind Being and enter intothe realm of Existence. In that realm there isno assumption of continuity such as we positthrough the meta-physical concept of Beingthat we project as the world. Rather inExistence what becomes necessary is theopposite assumption of radical discontinuity.I use the work of Sidi Ali al-Jamal as a basisfor describing what this kind of science ofexistence might be like. I see that science ofexistence as the basis of many traditionalsciences that have historically been promotedin the Chinese culture, Islamic cultures, andBuddhist cultures. In other words unless wechange our primary assumptions radically toinclude a fundamental discontinuity it will beimpossible to construct a coherent theory ofsciences of Existence as opposed to sciencesof Being.

After leaving London I continued myresearches as I made my living as a SystemsEngineer and Software Engineer inAerospace firms in Southern California. Icontinued my study of alternative sciencessuch as Homeopathy and Acupuncture thatcontradict the assumptions of modernWestern Science attempting to understandtwo things. First I was attempting tounderstand the difference between theWestern Worldview and TraditionalWorldviews such as those of Taoism inChina, Islam and Buddhism. Second I wasattempting to understand the differencebetween Western Science and the traditionalsciences that emanate from these traditionalworldviews.

In the process of this study I wrote a longmanuscript called The Fragmentation ofBeing and the Path beyond the Void. In thismanuscript I attempt to delve into the depthsof the Western Worldview in order to


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understand its underpinnings. Thismanuscript framed the problem in terms ofthe transition from Being to Existence withinthe Western worldview. It discovers at thecore of the Western worldivew a fundamentalfragmentation due to the fact that the Meta-levels of Being do not extend infinitely but infact cannot be found past meta-level four ofBeing. In other words it becomes clear that atthe center of the Western Worldview there isan emptiness that we must take veryseriously because it is our transition fromBeing to Existence within our worldview.What I discovered writing that book was thatthe structures of the world are veryconservative in spite of the emergent changesthat transform the worldview occasionally.What is conserved is the structure of theIndo-European worldview in terms of meta-levels of Being and the interface withExistence at the fifth meta-level. Afterfinishing that manuscript I continued toresearch until in about 1993 I discovered thebasis for understanding both the bridge fromthe Western worldview based in Being toother Traditional worldviews based inExistence, which is also the bridge frommodern Western Science to TraditionalSciences such as Homeopathy andAcupuncture. To capture and develop thatdiscovery I went on to write a series ofworking papers on Reflexive AutopoieticDissipative Special Systems. A newintroduction to these working papers nowexists. Also various explanatory papers weredelivered to the ISSS 2000 conference inorder to make the theory more widely known.

The key idea that I discovered was that therewere a series of emergent levels beyondstandard General Systems Theory whichexplained how the traditional qualitativesciences of existence related to the modernquantitative sciences. I will explain theseemergent levels and how they relate to eachother in the following section. But here weare merely discussing the serendipity of thediscovery. The discovery occurred byaccident when I just happened to be studying

two things in parallel and just happened towonder about their interrelation with eachother. One thing had to do with the FormalStructural Systems theory of George Klir. Ihad written a paper on how that theory wasrelated to software engineering designmethodologies that appears in my manuscriptWild Software Meta-systems. At that time Ihappened to be reading a book on HyperComplex Algebras and began to wonder howthe series of Hyper Complex Algebras(complex, quaternion, octonion, sedenion). Itturned out that both the lattice ofMethodological Distinctions that Klir talksabout and the series of Hyper-complexAlgebras have in common the element of realnumbers. When we connect both these seriesof emergent hierarchies, one of order theother or algebras, then we get a larger latticewith some very interesting properties. Thisdiscovery of the larger lattice prompted me tobegin studying the whole area again in termsof this structure and it was discovered that itprovided precisely the kind of structure I hadbeen searching for these many years. Since1993 I have been searching for historicalprecedents for this structure and have foundmany of them far and wide. The structure isvery peculiar and so it leaves a uniquesignature on the theoretical and practicalstructures which it is associated with. I havecome to think that this structure is a losttheoretical basis for the traditional scienceswhich make sense of Acupuncture andHomeopathy and other sorts of traditionalsciences based on the assumption of thediscontinuity of existence rather than thecontinuity of Being. From the beginning ofthe new Millennium I have begun attemptingto make this theory more widely knownbecause I have assured myself that it isindeed what I have thought it was for manyyears, i.e. the necessary bridge to a new wayof looking at science that combines thetraditional sciences of existence with themodern sciences of Being to raise both to anew level of subtlety and sophistication thatneither has achieved before. It fills in thesome of the blindspots of Western Science


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giving it the ability to be more responsive toits environment. It gives traditional sciencesa positive theoretical basis where previouslygood explanations were lacking so that theywere mocked for being merely superstitionsor perhaps forms of magic.

There are really two formations that areinvolved. One is the formation produced bythe hyper complex algebras themselves whichare related to systems and called SpecialSystems Theory. But there is also a meta-formation that is made up of all the hyper-complex division algebras plus the normalreal algebra which is called the EmergentMeta-system. Many of the historicalexamples I have found of this formationelucidate the Emergent Meta-system. It wasby chance that I happened to see in a book byEdinger on Jung's Aion a diagram that lookedlike the emergent meta-system formation. Ilooked up the diagram's in Jung's book, andthen realized I would have to read it in orderto know what he was talking about. When Iread the book I discovered that Jung hadknown about the Emergent Meta-systemformation and had made an image of it. Iwent on to read Jung's MysteriumConjunctus and became interested in thequestion of whether Alchemy concerned theEmergent Meta-system in any way. Afterfinishing the Mysterium Conjunctus andJung's other Alchemical Texts I went on toread many books on alchemy. The mostinteresting of these was the book by Lindsayon Alchemy in Egypt. In that book I foundwhat I had been looking for in the sectiondealing with Bolos and Ostanes. Their sayingis a clear example of the Special Systems.This made me realize that what I haddiscovered really was the root of Alchemyand that this placed it squarely within ourtradition rather than as something outsidethat tradition as many of the other examples Ihave found turned out to be. Thus I realizedthat what I had discovered was the originalbasis of Alchemy which is precisely analternative form of science within ourtradition prior to the triumph of atomism. By

contributing a theoretical basis for Alchemycommensurate with Modern Western Scienceit is possible to construct a new more subtleand more sophisticated Science by thecombination of this Alchemical Science withnormal modern Western Science.

By becoming interested in Jung's works again(I had done my senior thesis at KansasUniversity on Jung and SymbolicInteractionism) I began to explore the worldof Jungian psychology. Doing that Idiscovered the archetypal psychology ofHillman and the critique of that by Giegerich.I recently attended the "Psychology at theThreshold" conference where both Hillmanand Giegerich attended and gavepresentations. On my return from thatconference I read Giegerich's The Soul'sLogical Life. It turns out that this theory ofLogical and Archetypal Psychology is anexploration of the phenomena of the eidolonsof Democritus which is related to SpecialSystems Theory and the Theory of EmergentMeta-systems which explain the relationbetween quantity and quality. Therefore inthis essay I will deal with the extension ofArchetypal Psychology as it relates to thearticulation of the broader theory ofHolonomic Science and as it relates to theinterpretation of Alchemy in general as analternative kind of science to the modernWestern experimental science. HolonomicScience

Giegerich makes a case for why Jung andHillman's psychology is interesting, and thatis because they take seriously the concept ofSoul. This is an extreme case but it points toexactly what modern Western experimentalscience has lost, i.e. its soul. Soul, God,Spirit and other meta-physical concepts haveno place in modern Western experimentalscience. Alchemy on the other hand hasthroughout its history been concerned withsoul and nature both. This concern for therelation between soul and nature is preciselywhat we need to recapture in our scientificendeavors. There are even some books these


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days that concern the nature of soul from ascientific viewpoint such as The SpiritualUniverse by Fred Alan Wolf. He usesQuantum Physics as a basis for explainingthe unexplainable. The popularity of hiswork and similar works on the soul by othersincluding Hillman, More and others of theArchetypal Psychology school shows thatthis lack with respect to modern Westernphilosophy and science is something that isheart felt by many. Bringing togetherAlchemy with modern Western scienceshould address this issue of the relation ofSoul, Spirit to other more mundane termslike World and Self which are levels ofabstraction that may be seen to relate tomodern Western science.

Special Systems Theory

Alchemy in the beginning seems to be atheory of the Special Systems. This focuswas rapidly lost but is discernable in thework of Ostanes and Bolos in the ancientEgyptian school of Alchemy. But because itappears at the beginning there is a strain ofSpecial Systems that runs through thehistorical examples of Alchemy of later ages.Here we will be giving a much moreadvanced theoretical description of theSpecial Systems than appears in theaphorisms of Bolos and Ostanes. Hopefully,after I have explained the basis of SpecialSystems theory it will be clear how theiraphorisms relate to this theory.

The easiest way to explain the theory ofSpecial Systems is to start with thedistinction between Systems and Meta-systems. Systems are social gestalts. Meta-systems are environments, milieus, contexts,situations within which systems appear. Asystem is a whole greater than the sum of itsparts. A meta-system is a whole less than thesum of its parts. A meta-system has holes init. Those holes are niches in which thesystems nest within the field of the meta-system. An example of a meta-system is the

computer operating system within whichapplication systems appear. Another exampleof this difference is the relation of theUniversal Turing Machine to the TuringMachine. The Universal Turing Machine islike an operating system for Turing Machineapplications. Once you have anunderstanding of this difference betweenSystems and Meta-systemic Fields out ofwhich systems arise and to which they return,then it is possible to go on to define thespecial systems. The special systems are partsystems and part meta-systems that existbetween the system and meta-system. Wecall them Holons because from one anglethey look like systems and from anotherangle they look like meta-systems. Thus asKoestler said who coined the term, they havea Janus face from the viewpoint of the wholethey look like parts and from the viewpointof the part they look like wholes. Theseholons have a very special structure which ismade clear by their relation to the hypercomplex algebras. These algebras werediscovered by Hamilton and Graves in themiddle of the 1800s. Thus they have beenknown for 150 years. But to my knowledgethis mathematical basis has never been usedto ground a systems theory. That is becausethese special systems have some very strangeproperties. No one before thought thatsystems could have the strange propertiesthat the hyper-complex algebras exemplify. Itis this realization that these strangeproperties are useful for looking at the worldthat is my contribution to this field.

