It is fascinating to look through the histories and pantheons of the world, to see the pictures and statues that people have articulated into form, or hear of the myriad of ways the Source of Consciousness manifests Itself in Embodied Consciousness, and Embodied Consciousness manifests some aspect of It back into the world.
Look back at the list of characteristics commonly associated the One.
They are One, flowing from One Spirit, but it is hard to relate to something so Abstract and Absolute.
Catholicism has saints associated with these and many other characteristics.
Hinduism has named deities to represent them.
Many religions have Angels associated with them.
The Greeks has their pantheon of gods.
The Egyptians had theirs.
Other religious denominations assign various angelic beings or lesser deities to these roles and functions. Nearly every civilization has in some way represented their idea of the cosmic drama in a diverse theater of forms.
The purpose of this multitude seems to be, as it were, to decompose the Wholeness and Ultimate Reality of the One into an array of more immediately understandable, categorizable, and relatable partial manifestations. It is an attempt to articulate and make concrete and accessible the constituent elements of the total hierarchy of abstraction across all domains.
We sense an element of Reality, we abstract out its essence, then we name and concretize it.
The concretized pantheon of reincarnating essential abstractions of a culture becomes a sort of visual and verbal symbolic depiction of the total Metaphysical conception of that culture. These symbolic representations or embodiments in aggregate manifest the various aspects of the One Absolute.
Because the One Itself is beyond representation or comprehension, it tends to get articulated into bite-sized abstractions of its essential characteristics, which, when viewed in aggregate, articulate approximately what humanity has come to know about the Metaphysical Reality Giving Rise To The Universe As We Experience It.
Let’s play and explore.
You have a reality, such as the sea. Many people observing the sea over time can abstract out the essence, or spirit, of the sea. Those qualities which make the sea “sea like”. The qualities which give "seaness" to something. Those qualities together form an abstract (idea) of approximately what "seaness" is. The Distilled Essence of the Sea. These distilled essences, or conceptual realities encompassing what is common across thousands of observations of a given phenomena, can begin to feel even more real than the thing itself feels in a single observation.
They have a transcendent Meta quality about them that can be awe inspiring.
When someone is capable of observing an element of reality across thousands of instances, and then articulating its true essence in some form of art, they capture something that is far more interesting and captivating than the individual instances.
They begin to capture and interact with the deeper universal spirit or essence of the thing.
Element of Reality -> Distilled Essence or "Spirit".
Over time we get the feel of the Central Animating Spirit of a Category, and we often begin to find it more meaningful to interact with the spirit of a thing than the individual instance.
We are no longer interacting merely with an individual or local instantiation, but with the spirit from which the total set of all individual and local instantiations are flowing.
Once we are interacting with the spirit of a thing, a creator can then imagine and articulate that transcendent animating spirit / essence / idea back into form, or a variety of forms.
It is like a dance or a flow. From What Is we abstract out the animating spirit of things, and from that spirit we then Incarnate new instantiations.
Over time, we improve the Quality of the instantiations.
What is the Quality of instantiations rising towards?
It is a truly staggering question.
As New forms are articulated, we can imagine each of these forms having some varying degree of “fit” or “coherence” to the Central Animating Spirit of all such things in a given Category.
This would be some measure of the Quality of a thing.
The Quality is determined by how closely something conforms itself to the Ideal.
The Ideal is the perfect Embodiment of the Central Animating Spirit.
Yet the Ideal can never be fully Realized. Like the Absolute, it cannot be concretized or brought in through the Boundary.
We could also associate the word Archetype here, the prefix arch denoting the most superlative of a kind, and type denoting an image or impression.
The Most Superlative expression. Archetype. Ideal.
We could call the Instance with the greatest “fit” to the Ideal something like the Most Faithful Prototype.
That Which Most Closely Conforms To The Ideal.
The various Prototypes lay themselves out against various Archetypes of their category of kind.
The various Archetypes lay themselves out as representations of decomposed aspects of the One Who Is perfectly and simultaneously them All, in perfect Wise Right balance and proportion to One Another.
Forward to 6.14 Recomposing Notions Of The One
Back to 6.12 The Deepest Thing
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