The Archetype of Oneness

About this poem

Constructed at approximately 3:15 A.M. Eastern Standard Time (EST) on Passion Sunday, April 3, 2022, this poem, “The Archetype of Oneness,” awakened from a deep silent sleep that compelled me to write, driven by an energy that guided my pen hand to bleed the pages of white sheet with ink. And in the moment of composing, a thought came to me from graduate classes of linguistic lessons I had taken during the 1970s, and in which I recall that the eminent linguist, philosopher, and cognitive scientist, Noam Chomsky, had once articulated, in an effort to distinguish syntactics from semantics, the following sentence, suggesting it to be syntactical, but nonsensical, not semantic: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. ” Chomsky, a linguistic specialist, argued that his sample sentence was certainly syntactic, but defied, even contradicted the logic and rationalism of ordinary meaning, and was therefore not semantic. On its surface, the Chomsky specimen sentence appears to make little or no sense, as Chomsky declared. That is certainly the case, if we take the “meaning” of the sentence at literal face value. However, considered allegorically, metaphorically, or poetically, this specimen sentence can be found to be rich with metacognitive meaning. In the context of dream imagery and the imagery of the collective unconscious, the sentence can be determined to be rich with its own special syntax and its special meaning. I offer one such meaning as an elaborated paraphrase of Chomsky’s classical and scholarly sentence. It reads as follows: “In the depths of the collective unconscious, creative ideas not yet brought to human consciousness [“Colorless green ideas”] are ever restlessly being conceived [“sleep furiously”], before they become manifest to mankind.” I argue here that the innermost latent depth of the collective unconscious (where colorless green but fertile ideas of the underworld reside) is the habitat (the “furious”sleeping realm) of all creation, having a semantic import of its own logic and design, whose offerings are brought to us in our waking moments, and superimposed with our own syntax and our own meaning as manifestos of assertions as with new understanding. The eminent psychiatrist Sigmund Freud was innately aware of the distinction of the two realms of consciousness, naming one the realm of the latent (the realm of the unconscious), and the other, the realm of the manifest (our conscious realm). Not generally understanding the singularity of the realm of the collective unconscious as the numinous chthonic source of all human knowledge, we superimpose upon it the experiences and cornucopia of meaning that we construct daily in our conscious realm. Despite our eloquence and fluency in our own realms, we remain ever ignorant of the wisdom of the realm of the collective unconscious; the realm and residence of the archetype of Oneness. more »