Spring Semester: Holistic Archetypal Consciousness and the Evolutionary Paradigm

Faculty: Jim McNamara, Guest Faculty (72hr)

In the spring semester, the Philosophy, Culture and Consciousness course will take up the evolutionary themes of paradox in the complex holism of embodied, archetypal consciousness, through a study of the Jungian and archetypal tradition’s work on the imaginal reality of the subtle body in various Western mystical traditions, and the holistic, evolutionary paradigm in the scientific tradition. These themes will be pre-echoed and amplified in the HEP Spirituality one-day (Mar 15).

Course Sections

Section 1: Archetypal Consciousness

In classes 17, 18, 19 and 20, drawing on the works of David L. Miller (The New Polytheism), James Hillman (The Dream and the Underworld), Rafael Lopez-Pedraza ( Hermes and his Children) and Thomas Moore (Dark Eros), we will attempt a re-visioning and re-situating of Western culture’s heroic mode of enlightenment consciousness in a more dark, paradoxical, dream like, underworld style. This section correlates the pagan, polytheistic perspective of ancient Greek mythology with the post modern, multi-perspectival, contextually driven, imaginal style of consciousness that emerged in late 20th © Western culture from a mixture of the psychodynamic, archetypal and existential absurd traditions, and continental philosophy. Class 21 will draw on Sean Kelly’s Individuation and the Absolute, in which the complex, evolutionary holism of Hegel and Jung will be brought into dialectic relationship with the post modern, archetypal, polytheistic perspective, as they both differently elucidate the process of divine individuation in individuals and culture. This synthesis is characteristic of HEP.

Section 2: Imaginal Reality, Evolutionary Redemption and the Subtle Body.

In class 22 and 23 we will explore Gaston Bachelard’s imagination of the poetic encodings of the soul of matter and Hans Peter Duerr’s crosscultural ethnographic account of the “boundary between wilderness and civilization”. In class 24 we will draw on Marsilio Ficino, C.G. Jung and James Hillman to explore into the reality of the mediating dimension of the imaginal world of the soul. In this section we will also draw on Marie Louise von Franz’s alchemical understanding of Egyptian mythology of death and resurrection (class 25), Henri Corbin’s reading of Ibn ‘Arabi’s Sufi subtle body tradition in his “The Dialectic of Love and the Creative Feminine” (class 26), and Harold Bloom’s account of subtle body in the esoteric traditions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity (class 27). In class 28 we will highlight the personified nature of the experience of this 20th century Mundus Imaginalis through the archetypal figures of Sophia and the Holy Spirit, Lucifer and Satan. The existential, embodied, evolution promoting adverse alterity of the Lucifer/Satan archetype will be dialectically situated with the fiery, complex, holistic vitality of the Sophianic/Pentecostal archetype, following the spiral thread of authenticity, individuality, freedom and redemption. In class 29, the divine-human union mysticism of the beloved and apophatic traditions will be connected to the postmodern désoeuvre (unworking) of George Bataille, highlighting the Rosicrucian and apophatic beloved traditions as precursors of the 20th © death of God/rebirth of polytheism theme, the esoteric theme in surrealism, as well as the self-reflexive theme in the existential absurd, postmodern and romantic irony traditions and the nouveau roman. This theme will be echoed and amplified in the HEP Spirituality one-day.

Section 3: The Holistic Evolutionary Paradigm

In this section we will examine Jeffrey Stamps’ holonomy (class 30), which relates existentialism and systems theory in a model of consciousness that is holistic and evolutionary, and, in class 31, the self-organizing systems tradition, which highlights the naturally emergent nature of consciousness in any sentient system, using scientific language, as well as, in class 32, dynamical systems theory, a scientific paradigm that highlights subtle order in apparently disordered, chaotically random systems, and how dynamic, stable identity is maintained, despite, and even through, (sometimes) catastrophic change in complex, sentient, self regulating systems. Kristin Trotter, who has conducted mental health research using this model, will teach the dynamical systems theory class, relating it to self-organizing systems theory as applied to family and couples therapy. In class 33 we will look at how these scientific themes integrate in the HEP model of conscious evolution. Jeff Warren will teach class 34 on consciousness and the brain, using his book The Head Trip - Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness, which has been made into a TVO teaching video.

Section 4: Homo Dei Cosmopolitos

Class 35 will be a summary overview of the thread of conscious evolution as understood in the HEP tradition’s reading of 20th (c) psychology, philosophy and culture, relating this to the long Western tradition of divine-human union mysticism.