There are three sorts of holons or specialsystems where the whole is exactly equal tothe sum of its parts. These are calleddissipative ordering special system,autopoietic self-organizing special system,reflexive social special system. Each of theseare named for an existing theory. Dissipativesystems are named for the theory ofPirgogine who talks about neg-entropicdissipative structures in far from equilibriumthermodynamic systems. Autopoietic systemsare named for the theory of living organisms


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developed by Maturana and Varella.Reflexive systems are named for thesociological theories of Barry Sandywell andJohn O'Malley. In other words each of theseemergent levels of phenomena have beenidentified previously by specific theorists.What we are doing is showing how thesevarious emergent levels of differentphenomena fit together into a single meta-structure defined by the hyper-complexalgebras.

Once we have identified these emergentlevels and their relation to the hyper-complexalgebras then it is possible to see that theyactually form a higher level formationcomposed of the three holon levels and thesystem level which together define what iscalled the Emergent Meta-system. TheEmergent Meta-system is a dynamic imageof existence by which things are produced exnihilo out of the void, i.e. pure discontinuity.It is composed of stages called seed, monad,view and candidate and meta-operators thatconnect those stages called creation, mutualaction, gestalt pattern formation, andannihilation. This dynamic formation showshow things pop into existence and interact,view each other, explore possibilities, andthen disappear in mutual annihilation. TheEmergent Meta-System (EMS) is a theorythat is equivalent to the dragon of existenceposited by the Chinese in their mythology. Itis also this dragon who is suppressed in theWestern tradition, in which the gods andheroes slay dragons. The emergent meta-system is an image of the dynamic ofexistence that is covered over by Being. Wecan see an image of it in Shiva dancing in thering of fire. Each of the arms of Shiva standsfor a moment of the EMS cycle.

Now it is difficult for most people to relate tothe Hyper-complex algebras. We only aretaught real or complex algebra in school andso the quaternion and octonion algebras areforeign to us. But there is a very simplenumerical analogy that we can use instead.That analogy is the Perfect, Amicable and

Sociable numbers. Perfect Numbers arethose where the divisors add up to thenumber itself. They are very rare. Examplesare 6, 28, 496 etc. Amicable numbers, like220 and 284, are those where one number'sdivisors add up to the other whole and viceversa. Finally the Sociable numbers are aseries of such numbers in which each oneconstitutes the next until it returns toconstitute the first one in the series. Sociablenumbers were discovered in 1918 while theother two types were known since antiquity.These numbers have precisely the holonicattribute of the whole being exactly the sumof its parts that is between excess anddeficiency of all other numbers. We can seethat perfect numbers correspond toautopoietic special systems, amicablenumbers correspond to dissipative specialsystems and sociable numbers correspond toreflexive special systems. In other wordsmathematics is shot through with odditieslike this that can be seen as analogous to thespecial systems. Another example are theseries of non-orientiable surfaces(lemniscate, mobius strip, kleinian bottle,hyper-kleinian bottle) or in physics the seriesof soliton solutions (solitons, breathers,multi-monopoles). There are many differentways in which the emergent levels betweenthe various special systems can be seen to bearticulated in various kinds of mathematics.We can even discern physical phenomenathat correspond to each level. For instancethe soliton corresponds to the dissipativespeical system level, the super-conductingCooper pairs correspond to the autopoieticlevel and the Bose-Einstein condensatecorrespond to the reflexive special systemlevel. With these physical examples ofholonic systems as a basis special systemstheory becomes fully scientific because it hasa mathematical basis for its theory andanomalous physical phenomena that showsthat these systems are "real" as any otherphenomena studied experimentally byscience.

But what is amazing about these systems is


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that they give us a model of theinterpenetration of things that is posited byBuddhist meta-physics. That is the strangecharacter of hyper-complex algebras whichhad no use physically until it was realizedthat they represented special anomaloussystems that appear only rarely. It is theserare systems that Alchemy studies. Thesesystems exemplify the underlyinginterpenetration of all things described byBuddhist, Islamic and Taoist Traditionalviews of the world. Traditional sciences ofexistence assumed the interpenetration of allthings in spite of their radical discontinuity inexistence. Modern Western experimentalscience assumes continuity in the form ofBeing and atomic external discontinuitybetween the things themselves rather in themedium of spacetime. This is thefundamental difference between traditionalsciences and modern science. This gap isbridged by realizing that special systems arerare and thus exist but only peripherally interms of the phenomena that science studies.However, because they are negentropic, thesesystems have an advantage over othersystems so that once they exist then they tendto take over as they have done on our smallplanet, which sports life of social groupswith consciousness. We know that this planetis a rarity in the immediate universe. So theseanomalies become important when we lookaround at the part of the universe in whichwe live, because they are exemplified by usand the other creatures like us on this earth.What is even more interesting is that thetheory of the Emergent Meta-system gives usa theory of how Gaia, the "organism" of theearth is constructed. It is constructed basedon these structures of interpenetration. Thusit is more than just a theory of theconstitution of life, consciousness, and thesocial but also a theory of our relation toGaia as the Earth environment of which weare a part.

In essence the Special Systems Theory andthe Emergent Meta-systems Theory is arosette stone for understanding the relation

between Western Science and TraditionalSciences of Existence. It offers a bridgebetween these two forms of science whichallows the traditional sciences to make sensein relation to other sciences. It offers also abridge between the Western Philosophic andScientific tradition and other traditions suchas Buddhism, Sufism, and Taoism whichexplore the meaning of existence in terms ofemptiness, annihilation or void. Therealization of the basis of traditionalsciences, including Alchemy, is afundamental step forward in ourunderstanding of the wisdom of the past andits comprehension of the place of man onearth which we lack today.

Meta-Levels of Being or Psyche

One of the interesting philosophical issuesraised by Special Systems theory is therelation between it and the Being projectedon nature by the West. It turns out that Beinghas four meta-levels (Pure, Process, Hyper,and Wild) and that when we try to go to thefifth meta-level we encounter existence assomething beyond Being. But what can besaid is that the differences between the meta-levels of Being ARE the special systems andvice versa. Thus Existence articulates Beingand Being articulates Existence mutually.This allows us to develop a non-dual theoryand this non-duality allows us to elucidateproblems like those of the nature of soul andspirit raised by archetypal psychology. Non-duality is a type of theory that supports whatis neither one nor two. In other words, non-duality does not mean one or unified. Non-duality is another state that is not unified nordifferentiated, i.e. it points at what is otherthan the one or many. The model ofExistence producing Being and Beingproducing Existence allows us to articulate atheory which is non-dual in a very deep sensebut still articulate. This is because whatspecial systems show us is the order etchedinto the emptiness or void that is prior to thearising of all things. Democritus said that


11

there was only Void and Atoms. His theorymay well have been a theory of the emergentmeta-system that produces monads (atoms)out of the void and then allows them toarticulate and return to the void in a dynamiccycle. In such a picture the eidolons have aplace because in this process possiblecandidates are projected which thenannihilate to produce the seeds (side effects)of the next cycle. Thus we can understandDemocritus theory as having some of thenecessary ingredients necessary to be atheory of an Emergent Meta-system.Unfortunately we do not know enough aboutDemocritus theory to know for sure that it isprecisely what he is talking about. However,if it were then we could see why Bolos wouldrefer to him when he articulated the theory ofOstanes in which nature produces nature,nature conquers nature and nature delightsnature. We can see these as the autopoietic,dissipative and reflexive moments of theEMS cycle. Self-production is precisely thetheme of Autopoesis in which natureproduces nature from itself. We can contrastthis autopoietic moment with natureproducing more than nature, i.e. theartificial or nature producing less thannature, i.e. the un-natural, for instance toxicpollution. We see that our sciences of theartificial allow us to design all sorts ofgadgets, but that these leave a trace in naturewhich is unnatural pollution. Perfect balanceis seen in nature producing nature naturally.When nature has produced itself then somepart of it might conquer another part. This isthe image of a dissipative structure thatinvades and reorders the environment to itsown purposes. The spreading of an orderingfrom one part of nature to another is anexample of a neg-entropic reordering whichdestroys the old order and institutes a neworder. Finally we see in social systemsreflexivity in which there is mutual delight,like the speaking of a common language, orthe participation in a common culture, or theinstitution of a common social grouping.Mutual Delight is an echoing back and forthof mutual stimulation which calls for more

stimulation of the same kind, in terms oflanguage, culture and social interaction. Thisinteraction is for the most part as Mead sayssymbolic interaction, but it could be semioticinteraction or of some other kind. It is in thereflexive social field that images that are ofinterest to archetypal psychology areproduced. In other words the realm of imagesspoken of by Hillman is reflexive as is therealm of ideas that Giegerich would have ussublate images into. Archetypal and Logicalpsychology find their place in the reflexivesocial sphere. Myth is the inner logic of thissphere with respect to a particularworldview. Language emerges in this sphereas the symbolizing and signing mediumwithin the social sphere. Consciousnessappears at the autopoietic level as thenecessary correlate with the living of theorganism.

