Involution, prototypes and archetypes

The following is in response to Joe's comments here in the ongoing IPS OOO thread discussion.

Image schemas per se are indeed the lowest level of affect/sensation/perception. The example Joe used though about happiness is a metaphoric extension based on the up/down image schema, showing how the base if extended with a higher structure. So yes, image schema in themselves cannot integrate the higher levels. It is the reverse, that the higher levels integrate image schema, and those cognitive scientists like L&J are doing so while also noting how the higher levels are shaped and limited by the lower. Also see this recent post in another thread supporting their brand of embodied cognitive science as cross-paradigmatic.

Actually I think Wilber distinguishes between archetypes and prototypes. I think he'd be more in favor of the involutionary givens as the former and the evolutionary developments as prototypes.* But I don't buy into involution period, seeing it as one of those metaphysical premises of the kind we need to forgo in postmetaphysics. Granted we need metaphyical premises as ontology, but not supernatural planes beyond the physical which precede the physical and upon which it depends.


As for Jung bringing in the transpersonal, that's where I think he's still metaphysical in the sense described above, which is reflected in the way he frames archetypes. Hence my preference for Knox in a postmetaphysical frame. And in that sense I'd agree image schema are indeed the foundations for the so-called evolutionary return trip; there just isn't any involutionary trip to begin with.

As to my thesis on transforming image schema into subtle, causal and nondual states, see the states thread (and its linked Gaia predecessor) and the Thompson thread.

I like this from Edwards in "Through AQAL eyes part 3," consonant with my view of involution as integration and downward causation after something has evolved. Also how dream and deep sleep are related to subtle and causal state-stages via this downward and causative integration by the ego. I also criticize Edwards in some respects on this in the thread bearing his name.

"The within-quadrant drives and motivational dynamics include evolutionary forces (emergence) expressed as a holon's self-transcendence, and involutionary forces (integration) expressed as a holon's self-immanence. These motivating drives are also known at the Kosmic level as the Ascending and Descending movements and as the Eros and Agape drives. State dynamics can also be considered to be the result of within-quadrant dynamics. [...] I do not see the involutionary 'states' of sleep and deep sleep as being within this category of altered states. They are not states in the formal sense in that they are not episodic, unusual, or induced. Sleep and deep sleep are simply the integrated presence of previous forms of identity as they appear in a rational-egoic identity."

* I found clarification in this post.