THE ARCHETYPAL WAVELENGTH
The rhythm of everything from your body, habits, and emotions, to the rise and fall of empires, to the seasons of the year.
Whole Adepts Surf the Archetypal Wavelength
Reality hums with rhythm, and that humming vibrates our bodies. The way that a certain person can belch up some 280 character acid and the world ripples with anger. The way a perfectly timed smile from a stranger can remind you you’re grateful to be alive. The way you feel sad when your partner does, or feel energetic when you’re around motivated people.
It’s all vibration. Like a guitar string springing rapidly back and forth. And when you slow that string down and zoom all the way in, you see the rising and falling pattern that vibrates the air in a way your ear perceives as a musical note. The guitar wiggles the air the same way your partner’s laugh wiggles the field of consciousness you both inhabit to fill you with joy.
Interpret that with as much or as little “it’s just a metaphor” handwaving as you prefer. It’s pragmatic to approach the world this way: it can advance us toward our objectives. Toward equanimity, tranquility, meaning, love, luminosity, awakening, Wholeness. All of it.
In acoustics, the word “period” describes the space between one peak on a wave and the next. The length of the period is the wavelength.
Every wavelength essentially looks like a sine curve—use the picture above if you don’t remember trig. Like the guitar string, all wavelengths rubber band back and forth through highs and lows, on and on until they run out of energy.
Aside from “period,” we can also say “cycle.” That’s one full traversal, where the substance or object vibrating goes through each phase of the Wavelength. Before, of course, repeating again.
In order to go down you have to have gone up first? This is all almost too obvious to even bother with saying. But hang on, because it’s about to get interesting.
Although ntrospection into my own Bipolar Disorder triggered this epiphany, validation abounds in the external world: it turns out the shape of every cycle I’ve studied consists of roughly the same six phases. Granted, as with most Ken Wilber-style Integral theories, sometimes you have to squint your eyes a bit—and yet, everything seems to fit.
Wilber founded Integral Philosophy to describe the similarities between the core tenets of an incredibly wide spectrum of intellectual, spiritual and social arenas. Working like a madman locked in his house with pages and pages of handwritten notes laid out on the floor, he identified a basic structure to which different theories conform. His story is hugely inspiring to me. In fact, the pattern called Spiral Dynamics, or Growing Up as Wilber spins it, helps inform the Stages of APTITUDE. But more on that later.
Right now, let’s look at this Archetypal Wavelength.
What can we learn by studying the archetypal shape of all wavelengths: the aspects, vibes, and characteristics that they all share in common?
The Archetypal Wavelength is the deep current beneath your moods, your insights, your cycles of creation and collapse. It carries you through peaks of inspiration and valleys of despair, through the compulsions of the self-aggrandizing trickster and the humility of the emptied mystic. To know this wave is to know yourself.
Every cycle I’ve researched maps onto the Wavelength. The seasons, the rise and fall of civilizations, the flow of breath itself.
Again, it is six-fold: Rising, Peaking, Withdrawal, Diminishing, Bottoming Out, and Restoration. Each of these phases plays out across your psyche and the world around you, shaping experience and perception all the time.
Most live at the mercy of this cycle, either clinging to the highs or drowning in the lows. But the Adept sees the pattern, and learns to flow with it rather than against it. To ride the wave instead of tumbling desperately in its undertow.
Everything breathes and turns in its cycles. The moon, the stock market, our hearts, the wheeling galaxies all expand and contract with the rhythm of life. All spiritual life exists in an alternation of gain and loss, pleasure and pain. For each of us, even the Buddha, it is only by letting go into this truth that we awaken to that which is timeless, the reality of freedom.
~ Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy the Laundry
-
Rising is the birth of motion, the first swell of energy, the crackle of inspiration. We can think of it as the first energizing notes of a movie’s montage music, the scene in the film where training begins, where growth happens, where the hero risks leaving home on the road of adventure.
You can probably recognize moments you’ve been captured by Rising energy. The first intoxicating flush of a new romance, the giddy momentum of a creative surge, the electric charge of epiphany that feels more like remembering the truth than uncovering it.
APTITUDE is full of strategies for honoring this optimization-focused mood state with appropriate effort and self-organization. You are pulled forward by enthusiasm, but enthusiasm cannot sustain you forever. In fact, nothing can. Still, before the fall, is the Peak.
