The enchanted Framework of Creation

The enchanted Framework of Creation
From elementary Particles to the Alchemy of the Soul

Diego Frigoli*

«The true superiority of man does not consist
in dominating and conquering nature; it consists
instead in understanding it, in being able to contain
the immense universe in the microcosm of his own brain».
J. Verne

The title of this book may seem strange, mysterious, perhaps curious, and its subject matter unusual, because it deals with the search for the origin of the world, from stellar matter to the smallest bacterium, to arrive at man and the development of his mind. What prompted me to undertake this research? I could say a strong sense of curiosity combined with the fascination of wonder at observing how physical reality can allow us, through symbols and analogies, to order our thoughts to read the ‘incomprehensibility’ of the world that reason cannot interpret.
The most beautiful experience that the spectacle of Nature offers our eyes is an extraordinary web of forms and phenomena that speak a language that is not always easy to understand. If man stops at their presence and evidence, if he limits himself to considering them only for what they appear to be and not for what they really are, that is, living parts of that single immense organism of which he himself is a part, he becomes deaf to their voice and loses sight of their value and their profound essence. Only when we manage to overcome the barrier of their appearances and enter into deep resonance with their reality, only then will living forms speak their true language: they will emit that fascinating sound that contributes to creating that mysterious, ideal total harmony, the Unus Mundus, which pacifies man with himself and with reality.
To get in touch with that profound truth of things that goes beyond their outward appearance, we need to overturn the mistrust and contempt of science for the obscure and the unknown, through the discovery of the underlying emotions present in our imagination when it allows us to consider the world not so much as a scenario to be described, but rather as a mysterious code of symbols to be penetrated and deciphered with the tool of analogy. This is the only way to bring out the hidden meaning and bring everything back to that totality that the ordinary view of life corrupts and destroys. Do not think that this experience is only artistic, because art and the most authentic science, when they spring from the depths of the soul, grasp reality through the stimulation of emotions that lie beyond the organ of reason, leading the spirit to a constant confrontation with the Infinite.
Every artist, like every authentically creative scientist, does what Prometheus did: he gave men ideas in their own image, through ever-new creative acts, to give birth to continually renewed works, and in these themselves, with all the feminine pains of childbirth.
Both scientists and artists, by managing to animate the seed of life that shapes itself within their organs and elevating this sensitivity in the direction of the spirit, allow ideas to be suggested at will, using them as valuable tools for any modification of the real world. This is why it is used to say that art, like science, represents a gigantic construction site of memories in which “archetypal memories” intersect, creating ever-new images, open to the breath of infinite things.
When Life becomes the first and greatest of the Arts, all the others are nothing more than a less noble introduction, and even science, if it wants to penetrate the intimate essence of things, must be able to suggest emotions and moods through the absolute renunciation of any so-called ‘scientific’ demonstration, by adopting nuanced images and words that convey multiple meanings, more suggestive and evocative than descriptive. In short, Science must become a poetic Art, because Life is above all music, in which the mathematical laws of sound and the indefinite impressions of the soul merge harmoniously.
Man has always been fascinated by the mystery and unknown aspects of life: just as the moon captivated Leopardi, Jules Verne, and Cyrano de Bergerac, so has humankind needed the aspirations of space adventure and scientific and technological exploration to keep its mind open to the infinity of the knowable.
If it is the archaeologist’s task to make the soil, stones, and fossil skeletons speak in order to bring the earliest civilizations back to life, and the palaeontologist’s job to reconstruct a dinosaur from two vertebrae and a carpal bone, today it is up to the cosmologist, using a few scattered observations that he considers relevant, to attempt to reconstruct the so-called primordial stages of the universe, in order to find in them, thanks to the contribution of psychoanalysts, the patterns of the emergence of the human mind, as the recently interpreted theory of evolution allows. Scientific theories are constructions of the unknown similar to fairy tales, but unlike fairy tales, by definition they must be verifiable or, better yet, falsifiable. The poetic-scientific pattern that binds nature, man, and the universe into a coherent whole is constructed from an immense chain of “consciousness” that cosmological research calls “in-formation”.
In-formation connects all things in the universe, atoms as well as galaxies, organisms and their minds, to compose a Great Dance, the Dance of Life. This new vision is gaining ground: in the most advanced fields, cosmology is discovering a world in which the universe does not end in entropic ruin, and new physics, new biology, and new research on consciousness recognize that Life and Mind are integral elements of the world and not random by-products. The Infinite seems to be taking shape more and more, allowing the discovery of Beauty to emerge as a manifestation of a subtle bond that unites our soul to the Soul of the World. Even if only in fleeting glimpses this bond that unites all things—the starry sky, the moon, the sun, the sea, all of nature—seems to give us a taste of the art of Infinity, but then, when we return to ourselves, nostalgia for separation from this harmony comes to the fore.