It is within these realms that soul and spiritappear. We can think of the concept of Jungof ego verses self. We can combine that withthe idea of Bubber of I-IT and I-THOUrelations. We can think of ego-alter and self-thou relations by combining the insights ofthe two theorists. Giegerich says that the Selfof Jung is merely the introjection of thetranscendental ego into the unconscious. Thetranscendental ego is the prior synthesis ofexperience which allows us to know wherewe are in our world and allows us tounderstand our place in the scheme of thingsin every instant. Thus the Self is an image ofthe World within the person. If we lookdeeper into Jung's theory we can see that hisarchetypes fit onto the schema of the specialsystems. We can think of the ego-alter as asystem and anti-system pair. We can think ofthese existing within the meta-systemic fieldof the Self-Thou. Between these twoemergent levels we can see the holons of theego-shadow/alter-shadow, animus/anima,and wise-old-man/cathonic female. In otherwords the archetypal levels identified by Jungcorresponds to the levels of the specialsystems very precisely. Thus Jung was aprecursor to this theory of the special


12

systems. He structured his own theory ofarchetypes around the hierarchy of thespecial systems. We also see an image of theEMS in Aion and Mysterium Conjunctus interms of the Marriage of Moses Quaternio ofQuaternios. Jung had somehow discoveredboth the Special Systems and the EmergentMeta-systems formations even though he didnot realize their mathematical or systemstheoretic formulations. He projected them asarchetypes and saw them to be the majorthemes of Alchemy.

When we realize that self-thou and world areduals of each other in as much as the self-thou is an image of the world within theperson, then we can go on to attempt tounderstand where the soul and the spiritcome into play. We are helped in this byGiegerich who makes a PsychologicalDistinction analogous to HeideggersOntological Distinction. This distinctionhelps to distinguish the realm of the soulfrom the realm of psychological phenomena.The logical level of the soul is at the levelwhere Pure Being appears out of the onticlevel of psychological phenomena includingimages. What this analogy allows us to do isto see that the four kinds of Being that aremeta-levels can also be applied to the logicallevel of the soul. This means that whatGiegerich following Heidegger attains is thefirst level of Being, i.e. Pure Psyche. Whathe does not yet know is that there are threeother meta-levels of Psyche above that calledProcess Psyche, Hyper Psyche and WildPsyche which are related to the various kindsof Being (ergo Pure, Process, Hyper, Wild).Psyche is merely another name for whatothers call consciousness. Consciousness ismerely another name for what ontologistslike Heidegger call Being. All these aresynonyms developed in various unrelatedcontexts. But once we understand that thereis a Psychological Difference on the analogywith Ontological difference separatingPsyche/Being from the psychologicalphenomena or ontic level of entities. Then itis possible to learn from modern Continental

ontology that there are four kinds of Beingand that these kinds of Being end abruptlytheir mounting staircase of meta-levels at thefifth level. At that point we fall off thestaircase into existence. At that point Soul isconverted into Spirit. Spirit is the identity ofthe soul with emptiness or void at the level ofexistence. Soul is the identity of the soul withthe Psyche/Being at the various meta-levelsless that five. Psychological phenomena existat the level below thepsychological/ontological difference.

This theory of Soul and Spirit allows us tosay some interesting things vis a vis theHillman/Giegerich discussion that occurredat Psychology at the Threshold conference.First of all we can see that Hillman himselfplays the role of a deconstructionist usingJung's psychology as his basis fordeconstructing. But unlike mostdeconstruction which is nihilistic Hillmantakes the soul seriously as does Jung. Thusas Giegerich says Hillman has made anadvance by his concentration on theArchetypal Imaginal core of Jung'spsychology. But as Giegerich says we mustgo beyond images and see though them to thelogical level of the soul. It is logical in thesense that once we produce psychologicaldifference we can begin mounting the meta-levels of Being toward the spirit whichappears at the point where we move intoempty or void existence. Thus we see thatHillman's discounting of the Spirit isfundamentally wrong because both soul andspirit exist as distinguishable from eachother. Soul occurs in the meta-levels ofpsyche. When the meta-levels of the psycheend at the fifth meta-level then soultransforms into spirit. Spirit is theidentification of the self-thou with theemptiness or void. Soul on the other hand isthe identification with Being beyond the levelof ontological difference. Giegerich makesthe point that the Soul functions under anegation, even a negation of a negation. Thisis equal to looking at the Pure Soul as PureBeing where we see a negation of


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phenomena. Then we look at Process Soul(En-souling) as Process Being which isequivalent to what Sartre calls Nothingnessthat is an active negation of a negation.Otherwise we would see this positivelythough a process philosophy such as that ofWhitehead. But there are two more levels,one is the Hyper Soul which is equivalent toDerrida's Differance and there is the WildSoul which is equivalent to Merleau-Ponty'sFlesh. Hillman as a deconstructionist isusually talking about this same level thatDerrida talks about, i.e. Hyper Soul. But wecan go beyond this to understand the WildSoul which appears in the image talked aboutby Robert Bly as the Wild Man or WildWoman who leads the initiation process. Butall this is merely a preparation for theunderstanding of Existence as the Buddhadid as emptiness when we discover the fifthmeta-level of Being.

What is interesting is that the specialsystems, i.e. the archetypes differentiate thesemeta-levels of psyche or soul. This is to saythat the archetypes distinguish the soul orpsyche from itself. This is a very interestingresult from combining special systems theoryof the dynamics of existence and itsassociated ontology of Being with theconcepts developed by Hillman andGiegerich. Archetypes are holons thatdistinguish the meta-levels of the soul. Thatis why the soul speaks to us archetypally. Itis speaking of its own internal differentiation.

What is interesting in terms of Hillman'sconcept of "Seeing Through" is that meta-systems are deconstructions of systems andthe process of turning a system into a meta-system can be thought of as a process ofseeing through. This is interesting because aswe step through the levels of Psyche/Beingwe encounter the holons that produces thearchetypal structuring so that the archeypescan be seen to come out of the seeing thoughprocess as we move through the stages of thesoul to the endpoint of the spirit. We can seethis process as occurring below the level of

psychological difference or above it, i.e.embedded in the images as Hillman wouldapprove or at the level of soul, ie. Beyond thelevel of psychological difference as Giegerichwould have us to. These two levels of Seeingthough are duals of each other. One does notgo far enough from the point of view ofGiegerich while the other goes too far fromthe point of view of Hillman. But in actualitythese are duals of each other and can be seenas complementary. One does not achieve thelevel of soul completely and remains mixedup in the images because it does not seethough imagination itself in Giegerich'sterms. On the other hand, Giegerich'sformulation produces an ontology at the levelof ideas that Hillman wants to avoid.Hillman would say that soul at the level thatGiegerich suggests is too much like spirit.Hillman wants to live in the ontic realm anddoes not want to raise his sights to theontological in spite of the fact that this levelis still impure. Hillman likes that impurity. Itgives more grist for the mill ofdeconstruction.

Our point is that neither Hillman orGiegerich go far enough. We would move notonly to the level beyond psychologicaldifference but would step though the variousmeta-levels of soul until we reached the fifthmeta-level where spirit as utter formlessnessand void appears. This formlessness that theBuddha identified should be the axis of ourstudy of the Notion or Concept and theImages. Both vanish in the void or emptinessuncovered as we discover the bedrock ofexistence.

Another point is that within the empiricalrealm set up by Jung in his psychology thereis following Bataille ego-alter as restrictedeconomy, i.e. system, and self-thou asgeneral economy, i.e. meta-system. But thenwhen we move beyond the empirical realmwe enter the realm of soul beyond thedividing line of psychological difference.That realm moves though the stages of thesoul (Pure, Process, Hyper, and Wild) to the


14

threshold of existence where the spiritappears as we enter the emptiness of thevoid. Giegerich talks about how thetranscendental ego has been excluded andmade The Unconscious and then introjectedback into the empirical realm as the Self. Thesoul is seen as the inner coherence of theTranscendental Ego which is the priorsynthesis before our experience of what weexperience. If we look at the Hindu hierarchyof Being we find the following stages:

1. Brahman2. Brahma/Vishnu/Shiva3. Atman4. Transcendental Ego5. Empirical Ego6. Persona

It is possible to see that what we are doing isstepping up though this hierarchy. Descartesdefines the Empirical Ego with his CogitoErgo Sum. It is not until we reach Kant'sCritique of Pure Reason that theTranscendental Ego was discovered. Husserlwent on to discover the problem ofintersubjectivity which is the Atman level.We are stepping up though this hierarchy.We can see ego and self defining the limits ofthe level of the empirical ego. Similarly souland spirit may be seen as defining the level ofthe transcendental ego. So this raises thequestion of how to define the limits of Atmanand beyond. Jung talks about the collectiveunconscious but suppresses the idea ofcollective consciousness. He along withmany of this generation saw the problems ofmass psychology and withdrew from it.However, it is necessary to rethink some ofthese assumptions. We may wonder what adepth sociology beyond the limits of depthpsychology might be like. The Atman hastwo forms. One is what looks thougheveryones eyes. The Hindu philosophy alsohad a name for what looks though all theanimals eyes as well at one point. The otherinterpretation of Atman is who each of us areacross all the myriad worlds of the

pluriverse.

Meta-levels of Psyche

The question that is naturally raised is whatis the nature of the stages of the soul. If weaccept that there is psychological differenceon the analogy with ontological difference,then there it is a compelling argument thatthere are meta-levels of the soul along thelines of the meta-levels of Being.

