Finding Peace in the Freefall | Dialogues III

A Greek word meaning fullness. It appears in early Christian and Gnostic contexts with different senses. In Jung’s Seven Sermons to the Dead, the pleroma is described paradoxically as fullness and emptiness, beyond ordinary differentiation. The episode turns this into an oceanic image of reality; that image is a philosophical metaphor rather than an empirical cosmology.

The principium individuationis, or principle of individuation, is the philosophical question of what makes an individual distinct. Jung also used “individuation” for psychological integration—the development of a more whole personality. The episode’s description of distinctiveness as a defence against the pleroma is its own synthesis and should not be mistaken for Jung’s complete theory.

In Plotinus’s Neoplatonism, the One is the source beyond ordinary being and thought. Intellect and Soul proceed from it in an ordered dependence often called emanation. Images of sunlight or overflowing help explain this without implying a temporal act of manufacture. The episode’s equation of the One with Jung’s pleroma is comparative, not historical.

In Letter 58 to G. H. Schuller—not to Hugo Boxel—Spinoza imagines a moving stone that becomes conscious of its effort but not of the causes determining it. It would consider itself free. The example criticises an uncaused will; it does not by itself settle every contemporary question about responsibility, deliberation or practical agency.

A Daoist expression often translated as “non-action”, “effortless action” or action without forcing. It does not simply mean passivity. The Zhuangzi story of the Lüliang swimmer portrays cultivated responsiveness: he enters and emerges with the water’s changing movement rather than imposing a rigid plan upon it.

A set of interacting brain regions often active during internally directed cognition, including autobiographical memory, imagining the future and thinking about oneself or others. It is involved in more than rumination and is not literally the ego. Patterns of altered DMN activity appear in several conditions and states, but simple “more is bad, less is awakened” claims are not supported.

A family of theories in which perception and action involve predictions interacting with incoming signals. “Priors” are existing expectations or probability-weighted assumptions. These models can explain how expectations shape perception, but the idea that the brain “hallucinates reality” is a vivid shorthand. Predictive processing remains an influential research framework rather than a settled metaphysics of mind.

“Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics”, a model proposed by Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston. It suggests that psychedelics may reduce the precision of high-level prior beliefs and permit greater influence from lower-level signals. The model was not developed as a general explanation of meditation or flow, so the episode’s extension to those states is speculative.

Flow is deep absorption in an activity, often accompanied by reduced self-consciousness and altered time perception. Transient hypofrontality is Arne Dietrich’s hypothesis that some altered states temporarily reduce aspects of prefrontal processing. It is one proposed account, not a universal explanation of flow, and flow does not mean that executive control or the whole prefrontal cortex simply switches off.

A Sanskrit term meaning play, sport or spontaneous activity. Some Hindu traditions use it to speak of divine creation or manifestation as play rather than labour or necessity. The episode’s cosmic hide-and-seek is a modern interpretive image, not a definition shared uniformly across Hindu philosophical and devotional traditions.

Originally a craftsman figure in Plato’s Timaeus. In several Gnostic mythologies, a lower creator orders the material cosmos while ignorant of a higher divine fullness. Accounts vary substantially between texts and schools. The episode’s insecure “immature demiurge” and his eventual retirement are psychological allegories; they are not a standard summary of Sethian or Valentinian doctrine.

Meister Eckhart’s Abgeschiedenheit is detachment or being set apart from possessive attachment; Gelassenheit suggests releasement or letting-be. His Latin bullitio (“boiling”) and ebullitio (“boiling over”) describe aspects of divine life and procession. The episode’s organic “ripening” extends these themes imaginatively rather than translating a single Eckhartian doctrine.