We engage with the world and learn from it in one of three archetypes: Logically, Experientially, and Creatively. With Logic, we take patterns that we’ve inherited from others and apply them to the day’s events, consciously and subconsciously testing whether the patterns do apply. Think about reading the headlines of a newspaper: We try to understand current events as a product of previous actions and circumstances. Logic is faith that our current situation is a product of the immediate past; this world is the inevitable response to the millions of stimuli that just occurred yesterday, and the day before, and the day before…

Creative forces are both a validator and a refutation of the Logical Process. Creative forces seem to come out of nowhere. Imagine that headline of action that takes everyone by surprise. Whereas Logic has faith in pattern, true Creativity has no relation to pattern. It just leaps force, like the sudden mutation of DNA that sticks around for millions of years after.

Just like DNA, the thread that keeps the world together is built entirely on pattern, but with a very hard-to-see pattern of transcendental mutation. It’s the anti-pattern. It’s the suddenness of change and transformation that one may predict, but never to the tee; because we can always predict that Creativity will change the world, we just can’t ever describe when, why, or the how of manifested, true Creativity. It appears, and suddenly we wash away the old patterns. The Logical must then rebuild new patterns to keep track of the world.

Lastly, we have the Experiential engagement with life. This process is the salt of the earth. While we may engage with Logic that at any time will become irrelevant with one Creative swish, the Experiential process will continue as it ever did, because Experience is subjective and both timelessly profound and timefully redundant. No matter how many Creative impulses change the world, no matter how many Logical processes are upended, the Experiential process will just take it in, enjoy it, chew it up, and spit out. This is the person who sees the headline and flies over to the event and sees it for themself.

Between these archetypes, we have the Logical pattern-making, the Creative pattern-breaking, and the Experiential pattern-eating. While we may not enact true Creativity on a daily basis, mundane versions of all three of these archetypes are lived every day.

We absorb perceived patterns every day. This is how we make people, places and things knowable. Yet it has the same dilemma as Universal Love: We only know it as this object of the Other, this thing that in objective reality changes from one moment to the next, but we keep it in a box, because it would simply be too much to let it out of the box. We’d rather collect the patterns of what makes a “dog” without dealing with the intricacies of an individual dog and its differences with another individual dog. It would just be too much, so let’s just keep with the accepted pattern, “dogs will be dogs”.

The Experiential process is our gateway to understanding that dog. Not just dogs, but your dog. And you know your dog is different. It has all these quirks, these personality traits that you don’t see in Other Dogs. So we engage with Experience of specificity, so that small parts of our world can finally be ours.

I grew up with philosophy, and I love the practice, which is the attempt to get into the fundamental patterns of lived or transcendental existence. But all my education in philosophy has been in the form of texts. Whether articles or books or manifestos, they are texts, and inherently they are a Logical process of engaging with the world. And we’ve seen the graveyard of philosophies killed by Creative forces or eaten up and shat out by Experiential forces. The Creative changed the world and made new patterns outdated. The Experiential tested the philosophy’s asserted patterns and determined they didn’t work, either because they actually weren’t based on reality or the Creative already did their thing with it.

The best of the world’s philosophers were able to get to the root of existence, which is that existence changes. All the time. It reminds me of Nietzsche’s stance: “I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity.” To sell a system of thought as eternal is to slap an expiration date on it.

I’ve started to engage the world in the Logical process through an archetypal system. I hope it holds up, but I’ll be lucky to see it fail. Working with archetypes is a creative call-to-action, an attempt understand the patterns of the world through mythology and experience that speaks to the heart of existence. Yet the language will change, and the mythologies and experiences will change. What will remain new Creations come about?

My experience will at least remain with me, this piece of subjective knowledge that holds symbolic value, that constantly reshapes my past, my present, and my future.

The modern human being came to existence through the sharing of experiences. Do this, don’t touch that, go this way, avoid that. All of these pieces of personal experiences, which are only completed experiences once shared with others, and boiled down into their essence. Yet it’s not the responsibility of the Experiencer to find this essence, it’s just their responsibility to experience life as directly as possible, and communicate this to others who may be more fit to understand its core meaning.

It’s likely that the Logical will pick up the experience and discover the pattern that exists within. And this pattern may live on, or may die immediately at the test of another experience that just finds the first one to be fluke. Very dynamic.

For now, I rely on archetypes as a shortcut to the core essence of experience. Here, I’ve found three: Logical, Creative, and Experiential. But these are simply the archetypical forces of social knowledge. We’d need to delve into expressed behaviors, internalized thought processes, distortions and clarifications of perception, and maybe so many more forces that exist in the body, and in the social being, and in the spiritual being.

One person is not meant to experience everything. So they watch television, read books, listen to podcasts, so they can get a glimpse of other’s experiences that may just change that person’s perception of the world’s patterns. We are here to share, whether it’s the extraordinary or the mundane. We build on these experiences to progress as the World Being, with each individual standing on ever-growing giants.

On this blog, I’d like to sometimes explore the archetypes of experience, and how every single person can embody the mythologies of the past, present, and future in their own, unique light.

If you’d like, you can support me here.

Best,

Dom w/ Badwater