Existence No-hand Freedom Dis-continuous -indeter-minate

Wild Being Out-of-hand

Encom-pass

Propensity -Chaos

HyperBeing

In-hand bear Possibility -Fuzzy

ProcessBeing

Ready-to-hand

grasp Probability -Stochastic

Pure Being Present-at-hand

point Determinate- continuous

ontic thing entity

By analogy there are the following levels ofthe Soul

Spirit

Wild Soul Fragmenting Soul

Hyper Soul Splitting Soul

Process Soul Ensouling or Conceptualizing

Pure Soul Soul as Concept or Notion

Empricial -Imaginal


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When we first break through to the level thatGiegerich calls psychological beyond thethreshold of psychological difference then thesoul seems static as the double negation thatGiegerich talks about. But then we see thatthis apparent stasis of the soul, its achievedwholeness, is grounded in groundlessnessthen the underlying dynamism becomesapparent. The soul is continually beingensouled in order to maintain itself as notion.The double negative operates on itself tonecessitate continual renewal. Death is whenensouling no longer operates. But beyond theensouling there is the bifurcation of the soulin the realm of possibilities, what Derridacalls Differance which is differing anddeferring. At that third meta-level there is anindecision that hangs back in the realm ofpossibility. In many cultures such as theChinese the soul is seen as dual in form. InChinese there is the hun and the po souls.One goes to the realm of the spirits and theother goes to the realm of the body in theearth at death. This splitting of the souloccurs at the level of Differance. At thatlevel there is some part of the soul that neveris manifest. This is the deepest part of thesoul that never is known in line with whatHenry calls The Essence of Manifestation.Henry quotes Meister Eckhart with respect tothis level of the souls operation. Finally thesplit soul continues to split becoming chaoticand this is the level at with the many souls orspirits appear within us that Hillman is sofond of pointing out. We have manycomplexes and these are autonomous andthey correspond to the characters we meet indreams which also correspond to the socalled gods, i.e. jinn, and angels. When wecontinue to transition to the next meta-levelwe encounter the void and all the varioussouls splinters or sparks and spirits dissolvein that emptiness.

What we see is that the levels ofBeing/Psyche explain some of the structureof consciousness pointed out by Jung andHillman. When we are seeing though to thelevel of the gods. The sparks or splinters of

the soul that Jung speaks of in MysteriumConjunctus are merely the fragmentation ofthe soul itself at the fourth meta-level ofBeing. The splitting of the soul so that it hasa dark side of self deception is explained bythe hun and po souls that appear at the thirdmeta-level. Evidently the Egyptians havemany names for the souls functions and sowe can see the hun and po splitting up intomany different aspects in Egyptiansoulology. The process of ensouling explainsmany of the dynamics of the psyche. Butfinally we have the Notion of the Soul in areified concept that defines the first meta-level of the soul.

It is necessary to see though Jung, Hillmanand Giegerich, and it is easy to do that if weborrow these ontological concepts and applythem to define the various psychological(soulological) meta-levels. What isinteresting is that it is the traversing thestages of the soul that gives us access to thearchetypes which exist as special systemsbetween the meta-levels of the psyche. Thuswe encounter the archetypes within thestructure of the stages of the soul. Thearchetypes are defined by the holons that aredefined as dissipative, autopoietic andreflexive. When these non-dual non-representables are represented (imagined)then the archetypes appear. It is thisencounter with the non-duals that allow us tosee though the dualities that are produced inour Western worldview to discover order,right, good and fate. Recently Hillman calledout attention to Beauty, Justice and theGood. These are other names for Order,Right and Good which are the non-duals atthe center of the Western worldview. Theythe archetypal core of the Worldview whichappears when we see though nihilism anddualism.

Hillman is refreshing because of hisdebunking of many new age urban legends.Many of these revolve around the spiritualmarketplace that has been created by thecontentions between various spiritual paths.


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We can apply the levels of Being to analyzethis spiritual marketplace.

Existence Spirituality asFormlessness andclinging to Void orEmptiness

Wild Being Spiritual Fascism i.e.cult production

Hyper Being Spiritual Relativismand Perennialism

Process Being Spiritual DelusionProduction

Pure Being Spiritual Reification

ontic Many paths.

Hillman is against spirituality because hesees it as monolithic. This is in my opinion amisreading of the term spirituality. For mespirituality refers to the identification withthe formless, i.e. emptiness or void viaannihilation. But when we back away fromthat distinction between form and formlessthen we see that Spiritual Reification ispossible and that this leads to SpiritualDelusion production whenever one isinterested in Powers or Effects of spirituality.But when we go deeper we find the prevalentassumption of relativism and perennialism.Relativism says we cannot decide betweenpaths and thus they are all legitimate.Perennialism says that all the pathsultimately have the same goal. These twotogether are the core of nihilism because onesays that the differences do not make adifference that makes a difference alaBateson and the other says that they are allthe same ultimately anyway. This is adefinition of nihilism which sucks themeaning out of life as described by Rosen inhis book Nihilism. Fascism is when someonedecides to impose a spiritual way on others

and thus produces a cult like socialformation. In this spiritual fascism nihilismbecomes active destroying other paths. Sucha fascism may be atheistic as well.Relativism is a passive kind of nihilism.Fascism is active nihilism that works todestroy a spiritual path that is in existence.Beyond that there is another intensification ofnihilism which is genocide where all theadherents of that other path are wiped out.This is a nihilism pursued at the level ofexistence obliterating the other.

In this way we can see that what Hillman ispointing to is a real danger and that dangerhas become manifest many times. But thatdanger is a distortion of actual spiritualityinto some of its deformations. We notice thatthose deformations operate as the variouslevels of the soul. In other words the soul canbe tortured by nihilism and myths in theIndo-European tradition record many of theways that souls can be tortured by nihilism.And excellent example is the confrontationbetween Achilles and Agamemnon in theIliad. Achilles saw that the Acheans were nobetter than the Trojans and so with drewfrom the fighting and called the wrath ofZeus down upon the Acheans. The torture ofthe soul by nihilism is one of the mostfundamental phenomena in our worldview.So the stages of the soul is not merely anacademic exercise because these same stagesdefine the depths of hell as well as the heightsof paradise when we are freed from theonslaught of nihilism.

Stages of Initiation

One of the things that my researches hasuncovered is that there is a set of stages ofinitiation for males and females defined bythe meta-levels of Being. Men and Womenmove though these levels in oppositedirections during the initiation process

Male Female


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Pure

Feminine wisdom

Process

Masculine wisdom

Hyper

Wise old man

Wild

Cathonic Female

Wild

anima

Hyper

animus

Process

Male ego

Pure

Female ego

Men start out rooted in process, i.e. work,perhaps the work of war. Then in the midstof this they go berserk or encounter wildnessin some way as they follow the goddess ofwar into battle (Athena). This experienceallows them to understand the wise old man,like the wise old man of the sea thatMenalaus encounters and captures. Finallythe male develops a feminine wisdom whichcomprehends the purity of the uninitiatedfemale but often when it is too late.

Similarly the Female starts off pure, then shegets lost in the mirror house of social imagesof her until she meets the cathonic female likeBaba Yaga that puts her to work onimpossible tasks. From that she comes tounderstand the male wisdom concerningprocess which she is initiated into withrespect to child birth and child care. But thesecret of masculine work she comes tounderstand often too late.

The series of stages are the same for maleand female they are merely traversing themin the opposite directions. This is what makesthe masculine and feminine complementaryin our worldview. The stages of the initiationgive each person an acquaintance with thevarious meta-levels of the worldview. Butthem each comes to see in the other a face of

the world. The mysterium conjunctus is whenthe masculine and feminine meet each otherat each of the meta-levels of soul. In otherwords the soul of the man and woman areforged differently. The man is driven towardenlightenment while the woman is driventoward endarkenment. Darkness is impurityfor the male while it is light that is animpurity for the female. They are like shipspassing in the night as they each forge theirsouls in the initiation process producing thecomplementarity that will allow themysterium conjunctus to take place. Themysterium conjunctus is a conjunction of thecomplementarities forged by the initiationprocess at the level of Atman. Each has thevarious levels of their souls articulated sothat they can meet the Other at each level ofthe soul and in that way their spirits canbecome one as they enter into the voidtogether canceling or annihilating.

World and Soul

Hillman's deconstuctionism due to its lack ofphilosophical sophistication is open to theattacks of Giegerich who uses a combinationof Hegelian and Heideggerian views to laywaste to Archetypal Psychology as it standsand to assert that beyond it there must be alogical life to the soul. However, as we haveseen there are assumptions in the stance ofGiegerich which are also problematic. One ofthose assumptions is wholeness. Giegerichhas an uncritical assumption of wholenesswith respect to the soul. We have in turncritiqued that wholeness by showing thepossible stages of the soul as being related tothe meta-levels of Being. This critique whenit is linked with the special systems theoryshows that there are several kinds ofwholeness. There are wholes greater than thesum of the parts which are the standardgestalt wholes. It is interesting that gestaltsand flows are duals of each other. Giegerichtalks about the liquefaction of the dialectic.Really that can be seen as merely the inverseof the gestalt which has a flow as its


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opposite. However, as we have seen there isalso wholes less than the sum of their partswhich we call Meta-systems and would liketo name Archons after the archons whogoverned Athens after the kingship wasabolished. Between these wholes greater andless than the sum of their parts exist anotherkind of Whole called a holon. There happento be three kinds of holon of this type calleddissipative, autopoietic and reflexive. Eachof the special systems manifest in very rarephenomena and so are not generallyrecognized. They are the province ofAlchemy rather than normal Westernexperimental science. However, having saidthis there is also something further. Thesystem and the meta-system appear at thecenter of a hierarchy of ontological schemas:

pluriverse

kosmos

world

domain

archon (meta-system)

system

form

pattern

monad

facet

The ontological schemas are the duals of theontic schemas which are discovered asemergent (non-reducible) levels ofphenomena in nature such as social,organism, organ, cell, macro-molecule,molecule, atom, particle, quark etc. Thesetwo sets of emergent levels are themselvestogether opposite another pair of interleaved

emergent levels that have to do with thesocial and individual processing ofinformation.

Social Individual

absolute

Actualization

existence

Insight

ontos

wisdom

episteme

knowledge

paradigm

information

theory

data

fact

given

suchness

This latter pair of interlaced hierarchies ofemergent levels moves from the limited tounlimited and thus give fine coloring to thatdichotomy. Above the limited there is a splitbetween physus (ontic) and logos(ontological). These four hierarchies give usa good definition of the structure of ourworldview at the level of Being. Theworldview itself has a great deal of depth andthese two dualities may be seen as only twolevels out of a whole series of levels.