Those who have experienced it even for a moment never cease to seek it, because the willingness to embrace the unknown that bursts into the thought process as a completely new point of view gives meaning to events that have been before everyone's eyes since time immemorial, but which most people take for granted and find uninteresting. It is not difficult to be hit on the head by an apple, but only one person was able to draw a fruitful analogy with celestial bodies and use it to construct a new cosmology. These considerations are not escapes into vague mysticism, but conscious indications of the structural difficulties in describing scientific explanations. Life, with all its mysteries, always pushes us towards a perpetual renewal of ourselves, drawing on inner energies that often appear inert but, on closer inspection, are endowed with a subtle dynamism comparable to that which occurs in nature when things assert themselves in their harmony. The unknown, bursting into the adventure of knowledge, increasingly explains the concordance of ‘facts’, bringing our mind closer to that ‘oceanic feeling’ described by Freud as an intuition of the Unity of the Whole. Thus, the Infinite glimpsed in distant things has become intimate, like all things dear to us, and is no longer outside, but here and now, within our soul.
That is the reason why I divided the book into two parts.
In the first part, I endeavoured to describe, as accurately as possible, the orientations of science in communicating its discoveries, particularly in-formation as the acquisition of an increasingly universal point of view capable of combining Newtonian cosmology and its actions at a distance from Einsteinian cosmology and quantum physics, in their attempt to give form to everything that exists.  However, I also asked myself whether the nature of things on the horizon of our thinking can present itself differently from how we commonly observe it. All living nature—and especially plant life—offers our senses harmonious forms, delicate scents, and evocative colours that call to each other and integrate, merging into the extraordinary and profound unity of Life. For several centuries, oppressed by the idea of biological utilitarianism, we have been unable to appreciate those harmonies and that beauty, almost considering them superfluous and deceptive. Everything had to be measured in functional terms, which demonstrated the hasty practicality of nature.
The secret of life thus lay in its chemistry, its molecular reactions, its intimate structures: what importance could shapes, sounds, colours, and scents have if not as a futile embellishment of life? Is it possible, then, to tear away the veil of habit that prevents us from “seeing” what is hidden in the reality of nature, in order to grasp those images that are at times delicate and soothing, at times strong and disturbing, dictated by the resonance of the imagination with the sensations of mixed colours and suffused scents, which merge into the extraordinary and profound unity of the life of the universe?
If the knowing subject uncritically adheres to the structure of thought, it is impossible for the new to emerge into his consciousness. From this point of view, consciousness becomes and (remains) consciousness of something. And that something can be indifferently an apple, a galaxy, an electron ... or a dreamlike revelation.
The writer Arthur Koestler (1959) compared the initiators of modern science to “sleepwalkers” who, with fragments of dreams, construct what will become the scientific reality of future generations. Newton belongs fully to this family because, in order to justify gravitational attraction in an apparently empty space, he did not hesitate to fill it with the body of God, explaining ... ignotum per ignotius. Until the last century, our reality could be explained on the basis of three paradigms: matter, energy, and information; however, the latter had the value of mere quantitative communication of data, and not the current meaning of in-formation to express the coherent connection of the relationships that synchronously bind all things in the universe, giving shape to human consciousness. The unknown is always one step further, and to know it, man must keep his mind ‘open’ to the infinity of the knowable, moving within it in search of new orders.
Unlike mathematicians, who delight in admiring and using zero and infinity, physicists must describe a world in which these two concepts have no meaning. A temperature equal to absolute zero is completely inaccessible, just as the total number of particles that make up the observable universe is enormous (a one followed by eighty zeros), but not infinite. For this reason, it is impossible to imagine a zero moment in which the universe appeared, with a radius equal to zero. Reality, being therefore nothingness, is nothing more than a world of illusion, thus giving us the idea, already glimpsed in the East by Vedic and Buddhist thought, and in the West by Platonic thought, that the matter of reality is nothing more than the product of the ‘lazy’ matter of our mind. The reality that appears to us as such is therefore co-produced by the organizing powers of our brain, and is made up solely of frequency waves, so that we do not know it directly but only through the modifications induced by our sensations, perceptions, emotions, and our own language, as well as by the theories and philosophies of our culture and society.