-
Peaking is the high, the culmination, the moment when everything aligns, and you feel like you are on top of the world. It’s the experience of your personal vibration aligning with or harmonizing with the vibration of reality itself.
Returning to acoustics, when two waves meet, if their highs align, those highs are amplified—they become even higher. That amplification is what we are talking about when we say an idea “resonates” with us—it’s a borrowed word.
To Peak is to be resonant with reality itself.
It’s the ecstasy of the athlete breaking a record, the artist lost in the rapture of flow, the mystic gnosis—experiential understanding—of Source. There is a danger here too, though, for the higher you climb, the greater the vertigo when the descent begins.
APTITUDE, in part, teaches skills that prevent compulsively over-extending the high. Because yes, many of us try to clutch this moment, freeze it, hold it static—but life does not work that way. The cycle moves ever forward.
-
Withdrawal is when the ice gets too thin and starts to crack. It’s the tremor of the decline, the fading of the thrill, the moment after the applause when silence settles in and you start to reflect on every minor mistake.
Agitation begins to pick at you due to worry, remorse or anxiety.
At its best, Withdrawal can be a helpful phase for introspection and vigilance that serves life, growth, and Wholeness. But too often among Liminal Trickster Mystics, the addiction cycle starts here. The artist, once ablaze, suddenly feels that nothing they create is good enough. This natural ebb is too often mistaken for failure.
This course can help you find less self-destructive strategies to cope with this oft-painful phase.
-
Diminishing is the slide into the Low.
Although there is a persistent hope that the mood can be salvaged simply by re-engaging with the activities that brought rapture in the Rising phase, what was thrilling now feels hollow, if not impossible. Self-doubt sets in. Or, if the energy of the diminished state is externalized, convicted anger toward others thrills through you. You may find yourself questioning why you even started.
You find yourself dangling from a cliff by your fingertips, not quite strong enough to pull yourself back up. Atop the cliff is the Peaking state you just slipped away from, all those strategies and activities that worked so well to make you feel so resonant still sing a siren song to you. But you can’t get it back. You can never go backwards.
It turns out that the drop from the cliff is only a few inches, if you aim right. Then you can take a leisurely walk back up to the peak once you’re on solid ground. APTITUDE will teach strategies to welcome this contraction with grace.
-
Bottoming Out is the nadir, the Dark Night, the moment of absolute stillness where everything seems lost. The Tower crumbles, the Fool falls, the cycle reaches its deepest point.
You lose your job.
Heartbreak shatters you.
The collapsing world makes no sense.
It often seems to be caused by external conditions. We cling to them as if they’re the only thing that makes the feeling real and valid. But the fact is, what goes up must come down. A pendulum always has a backswing.
Depression often begins to creep in here. But this is also necessary: contraction, rest, coziness, and darkness are the conditions a buried seed needs to begin to sprout.
As with all things, “this too shall pass.” It’s both a blessing and a curse, and that pendulum keeps on swinging. The field of consciousness keeps on vibrating. Even within this void, if you listen, you can hear the moment something shifts.
APTITUDE teaches that in the fallow state of total surrender, adopting a posture of receptivity ensures nutrients accrue for the coming Restoration.
-
Restoration is the return, the inhale after the exhale, the first green shoot after winter. This is the Phoenix phase.
Narratives of rising action and climax have captured the world we live in. The return of Christ, the landing of the aliens, the rapture of the technological Singularity. But The Archetypal Wavelength recognizes a deeper, older truth: even after a piece of the narrative that seems like a complete story is over, the cycle continues.
From this perspective, with this broader lens, the polycrisis isn’t a cataclysmic end, but the prelude to a new and better world.
APTITUDE teaches that Restoration isn’t a re-treading of the glory of the past, but a new stage in an infinite spiral toward actualization.
APTITUDE Empowers Temperance and Equanimity in Relating to Life’s Many Varied Archetypal Wavelengths
To surf this wave is to dance with the universe itself, to move with the pulse of being rather than against it. Those who fight it are thrown about, lost in the push and pull of forces they do not understand. But those who recognize the pattern, who learn the rhythm, who embrace each phase for what it is—those are the ones who excel in the same waters in which the psychotic may often drown.
The awakened mystic doesn’t resist the crest or the crash, because they know: the Whole Adept is not just the surfer.
The Whole Adept is the ocean itself.