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Bifurcating Non-duals Non-Bifurcating

particle uncertainty wave

quantummechanics

spacetime relativity

physics infoenergy thermo-dynamics

physus order logos

limited right unlimited

having good having not

existing fate existing not

actualization sources Actualizationnot

Unmanifestparadoxical

root Manifestsuprarational

Singlesource

The bold levels are those articulated by thefour hierarchies. One of those hierarchies isthat of the ontological schemas which thesystem/archon fall into. These varioushierarchies define the structure of the world.

When we talk about the "worldsoul" it mustbe realized that the Indo-European worldviewhas a very specific structure. Where thedominant worldview is well structured thesoul lacks structure, even negates structure.So the conjunction "worldsoul" is verypeculiar. Both Giegerich and Hillman lack asensitivity to the structure of this specificworld we live in due to its global dominance.

We can go on to say that the ontologicalhierarchy has a sliding scale of whole with no

parts and parts with no whole which areposited at the two ends of the ontologicalhierarchy. A pluriverse appears as parts ofwhom the whole cannot be seen. A facetappears as a whole of which the parts cannotbe apprehended. But this designation mayappear at any level up to those just adjacentto what ever reference level you choose. Thepoint is that the dual of the holon is theholoid (or hologram) which is no part and nowhole. Thus the holon has a dual in theholoidal. This "whole" with no parts and nowholeness that is holoidal is yet another kindof wholeness, i.e. a self-negating wholeness.

From this it becomes clear that there are fourkinds of wholeness, greater than the sum ofthe parts, less than the sum of the parts,holonic (equal to the sum of the parts) andholoidal (with incommensurate whole andparts). If as Giegerich says that the soul iswhole then with this distinction we must askwhat kind of wholeness does the soul have.The first answer is that the ontic realm is fullof gestalt/flows and so we do not believe thatthe soul is of that type. The second answer isthat the soul differentiates itself in the meta-levels of Psyche (Being) reaching toward thewhole that is less than the sum of the parts,i.e. the field of spirit, where utterdeconstruction reigns. Hillman would likethat as it produces an infinite field for him toply his deconstructionist trade. But Hillmanwould stop short of empty or void Existencewhere the soul transforms into spirit.Giegerich prefers the level at which soulshows itself as dynamic and liquid, i.e. thelevel of Pure Being, i.e. pure psyche. Hillmanwould push on into Differance and then toWild Psyche. What Giegerich calls the Wildis the whole realm of Psyche beyond thethreshold of psychological difference. As wemove up thorough the stages of psyche weencounter the archetypal holons. We wouldnot call these wholes that are both parts andwholes at the same time the soul. This leavesone kind of wholeness for the soul which isthat of the holoidal i.e. neither part nor wholelike a hologram. Each part reflects the whole,


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but since all the parts only imperfectly reflectthe whole the whole itself is left ill defined asit is caught in multiple viewpoints as anoematic nucleus with no essence. We couldposit that the soul has this kind of non-wholeness/non-partness which is the dual ofthe holon. But such a definition of the soulwould bind it too much and make itsomething positive rather than a negative.What we can do is see that this is a form ofthe tetralemma.

Part no whole

Whole no part

Both part and whole

Neither part nor whole

As such we know from Nagarjuna that thecenter of the tetralemma is emptiness.Emptiness is the difference between the bothand the neither. This is the same emptinessthat appears at the fifth meta-level of Beingwhich we hid from ourselves by acceptingAristotle's dictum of the Excluded Middle.We believe that the soul and spirit are nodifferent from each other. Rather both areempty. But we can see the difference in termsof the fact that the Spirit is wholly identifiedwith the emptiness while the soul has not yetachieved that complete identification. ThusSoul can appear as any of the types ofwholeness we have mentioned but is betterthought of as somehow the center of thetetralemma before the tetralemma itself fallsaway in the complete identification of soul,spirit and emptiness at the fifth meta-level ofBeing/Psyche.

There is something that needs to be addedhere. In Arabic there are two words: ruh andnafs. Ruh means the breathing and nafsmeans the breath itself. Nafs is used for "I"or the self-reference of the Self. On the otherhand in English we get Spirit from the word

for breath in Latin. Soul2 we do not know thederivation of but it is fairly sure that ifknown it would relate more to Ruh because itmay be related to 'lifetime' which is thelength of time one is breathing. Robert K.Barnhart in his Dictionary of Etymology saysthat Soul comes from *swawalo which is anOld High German root that means "of orbelonging to the sea". Because the sea haswaves and tides we can see in this root arelation to the motion of breathing mirroredin nature. At any rate between Arabic andEnglish there is an inversion of terms that wemust take into account. What we are callingsoul here is Nafs in Arabic while what weare calling spirit here is Ruh in Arabic. Thereconnotations are precisely opposite. Nafs isbreath not the breathing while Ruh isbreathing not the breath that is breathed. Wecan account for this by the two languagesdifferent valuing of Being and Existence.English values Being and deplores Existence.Thus Breathing is placed on the side of Beingand breath on the side of Existence. On theother hand if we value Existence then it isbreathing that is placed on this side and thebreath on the side of Being, i.e. in the reifiedNafs. Soul = Nafs and Spirit = Ruh.However from the point of view of theirconnotation they are the opposite meaningswhich is caused by the differing valuation ofBeing and Existence in the two cultures.

What we must remember is that there is acomplementarity between breath andbreathing. David Abrams makes the case thatthe entire atmosphere is the actual embodiedsoul. It is our connection to the other beaststhat inhabit this planet with us. When we saybreathe breath. We have the verb and the

2 Soul \Soul\, n. [OE. soule, saule, AS. s[=a]wel,s[=a]wl; akin to OFries. s?le, OS. s?ola, D. ziel, G.seele, OHG. s?la, s?ula, Icel. s[=a]la, Sw. sj["a]l,Dan. si[ae]l, Goth. saiwala; of uncertain origin,perhaps akin to L. saeculum a lifetime, age (cf.{Secular}.)] From Webster's Revised UnabridgedDictionary (1913) [web1913]:


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noun which are the two faces of the samephenomena. There is no breathing withoutthe air to breathe. There is no air to breathewithout the breathing of the plants andanimals that complement each other in termsof output of carbon dioxide and oxygen. Thedeeper complementarity between plants andanimals is normally missed. Each arebreathing and transforming the other's waste.If the world soul is the breathed atmospherethen in the deeper complementarity of plantsand animals breathing and theintertransformation of the air itself there is awonderful metaphor that can extend to thecomplementarity between men and women'sinitiation rites. Initiation rites produce soulby taking the initiates through the levels ofthe soul giving them experience of each one.But the men and the women experience thisin complementary ways and this sets up twocomplementary faces of the world thatrecognize each other producing themysterium conjunctus as each level conjunctsin the meeting between men and women. Onebreathes in the light and breathes out thedarkness and vice versa. They together set upthe positive and negative fourfolds. For menit is the fourfold of Limited/Unlimited//Physus/Logos in the metaphysical era whichpreviously in the mythopoietic era wasHeaven/Earth/ /Immortals/Mortals. Forwomen it is the negative fourfold shown usby Aristophanes in the Birds of Chaos,Night, Abyss, and Covering. The negativefourfold is an inversion of the four great non-duals (order, right, good, fate). The dualityproducers, i.e. the men, have as theiropposites the inversion of the non-duals thatlie in the heart of the dualistic worldview.Men produce too much darkness though theirdualism and Women too much light by theirexemplification of the non-duals. Womenmust move toward the dark because theirnature is light, the light of the non-duals.Men must move toward light because in theirnature is the production of the darkness ofdualism. Their duality is like that of theplants and animals. Light purifies darknessand darkness purifies light. The mysterium

conjunctus occurs when both the sun and themoon are visible together. The sun'sbrightness is lessened and the moon can beseen.

To understand this dance within the WesternWorldview it is necessary to understand thestructure of the world and the emptiness ofthe soul and spirit or Nafs and Ruh whichultimately are the same. But we differentiateNafs and soul as connecting with the worldwhile Ruh and spirit connect with thetranscendent, but ultimately since there is notranscendent we realize that they are relatedonly to emptiness and void. Nafs becomesRuh by undergoing annihilation. But Ruh ismerely refined or sublimated Nafs. But wevalue these differently based on whether wehave Being or Existence as our referencepoint. What both Hillman and Giegerich lackis an appreciation of the structure of theIndo-European world as outlined above.Hillman following Jung believes we cantranslate any myth into our cultural context.Giegerich has an uncritical view of thewholeness of the soul. Hillman prefersdeconstructive fragmentation. He finds theWild Psyche at the fourth meta-level to be asafe refuge but would prefer to avoid tryingto move to the fifth meta-level, i.e. the levelof spirit. Giegerich thinks that Hillman doesnot know anything beyond the threshold ofpsychological difference. He sees everythingbeyond that threshold as wild not recognizingthe structure that the worldview exemplifies.Neither appreciate the role of the archetypesas the holons that inhabit the intersticesbetween the stages of the Psyche or Soulbeyond the threshold of psychologicaldifference. What is necessary is forArchetypal Psychology to realize that itneeds to be replaced by an ArchetypalPhilosophy (Ontology) and Systems Theory.Archetypal needs to be interpreted in termsof the Archon and the Holons. Anappreciation of Special Systems Theory andEmergent Meta-systems needs to be attained.Then it is possible to understand how bothHillman and Giegerich are just sensing


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different parts of a very big elephant.

