A person’s own inner most awareness and the movements within their awareness field bring forth their direct personal experience of their cosmological archetypal field of awareness. This spontaneous event is given to us within the archetypal realm of awareness. The archetypal dimension manifests itself as us, and reveals itself to us through our experience of its self-manifestation.
Transitional Space and Awareness
Often the first movement is for a person is to enter into the experience of awareness, and this awareness is intrinsically a modality of transitional space and transitional relatedness. It is within transitional awareness, that the archetypal experience can and does manifest within us. This manifestation of transitional awareness can be experienced through dreams, apparitions, mythological symbolic experience, luminous relational events; and cosmological symbolic processes such as archetypal astrology, meditative awareness and contemplative praxis.
The transitional nature of awareness has been exquisitely described by Donald Winnicott, the great English psychoanalyst. Transitional awareness is the experience that arises when a person is not located in their mind alone, nor are they located in a singular ego function of the mind, such as mentalistic thinking.
Transitional awareness is the intermediary area of experience, and this intermediary area of experience has been described as the “space-in–be- tween.” It is the space in-between reality and fantasy, in-between thought and affects, in-between sensation and memory, and in- between the functions of the mind. Winnicott described this awareness experience as being in the space of spacious non conceptual knowingness, a thought free knowingness. The transitional time is the ‘opening of the opening’ that allows for the emergence and manifestation of the archetypal dimension of human experience within awareness. Transitional awareness opens during wakefulness and also opens within sleep. The dreams that emerge through transitional space and open during sleep will be dramatic dreams or archetypal dreams. Within transitional awareness we can experience a most basic sense of self which Winnicott describes as “the ongoing sense of continuity of being”.
Dr Rudolph Bauer in “Experiencing the Archetypal Realm: A Phenomenology of Self Liberation”