What lies behind our mental reconstructions if not a veiled reality, unknowable in itself, because it is woven from our imagination, dreams, aspirations, desires, and affections? In human experience, as reflected upon by psychoanalysis, we can say that the realm of the unknown coincides with the unconscious, but not that considered as a sort of metaphorical storeroom of the soul, but rather that which is the source of new knowledge that has a more universal value than ordinary everyday awareness.
If, in Freud's words, the royal road to accessing the personal unconscious is the dream—because it is through the dream that an open subjectivity continues its journey toward the unknown—in order to become aware of the possible universes of our soul, we need to practice, as Ecobiopsychology teaches, the analogical-symbolic experience of the imaginal, which allows the light of unexpected knowledge to access the supersensible worlds of the soul.
«We know» Jung wrote at the end of his autobiographical miscellany, «that the stranger that comes to us is the unknown; just as we know that we do not ourselves make a dream or an inspiration, but that it somehow arises of its own accord. What does happen to us in this manner can be the manifestations of the mana, a demon, God, or the unconscious» (Jaffé, 1988).
For this reason, in the second part of these reflections on the hypercomplex nature of reality as it appears to us through science, I endeavoured to explore, in pursuit of a personal Grand Dream, the value of the collective unconscious, giving it not only the meaning of a “place” of psychic images, as Jungian tradition dictates, but of an authentic mythical, if not shamanic, experience, where the river of memory always reconnects with the instinctive condition of the body and its history. By this I mean that the ecobiopsychological approach to images goes far beyond the Proustian way of relying on unthought sensations, on the free flow of memories, because the original sensations that draw on the instinctive-irrational sphere are those in which there is no before and after, no second time and no first time, because time does not exist. Therefore, when we want to go back up the river of memory and search with self-sacrifice for the instinctive state of the body from which these sensations arise, we must pay close attention to our memories, because the sensations that emerge are far from immune to compliant personal embellishments that prevent us from going back to the original past without first passing through the wealth of subjective impressions that distort the discovery of the naturalness of instinct, hidden in the fibres of our body.
To rediscover this nascent state of mind when it is still linked to the molecules of our DNA, rather than an intellectual effort, we need to delve into our imagination to explore the harmony of nature, which begins with its most secret and minute invisible structures and reveals itself in the elegance and grace of tangible forms. In this way, by laying bare the essence of the harmony of living nature through the discovery of the coherence of analogically evoked images, our mind can reach the unattainable “first time” when it experienced knowledge beyond the existence of words. It is certain that everything comes from an Eden about which it is impossible to know anything logically, because it is there, in the mind, that the reflections present a “second time” are born, and it is under them that the naked memories of our body are hidden. Every sensation, even the most tenuous and intangible, can trigger the surfacing of images, memories, and desires; it can evoke “correspondences” that have no logical relationship with it. The image that emerges will have no relationship with the sensation that gave rise to it other than that of having been generated by free, instinctive, arbitrary association, due to sensitivity and not to logic. The possibilities of images are therefore infinite, and among these are also the original ones.
So, is this a case of searching for lost time, relying on fleeting sensations evoked by our memory to give voice to that genuine mould of our origins, made up of the elusive fullness of the “first time”? But how can we give voice to our memories and emotions, if not by drawing on the sphere of irrational instinct that can bring us closer to the sphere of being and ecstasy? Only by abolishing time, by making the before and after, the second time and the first, cease to exist, can we come closer to grasping the unexpected image that had no beginning, that occurred beyond our consciousness, beyond our days and beyond our concepts. For us adults, this means, moment by moment, going back to that time when wonder came to us from outside, beyond words, beyond ordinary signals, to discover the mythical uniqueness of the dawn of consciousness, before it enclosed us within the confines of words. Only analogical maturity could have allowed us to rediscover the treasure we ourselves guarded, represented by the pursuit of the mythical ‘first time’, beyond the ascetic renunciation of the ordinary meaning of words.
Each of us has a personal wealth of intimate images, which made up the breeding ground for all our amazement, completely superimposable on that with which life has created ourselves and the things of the world; at times we find them before us in the most unexpected moments, suggested by an encounter, a distraction, a hint or a dream, and each time, if we gaze[1] intently on them as we scrutinize our own face in the mirror, we recognize an enigmatic yet familiar reality: the poetry of our soul that resonates with the poetry of Life.