Psychology Beyond the Threshold

Giegerich in his talk titled The Flight IntoThe Unconscious at the Psychology at theThreshold conference (Santa Barbara UCSBAugust-Sept 2000) did his best to destroyJungian Psychology and called the nextmillennium non-psychological. Hillmanapplauded the attempt to plow under whatwas old and worn out. But afterwards Iasked Giegerich what was next and he saidhe did not know and we would just have towait and see. Unfortunately Giegerich was soself involved at that time he took no interestin who was standing in front of himquestioning him, i.e. someone who mightpossess the key to what he was calling for, i.eto unlock the non-psychological new centuryof Jungian/Archetypal Philosophy. It isinteresting when our lack of curiosity causesus to miss the appearance of the Other weare ourselves calling for when it arises at themoment of our speech. This same selfobsession was observed in several otherphilosophers at the conference as well, whohad little time to talk with anyone outsidetheir small circle. Hillman, of course, couldnot be expected to be receptive. But little didthey know that amongst them was someonewho had actually become an Alchemist in thetrue sense of the word. And not just that butsomeone who can formulate it as a theorywhich can be seen as fully scientific andexpressible in ways that can be understoodphilosophically as the basis of an imaginalphilosophy. In order to move beyondArchetypalism or Jungianism we need toactually reclaim the spirit of Alchemy. Notmerely talk about it and pretend. That spiritis not what they would try to think it to be.You cannot learn it by studying alchemy. Noamount of the study of the manifestations ofSol Niger will reveal the nature of Alchemyitself. Rather one must study science with aneye toward the non-dual. Then if you aregraced by God with some insight it is

possible to see what the underlying nature ofAlchemy actually is. Alchemy is asupplement to Western Science which wasthere from the beginning and which in factgave rise to Western science as a reaction toit. Alchemy first united theory andexperiment. Later that unification fell intodisuse and Alchemy reified to the horror ofRoger Bacon and later Francis Bacon. BothBacon's attempted to clear the way toward ascience of experiment. But the science thatgrew up still was based on Aristotle'sconcept of science as the view of the commonby the common. Thus we lost Plato'sscientific view that cherished the uncommon,the unique or odd, i.e. rare anomalies. WithHolonomic Science these anomalies are takenback into an overall framework that includesboth the common and the anomalous.Holonomic Science raises Western Science toa new level and sophistication and at thesame time makes sense of traditional sciencesof existence which it creates a bridge for tothe modern experimental sciences rooted inBeing. Holonomic Sciences are intrinsicallyalchemical because they are rooted in thenon-dualities at the core of the WesternWorldview. Archonic and HolonomicScience allows the Alchemical supplement ofWestern Science to become dominant againbecause by it the Alchemical becomesacceptable Science to the Western Scientificestablishment. This is because it is rooted intheory based on mathematical underpinningsand it has physical examples in theanomalous phenomena that we cited earlier.Archonic Science studies the Meta-systems,i.e. fields, environments, situations thatprovide niches for systems. We do not haveto get rid of systems all together as Hillmanwould do. Rather we recognize the correctplace for the system and the meta-systemicenvirons. Holonomic Science studies theHolons, whether dissipative, autopoietic orreflexive. Within the reflexive environmentwe find a place for the myriad images thatHillman would study as reflections ofreflections of reflections. Also we study theHoloidal as the inverse of the holons. In the


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Holoidal the images are arranged such thateach part of the hologram contains anencoding of a fuzzy picture of the whole. TheAlchemy of Archonic Holonomic HoloidalSystems Theory brings back to life what washither to a dead part of our tradition. Thisalchemy can be seen in the works of Plato, inthe Greek Myths, in other Indo-EuropeanMyths and Epics. It is deeply rooted in ourtradition, and those roots go up throughDemocritus and the Egyptian AlchemistsBolos and Ostanes before being lost in thereflexive milieu of Alchemy as it waspursued and reinterpreted throughout thedevelopment of the Western tradition and thebirth of science, right up to Newton the lastAlchemist. In fact, we might say thatAlchemy was killed by Kant and hisdefinition of the Transcendental Ego becauseat that point it was known who Mercuriuswas. Kant took the Physics of Newton andmade a philosophy of it basing his Critiqueon the structure of the Calculus. It has takenus a while to get back to valuing thetranscendental ego and talking about it interms of old words like soul and spirit. Usingthese words Hillman and his crew are tryingto put life into psychology again, respondingto the abstraction from the lifeworld thatHusserl indicated to be the prime problem inhis Krisis. Giegerich is right to point to Jungand Hillman as making important moves byconcentrating on the Soul and Alchemy askey terms in the revitalization of ourworldview. But even Giegerich falls shortbecause he does not understand past Hegeland Heidegger that what there is beyond thethreshold of psychological difference are themeta-levels of Being and beyond thatExistence. The discovery of the threshold ofexistence suddenly makes Buddhist meta-physics relevant again to us because it helpsus understand the inherent fragmentation ofthe Western worldview. Holonomics usesmathematics to model the interpenetration ofthings long discussed by the ChineseBuddhists as the positive interpretation ofemptiness. Modern Science gives us the samething in the form of Bell's Theorem. Any two

things that have ever been together continueto effect each other at a distance. Becauseeverything erupted together from the BigBang that means that everything is really onewhole, but that wholeness has multiple waysof being seen, as archon, as holon, as holoidor as system. The soul is not captured by anyof these kinds of wholeness becauseultimately soul and spirit are the same asbreath and breather need each other and arecomplementary.

So even though it could not be recognized atthe conference, I believe that the next thingbeyond Archetypal Jungianism is at hand. Itis Archonic Holoidal Holonomic SystemsTheory which comprehends interpenetrationthat underlies the fragmentation of the kindsof Psyche that lay beyond the threshold ofpsychological difference. This is a newplayground for the deconstruction ofHillman. He could not see it due to hisintentional mistrust of systems. What he didnot realize was that systems have an inverse.And between systems and meta-systems arethree kinds of perfect balance which in turnhas an inverse in the holoidal. All these kindsof wholeness address the embeddedness ofthe Soul in the kinds of Being and brings usto the threshold of existence where spiritappears. Archonic Holoidal HolonomicSystems Theory gives Archetypal JungianPhilosophy a "Scientific" basis that raises thesophistication and subtlety of Science itselfto include inter/intra//surfacing/penetration.By producing the Threshold event Hillmancalled for what lies over the threshold as wework from grave to cradle. He invited hisprime critic and gave him the stage who didhis best to sweep away Jungian Psychology.He had already offered a devastating critiqueof Archetypalism. But by plowing under wethen ask for new seeds to sprout. One ofthose seeds, perhaps a weed, odd and outcastis Special Systems Theory and EmergentMeta-systems. It deserves a try at givingArchetypal Jungianism now becomeSoulology a chance to become somethingmore than a nostalgia for the lost soul of


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man. Instead of looking at the non-differentiated we need to look at thedifferentiated, i.e. the structure of the world.When we do that and consider the variouskinds of wholeness that are possible for thesoul to embody then we see that the worldreally does have a soul which when we hitthe level of existence turns into spirit.

The Myth of the Radical DialecticalUnity or Wholeness of the Soul


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When we read Giegerich's The Soul's LogicalLife we see at the end Giegerich criticizesDerrida, the real intellectual power behindthe throne of Hillman. Hillman practicesdeconstructionism on Jung's works but hedoes not provide a theoretical framework forthat deconstruction. At a recent workshopHillman did admit that deconstruction wasone of his sources, one of many, but from aphilosophical point of view the key, sourcebecause it guides his work. Doingdeconstruction unphilosophically leavesHillman's various opinions on everythingunder the sun open to severe criticism from aHeideggarian and a Hegelian like Giegerich.But in the end Geigerich attacks Derrida andrightly says that his method is more fittingfor cyberspace than the psyche. Geigerich inhis analysis of a particular myth in his finalchapter attempts to demonstrate the radicallogical or dialectical unity of the myth. Hedoes an excellent job of this showing fairlywell the logical necessity of the unfolding ofthat particular myth of Artimis and Actaion.However, what Geigerich tends to play downis that if Jung had not both stuck to the soulas primal metaphor and as well sunk into avirtual simulation of the psyche as the basisof his psychology, and Hillman had not donea deconstruction of the Jungian tradition,then Geigerich's position would not be nearlyas compelling. In other words Geigerich isdependent on Jung and Hillman as heacknowledges to prepare the ground for alogical and dialectical move. By logical hedoes not mean formal logic but instead adynamic dialectical logic of sublationintroduced by Hegel. However, actually logichere means the level of logos which is addedto psyche to produce something like theontology that rises above the ontic. He callsthis psychological difference as noted above.But as we noted also Geigerich is naïveabout wholeness as Hillman is naïve aboutheterogeneity, difference and anti-systemization. We must be much moresophisticated than either of them. Geigerichinstitutes psycho-logical difference. But hethinks that by that he achieves wholeness.

But as we have seen there are varieties ofwholeness that Giegerich is unaware of. Wecould interpret Hillman as being above thelevel of Psychological Difference andexploring the realms of Hyper Being, i.e.Differance, or even Wild Being thatGeigerich would himself explore. This maybe more philosophically sophisticated thanHillman pretends to be. But ultimately thereis only a show down between them, ononeside the imaginal and on the other side thedialectical logic which renders theimagination itself imaginary. But when weintroduce the kinds of Being or here the kindsof Psyche, where Psyche relates to soul andsoul to phenomenological consciousness andconsciousness to Being and Existence,suddenly there is a deeper foundation. Whenwe bring in the Special Systems and theEmergent Meta-system as well then suddenlywe have an apparatus by which we canconsider the relation of the imagination asone of the psyche's functions along with logicand the ability to engage in dialectics. Platosays that dialectics goes to the limits of theintelligible which he distinguishes above inone part of his divided line betweenrepresentable and non-representableintelligibles. The Good is an example of anon-representable intelligible that Platopresents in the Sun, Divided Line and Caveanalogies. Plato uses metaphor to describethe difference between the logical level andthe imaginary level. These metaphors arevery sophisticated. Plato also describes howwhen trapped by paradox Socrates resorts toan image, the image of the captain whoknows navigation and his crew that does not.Plato shows how when we are caught inparadox one way to escape is to go downfrom the Logical level to the Imaginationlevel. Plato himself is always doing this usingmyth and poetry to tell stories that illustratehis points. Plato moves back and forthbetween Dialectical Logic and Imagination toweave one of the most interesting argumentsand narratives ever produced in our tradition.One thing that Giegerich lacks is thisappreciation that Plato had for the use of


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Imagination to get us out of impasses wherethe dialectic gets stuck. For Plato the movebetween dialectical logic and imagination is atwo way street and both directions are useful.Therefore to sublation we must addsuperlation. These are opposites. One buildsto the next level of synthesis and the other,superlation, deconstructs. Both sublation andsuperlation are based on the word re-lation.A relation is between things at the same levelof abstration. A sublation is a move up to anew synthesis. This is the move that Hegelcontinues to make over and over again untilhe believes he has reached the absolute spirit.But Hegel does not consider Super-lation.Superlation is deconstruction. It is when youdeconstruct the synthesis into its parts. Thisis exactly what you do when you take asystem apart into its meta-system. Systemsare gestalts which are wholes greater than thesum of their parts that stand as syntheses.When we move up to a System we dosublation of the parts that make up thesystem. Hegel allowed for Systems that werepara-consistent and thus could embraceparadox, i.e. active contradiction. Systemscould be para-complete if and para-clear alsobecause formalisms have three properties ofcompleteness, consistency, and clarity. Thatis in their relation to the truth. But in relationto reality they also have the properties ofverifiability, validity, and coherence.Giegerich is really only considering ourrelation to Truth and eschewing the equallyfundamental relation to Reality. Actually,there are four aspects of Being which alsoinclude Identity and Presence.

