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Joe Corbett has been living in Shanghai and Beijing since 2001. He has taught at American and Chinese universities using the AQAL model as an analytical tool in Western Literature, Sociology and Anthropology, Environmental Science, and Communications. He has a BA in Philosophy and Religion as well as an MA in Interdisciplinary Social Science, and did his PhD work on modern and postmodern discourses of self-development, all at public universities in San Francisco and Los Angeles, California. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Quantum Bio-Psycho-
Socio-Ontology

Joe Corbett

In this brief and condensed essay, which is actually more in the spirit of a sutra than an essay, I will sketch an outline of both the physical and the psychological, and hence also the biological and the social, dynamics of manifestation and the evolution of complexity. I will call this mode of analysis Quantum Bio-Psycho-Socio-Ontology.

In the movement of the Kosmos from the interiors to the exteriors, and from the exteriors to the interiors in a reciprocal unfolding and enfolding process, the deep memories and habits of the Soul are the archetypal probability fields in the causal/imaginal collective unconscious (in the LL), whereas the full range of potentiality for their creative and novel manifestation are the subtle future possible forms of being in the field of imagination within the Mind (in the UL). Often or widely repeated potentialities (through intentional and/or random resonance) become greater probabilities, which are inherited or "engrooved" as memories/habits/archetypes, and these greater probabilities (whether by random or intentional resonance) then become specific manifest forms (in the UR). Just as Aristotle said, the body is the form of the soul, the product of the habits of our potentialities, the memories of our intentionalities and lucky/unlucky accidents, which is the archetypal manifestation of our soul. And finally, all this takes place within the environment of the sum total of all things with their potentialities and probabilities, which is the non-dual Spirit (the interior-exterior LR).

As the potentialities of forms accumulate habits and increase the probability of their appearance as forms into the present, the future (potentiality) is projected into the past (memory), which becomes the present (manifest forms). This is to say that as Mind accumulates memories to and from the Soul, these memories are transferred to the appearance of the Body-form, and all of this takes place within Spirit, within the environmental context of all the potentialities and probabilities of things. Or again, as the Self accumulates habits and values to and from Culture, these are transferred to Nature and Technology (extensions of the Body), and all of this takes place within the context of the class relations and institutional structures of Society, which are themselves the sum total of the previous process.

Each trait of existence is formed and selected by future potentialities and past probabilities in the present, from moment to moment, in the context of all the potentialities and probabilities of existing things in the environment. No thing has potentialities or probabilities separate from the other things in its environment with their own potentialities and probabilities. The process-relational nature of each thing is its essence, which is its mutual arising with other things in its environmental context, its geographic-spatial and historical-time dimensions. Therefore the true nature of things is not their existence as such, but the field of their potentials and the probability resonances of their accumulated past, which is inseparable from Spirit, or the sum total of the existence of all things within a particular environment, ultimately scaling-up to the environment of the entire Kosmos.