It is therefore up to poetic language, or simply analogical language, to give us a glimpse of the mythical lost Atlantis through the “cross-eyed” use of its reading, thus building a bridge between the impossibility of uniting the internal reality of the unconscious with the external reality of the unknown of the Soul of the World. Thus taking everything as if it were a ‘poem’ of life, I strove to free consciousness from its hard crust of literalism, from words petrified by the use of definitions, in order to try to savour, on the plane of being, either by grace or inspiration, in short, by ecstasy, those unexpected images, the spiritual fruit embodied in an experience of searching for the sacred and the archetype.
It is for this reason that, supported by studies in alchemy, I sought to use analogical knowledge to reinterpret the “certainties” of biological evolution in a mythical way, as if to emphasize how every human creation and the universe itself are nothing more than an enchanted loom on which Life has embroidered the poetic spectacle of those signs of infinity represented by the forms of nature. The infinity of the world was transformed in me into the infinity of man. If the former corresponded to the “matter” with which the Creator shaped the worlds, the latter represented the “phosphorized”[2] dust with which man was created.
From this point of view, man, in the prodigiously varied series of evolution, with his soul and spirit, represents the end and at the same time the beginning of a new evolution, that of consciousness. In fact, nature, in its evolutionary path, however imperceptibly it has advanced in each step through infinite metamorphoses regarding the consciousness of all the varieties intermediate between the archetype and man, can be considered as the expression of as many attempts tending towards perfection, yet incapable of achieving it except through countless series of drafts. The set of preliminary stages could be thought as the apprenticeship of nature learning to create man.
Today, however, if man wants to survive, he must know and assimilate the very laws of nature that created him, transforming his breath into our breath, in which the beauty out there can become our beauty. Our body, mind, and soul want to be “inspired,” that is, to receive the spirit that gives life, and this can only happen through a ceaseless “I don't know” that can open us to the authentic awareness of knowing.
With evolution, human consciousness has symbolically become a circumference produced by the pure expansive force of life, which today consciously aspires to seek the Centre from which it sprang. Knowing this Centre therefore becomes a form of ubiquity: it is a matter of being simultaneously in the entirety of the knowable world and at the same time in the depths of our soul. What, then, does this circumference consist of? It represents the techno-economic unification of the globe and the multiplication of communications, which, however, have produced a terrible truth: humanity no longer has a Centre, a Great Myth for which it is worth living and dying. All that remains is an intangible dust of myths, a network of luminous points which, like those on a television screen, combine and recombine in a kaleidoscope of evanescent images.
However, the fate of this expansive movement is not definitively established, because if we find in the symbol the spiritual energy that, having just sprung from the soul, spreads throughout the universe, bringing its way of feeling everywhere, the return to the Centre becomes concrete, not only for the individual but for all humanity. Post-humanity therefore presupposes the overcoming of current humanity through a scientific – technical - economic metamorphosis of the triple engine that propels the spaceship Earth towards the regeneration of a new humanism, determined by a different culture, represented by the ecobiopsychological engine that currently invites us to look at the world as the ancient alchemists did: the transformation of the consciousness of the knowing subject into the known object, through the analogical flexibility of the mind. And since these things belong to the external world, it follows that transforming ourselves into them means beginning to exist in a purely external existence, at any point on the circumference, to rediscover, point by point, thing by thing, their origin, the radical Centre of their soul. What is the purpose of this alchemy? To multiply the vital points of the soul, to phosphorize the monad that sustains them, to rekindle the meaning of universal life. In short, returning to the Centre of the series of concentric circles that enclose it, represented by the evolution of forms, means returning to the initial state from which the movement of expansion began; it means rediscovering the origin in which the naked Ego became pure consciousness.

*Diego Frigoli – Founder and promoter of the ecobiopsychological thinking, Psychiatrist, Psychotherapist and Director of the School of Specialization in Psychotherapy ANEB Institute. Innovator in the study of imagery with particular reference to the element of symbol in relation to its dynamics between individual and collective consciousness.

Translated by Raffaella Restelli – Human Sciences scholar, linguist and psychologist enrolled in the British Psychological Society with which she actively collaborates. Graduated in Modern Languages and Literatures at the Catholic University of Milan and in Psychology at the Newcastle University, UK. Ecobiopsychological counselor. Collaborator of ANEB Editorial Area as a translator.

[1] I used this word rather than the more common term “fix” to express the ‘intensity’ with which Dante describes the state of mind when he wants to emphasize the depth of the action in Canto I of Paradise, in verse 54: « [...] and fixed his eyes on the sun beyond our custom [...] »

[2] I used this term metaphorically to indicate how the dust that God used to create man was made up of a neutral material (dust) that was imbued with light and fire (phosphorus), i.e., the symbolic agents that form the basis of life: fire (love) and light (consciousness).