Real X is.

True X is Y.

Identity X is X

Presence This is X.

So we see from this that Truth is only part ofthe picture. Instead of saying that the Soulhas an essential relation only to the Truth, a

prejudice inherited by Giegerich from Hegel,we should also consider the soul's relation toall the aspects of Being. When we do thatthen we see that the soul actually relates toall the kinds and aspects of Being. When wecombine them we get a matrix of the variouskinds and aspects of Being.

TruePureBeing

RealPureBeing

IdenticalPureBeing

PresentPureBeing

TrueProcessBeing

RealProcessBeing

IdenticalProcessBeing

PresentProcessBeing

TrueHyperBeing

RealHyperBeing

IdenticalHyperBeing

PresentHyperBeing

TrueWildBeing

RealWildBeing

IdenticalWildBeing

PresentWildBeing

What is important about this table is thatBeing is fragmented into both aspects andkinds. This is because Being ultimately is aparadox and that we apply the Theory ofHigher Logical Types of Russell to attemptto deal with that paradoxicality in ourReason. Reason should be thought of asapplying all four aspects of Being together.The logical levels is merely the meta-levels ofBeing. The aspects are the types that ramifyat the various meta-levels. The aspects aredifferent at each meta-level. When Geigerichprivileges Truth and Logicality he iscollapsing all the kinds of Being into anabstract gloss as what lies beyond the onticand he is only really considering one aspect,even though he does mention reality a fewtimes. What we need to understand is that allthese kinds and aspects play a role in thearena beyond the ontic. Psyche as it isnormally used say by Jung is merely one wayof talking about Being, it is the form ofBeing that impresses itself on us asconsciousness. Ontology is what we talkabout if we want to be objective.


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Consciousness is what we talk about if wewant to be subjective. Soul on the other handis something indefinable that is non-dualbetween ontology and consciousness. Inorder to understand soul we must ultimatelyunderstand non-duality and to understandthat we must talk about supra-rationality asopposed to paradoxicality. Our tradition byaccepting Aristotle's principle of excludedmiddle has cut itself off from anunderstanding of Suprarational non-duality.Non-duality means not one, not two. Neitherone nor many. David Loy in his bookNonduality gives a good introduction to thesubject and its relation to the Westerntradition that is manly ignorant of this way oflooking at things. But as we said above thereare different kinds of wholeness (System,Holon, Archon, Holoid) and soul is none ofthese, it is somehow in the non-dual middlebetween all of these. Non-duality is beyondwhat Merleau-Ponty called the Chiasm ofreversibility. It actually exists above thefourth meta-level of Being in the realm ofExistence which we can interpret as Void viaTaoism or as Empty via Buddhism. Merleau-Ponty defines Wild Being going beyondDerrida's definition of Hyper Being asDifferance. When Giegerich talks about theWild in which Artimis is found he isreferring to Wild Being which he wishes todistinguish from Derrida's Hyper Being(Differance), i.e. where Hillman would be ifhe approached Deconstructionismphilosophically rather than as a non-reflective practice. Geigerich's charge ofliteralism in Hillman applies also to hisdeconstructionist method. Hillman is a naïvedeconstructionist not setting out thephilosophical justification of the method asDerrida has done but rather followingDerrida blindly into that nihilistic territory.But as Geigerich points out it is possible ifwe will be absolutists to make distinctionsthat stand in the nihilistic landscape. Butthese absolutes are still frozen and areultimately nihilistic as well. We can onlyapproach the possibility of non-nihilisticdistinctions if we leave the Wild of Being for

the emptiness or void of Existence. BothBuddhism and Taoism has explored thesenon-dual territories to which our tradition isblind. We have much to learn from thesetraditions and their popularity shows thatpeople sense that there is something theremissing in our own tradition, which istrapped in Being and has spent millenniasuppressing Existence in the image of theHero slaying the dragon.

Revisiting the Artimis and Actaion.

Giegerich's masterful interpretation of theActaion myth is a hard act to follow. But letus consider for a moment the fact that ifthere were not nihilistic deconstructionistinterpretations to play off of his argument foran absolutism would not be nearly asinteresting. Giegerich's criticism of Hillmanand More is dependent on them to givemeaning to his case. Thus as we move up toWild Being from Hyper Being (assuming thatHillman's deconstruction could be justified ina manner similar to Derrida'sphilosophically) it is necessary to have thatlower logical type in place. Also theemphasis on truth and the playing down ofidentity, presence and reality, also plays animportant part in Giegerich's argumentgiving it a focus it would not have otherwise.Presence appears as the presencing of thegoddess to action. Identity plays a role inAction's becoming the Goddess, becomingthe stag, becoming the Dionysian victim.Reality plays a small role when Geigerichattempts to bring in Existence for which heneeds another term to make it coherent.Giegerich really when his argument iscarefully study talks about all four aspects ofBeing, but he emphasizes truth greatly. Healso emphasizes Wild Being over HyperBeing and barely distinguishes the others. Hedoes not even really know about the meta-levels of Being beyond the level of the ontic,i.e. past the incision of ontological(psychological) difference. He does not reallyknow about the special systems that exist in


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the interstices between the kinds of Beingrepresenting the non-dual.

Plato makes an interesting remark in theRepublic just after the analogies of the Goodand as he is beginning to talk about thedegeneration of the republic into antimocracy, then oligarchy, then democracyand tyranny. He appeals to the Muses andthen in passing says that the gods have abirthing number which is perfect and that itwas a departure from that perfection in thebirthing number that probably produces thedegeneration of the city. Plato is telling usthat the gods (jinn in Arabic) have a form ofreproduction based on perfect numbers. Thistells us they are autopoietic systems. Thistells us that they are seen as wholes exactlyequal to the sum of their parts. That theirparts cohere based on conjunction and thatthere are also dissipative and reflexivesystems that are related to these autopoieticsystems. This squarely places the gods inexistence rather than in Being. If we thinkabout this we realize that the meetingbetween Artimis and Actiaon can be seen asan interaction between a jinn existent and ahuman-being. According to Quran the Jinnand Men are opposites in every respect. Jinnlive about a thousand years giving credenceto Giegerich's claim that the old Greek godsare dead. Jinn see us in this world and we seethem in the next world. There is a wholefolklore concerning Jinn in Islam that isrooted in Quran. One of the points about Jinnis that they eat bones and the smoke from fatburned on fires, just like that offered by mento the Greek gods. It is fairly clear thatQuran is talking about the same creatureswhich are distinguished from Angels. It isinteresting that this folklore is never talkedabout in the same breath as the Greek gods.But the Quran gives the Jinn a reality basedon the word of God, which about one fifth ofthe worlds population accepts. Thus Jinn andmen are opposites and equal in many ways.Also we can be assured that other Jinn existtoday that Archetypal psychology plugs intounder the names of the old Greek and other

gods. The point is that Quran says that theseinvisible manlike creatures actually exist andthat men may have dealings with them. Platoon the other hand says that they have abirthing number related to the perfect numberand so they would then clearly inhabit thenon-dual interspace between the dualities weposit in our worldview. They are existentsand we style ourselves as human-beings. Wethink of them however as pure being ratherthan existents. Norman Austin in hisMeaning and Being in Myth3 makes thispoint. Thus we need to consider the relationbetween the existent jinn and our picture ofthem as gods who suppress the dragon ofexistence, i.e. python/typhoon. In one casethey inhabit the paradoxicality of the totalityof Being and in the other case they inhabitsupra-rational non-duality. Right there it isclear that there is an important tension beingembodied that is important to our worldview.If we take this Quranic (i.e. Islamic)perspective seriously then it becomes clearthat when we talk about Jinn and Menmeeting beings or as existents somethinginteresting is bound to happen. Reading godsas jinn helps us deconstruct the language ofthe gods and reduces it to the level offairytales about fairies from the exalted levelof myth. That event is dramatized by themyth of Actaion. The key point of theDionysian dismemberment of Actaion is thathe returns to empty void of existence in theend. This is a key point that shows how therest of the myth may be read as sayingsomething about the structure of the Indo-European worldview based on the meta-levels of Being. Actaion enters the foresthunting. Hunting is a dynamic activity that isrooted in Process Being. In that activity hesees the goddess which presents herself tohim naked while startled in her engagementin the process of taking a bath, also a processrooted in Process Being. The moment ofpresencing of the goddess to Actaion is anevent of Pure Being, a frozen moment in timewhich we see as timeless because Actaion 3 (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990)


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was enthralled and entranced by what hesaw. Perhaps the whole story of Giegerichthat he actually killed a stag is true. Soundsreasonable, but in that Giegerich departsfrom the actual story. The point is that whenthat endless moment was over, Actaion wasturned into a stag. He became man-stag, i.e.something with Hyper Being, somethingundecidable, something both man and stag atthe same time. Then his dogs tore him apartwhich is his entry into Dionysian Wild Being.After that Actaion was no more, i.e. heentered into the void of existence assomething destroyed. Notice that the story astold has just the number of pieces needed torepresent all four kinds of Being. So althoughGiegerich does not know about the four kindsof Being, we can interpret this myth andmany others as showing us that the world hasthis structure. Here there was first Process,then Pure, then Hyper then Wild. A specificsequence that is different from the normalsequence by which the kinds of Being unfoldas meta-levels. Process and Pure are reversedbut Hyper and Wild are in their normalposition. If we look back at our initiationceremony sequence we note that men startout in Process and end up in Pure Being.They encounter Wild and Hyper Being alongthe way. So one thing this myth might betelling us is that a meeting with a female jinnis of a different nature than a meeting with afemale woman. We go straight from processto purity. This can be seen in occasionswhere Athena appears in battle to lead thetroops. In the process of fighting the men seethe goddess as a presence in the midst of thefighting. Normally this sight causes them togo into a berzerker mode, i.e. enter the wildstate. But in the Wild state they are identifiedwith some kind of animal, usually a lion.Thus we see here a commentary on the use ofHyper Being to identify with the animal andthen the movement into a wild Being statefrom that. So the myth is telling us that inthis case the movement from process to wildcan be set off by the presence of a goddessand the transformation into an animal. Pureand Hyper comes between Process and Wild.

For a man in initiation, the reaching of theHyper Being state where he meets the WiseOld Man and learns the pure wisdom occurslater than the berserker state. Thus theintervention of a goddess causes animmediate state change from process to wildwhile in initiation this later stage comesabout in a different order. Intervention of agoddess changes the order of the productionof a face of the world, where all the differentkinds of Being are brought together. Thegoddess intervenes to trip the man over intoberzerker mode from which there is no returnwhereas in the initiation there is a returnfrom berzerker mode through Hyper andPure Being.

A similar case occurs with Achilles when hemeets the Amazon in the second half of theIliad. As Achilles killed the Amazon he fell inlove with her. This is a very similar situationfraught with ambiguity as that of Actaionand Artimis. Here death and love are mixedas they are in the story of Actaion andArtimis. Why would Aritmis allow Action tosee her if she did not love him as he lovedher. The very vision is her love of him.Aphrodite had an affair with a mortal aswell. But because Artimis must remain pureshe cannot be touched by her human suitorso he must die to maintain her purity. Thepoint is that these situations amount toparadox which is what you get when youcombine the four kinds of Being into a singleontological state. Paradox is what theWestern tradition knows very well. It issuprarationality that is not well known. Sowe get an event that is structured so as toshow paradox as a whole and the kinds ofBeing as the phases of that whole face of theworld.

Now lets look closer. We know that thespecial systems appear as the interfaces ofexistence between the kinds of Being. Butboth the initiation and the goddessmanifestation series change this order. Is itpossible to see these special systems? Thefirst of the special systems is the dissipative.


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Dissipative ordering structures spread out infar from equilibrium thermodynamicenvironments. When Giegerich talks aboutthe wild and the tame we see how the tame isencroaching on the wild. It is almost a giventhat because Actaion is in virgin wildernesshe is encroaching or trespassing spreadingorder of civilization just by being there andseeing what is to be seen for the first time. Sodissipation of order as tameness can be seenas an underlying theme behind the myth. Asfor the autopoietic, Plato has alreadysupplied the answer. The birth number of thegods is a perfect number. The coupling ofActaion and Artimis would definitely be theproduction of an imbalance and a departurefrom the birth number. By her virginityArtimis is in some way preserving this birthnumber. It is the autopoietic nature of thegods that make them long lived. Whenhumans strive for immortality as in Chinesealchemy it is by making the body anautopoietic system and conserving Chi. Asfor the reflexive special system we can see itin the dogs around Actaion and the nymphsaround Artimis. Neither of them are alone.There are witnesses of their meeting.Witnesses that could tell tales to the othergods but not to the humans. Both of thesesemi-social environments can be seen to bereflexive in as much as there are multipleviewpoints and witnesses, but the witnessesare less than their masters in each case. Thebathing of Artimis stops, but the dogs arethere to continue the hunt with Actaion asprey. We don't see the dogs until after thePresence of Artimis to Action. It is as if thenymphs disappear and the dogs appear on theother side of that endless moment of PureBeing. There is a reflexive transformationbetween the bathing of the goddess and thetearing to pieces of the dogs. It is as if thesewomen became the dogs and tore him topieces. Women in groups were known topretend to dismember animals in theDionysus cult. In fact we can see clearly thatthere is a relation between Dionysus andArtimis. Dionysus and Athena are a pair andArtimis and Apollo are a pair. The former

come out of the thigh and head of Zeus andthe later are born of Leto from Zeus as well.We can imagine Dionysus lecherouslyhunting Artimis in the wilds. Well if Actaionwas Dionysus in this case we get a re-enactment of his destruction by the Titans.Artimis is inviolable but Wild while Athenais inviolable and cultured or tame. Apollostands for culture and Dionysus/Shiva standsfor the wild. Thus there is a tame/wilddichotomy going through these two pairs ofchildren of Zeus. We also know thatDionysus gets Artimis to Kill Ariadne hiswife at one point. So it is not just Actaionthat has a bad encounter with Artimis.Artimis repels as Dionysus attracts. Atrimisis unaffected by Dionysus unlike otherwomen. Hephestes has better luck withAthena. The point of all this is that thematrix of the gods as a variety ofpersonalities gives a context forunderstanding the myth which isindispensable. It is well and good to say thatnothing else is needed but all the myths aremutually elucidating and sticking to a singlemyth is somewhat myopic.

At any rate in general we can see that thismyth has dissipative, autopoietic andreflexive moments. If we combine thesemoments with the system of Actaion as agestalt standing out on the background of thevirgin forest as trespasser then we mightconstrue it also as an image of the dynamicsof the Emergent Meta-system even thoughthere is not enough detail to press thisinterpretation forward as in the case of othermyths like that of Cadamus and Harmony.

The main point here is that we can use thekinds of Being and the special systems as abasis for understanding something of what ishappening in this myth. The myth is a face ofthe world, i.e. an integration of the kinds ofBeing with hints of the special systemsindicating existence behind the projection ofBeing. We only see the face of the world inmyth if we step out into the plane ofExistence beyond Being. This myth takes us


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though the stages of the kinds of Being in acertain order an takes us into existence. Thegoddess may appear as a perfect Being, i.e.the embodiment of paradox when man isaround. But when man is not around, whenthe forest is virgin then the goddess returns toa mere existent. Existents are like rocks atthe side of the road, or trees that fall inforests when no one can hear. There is noprojection, even mutual projection betweenman and Anima as Artimis, in existence. In away the myth carries the mytheme ofRomantic love. That is the unobtainable lovethat became the basic notion of love in theWest passed down from the Cathars andTroubadours to us. Everyone knows thatArtimis is inviolable. So Actaion is the onewho demonstrates that by bringing Being intoExistence enough to have Being collapse onitself and self-destruct because the projectioncould not land and effect the nature of things.

There are many ways to interpret this andother myths. One of those ways is calledOnto-Mythology. That looks for the structureof the Indo-European Worldview in mythsand also for the traces of Existence. Here wehave applied Onto-mythology in order toshow that the myth is richer than either Moreor Giegerich imagine. Others will I am suresurpass this explanation. All theseexplanations form a rich tapestry whereimagination, logic and what goes beyondlogic all commingle to give us myriadmeanings from myth that satisfies our souls.

Acknowledgements

Would like to thank my mentor Ian Dallas.

About the Author

Kent Palmer is a Senior Systems Engineer ata major Aerospace Systems Company. He

has a Ph.D. in Sociology concentrating onPhilosophy of Science from the LondonSchool of Economics and a B.Sc. inSociology from the University of Kansas.His dissertation was on The Structure ofTheoretical Systems in Relation toEmergence4 and concerned how new thingscome into existence within the WesternPhilosophical and Scientific worldview. Hehas written extensively on the roots of theWestern Worldview in his electronic bookThe Fragmentation of Being and the PathBeyond the Void5. He has at least seventeenyears experience6 in Software Engineeringand Systems Engineering disciplines at majoraerospace companies based in OrangeCounty CA. He served several years as thechairman of a Software Engineering ProcessGroup and now is engaged in SystemsEngineering Process improvement based onEIA 731 and CMMI. He has presented atutorial on “Advanced ProcessArchitectures7” which concerned engineeringwide process improvement including bothsoftware and systems engineering. Besidesprocess experience he has recently been asoftware team lead on a Satellite Payloadproject and a systems engineer on a SatelliteGround System project. He has also engagedin independent research in Systems Theorywhich has resulted in a book of workingpapers called Reflexive Autopoietic SystemsTheory8. A new introduction to this worknow exists called Reflexive AutopoieticDissipative Special Systems Theory9. He hasgiven a tutorial10 on Meta-systemsengineering to the INCOSE Principlesworking group. He has written a series onSoftware Engineering Foundations whichare contained in the book Wild Software

4 http://server.snni.com:80/~palmer/disab.html5 http://server.snni.com:80/~palmer/fbpath.htm6 http://server.snni.com:80/~palmer/resume.html7 http://server.snni.com:80/~palmer/advanced.htm8 http://server.snni.com:80/~palmer/refauto2.htm9 http://server.snni.com:80/~palmer/autopoiesis.html10 http://dialog.net:85/homepage/incosewg/index.htm


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Meta-systems11. He now teaches a course in“Software Systems Requirements and DesignMethodologies” at University CaliforniaIrvine Extension.

[end of document]

11 http://server.snni.com:80/~palmer/wsms.htm

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