This phrase that Trump’s election has precipitated into a full-blown — hmmm . . . what? Not just “meme” — that word skates the surface. What’s happened with the upsurging of this phrase seems to be simultaneously both expansion and deepening of the cultural? conspiratorial? convergence? field which holds all our political (and other) imaginings. And, I’d say, it’s about time.

It’s about time that we begin to think, see, feel, in a layered, or even multidimensional manner, recognizing that whatever we’re dreaming up now has deep roots elsewhere and that whatever is beginning to die off is returning to that same mysterious fertile soil. For me, what’s of most interest is not the visible extrusions from that soil, but the soil itself.

Rather like mushrooms, ideas sprout up from an underground mycelium web, and when strongly and repeatedly encouraged, persist, ripen into concrete manifestation.

It’s the web itself that holds and feeds nutrients across time and space. Likewise for us, inside our brains, “ideas” are constantly being fed and scrapped by the mysterious underground web of neurons;  “ideas” of which we become conscious are like tiny points of light, appearing and disappearing.

I’ve been quite used to the idea of this “Deep State” within myself. Comfortable to consider that whatever grows up as an idea or feeling inside me is rooted in something seemingly semi-permanent, a largely unknown and unexplored field of possibilities, what, since Freud, we have called the personal subconscious, and which, when we open further, says C.G. Jung, expands into something Freud, horror-stricken at Jung’s divergence from his theory, labeled “the occult.”

Freud preferred to stick with the personal subconscious. Jung’s great advance, which came about through extended self-analysis, was to deepen his understanding from the personal to what lies beyond, what he called the collective unconscious, and which, for Jung, consisted of species-wide archetypes, patterns, again reminding us of those extended mycelium webs.

I tend to be Jungian in my orientation. For me, the main task in life is to deepen the personal field so that it really does open into the quantum void of infinite possibilities. Yes, at some level, in some layer or dimension, anything is possible, ANYTHING.

Here’s a photo of the supposed distribution of galaxies. Talk about a “Deep State”!

Which reminds me, how can we ever, ever assume that we’ve managed to capture the full context of any idea or claim? How can we even pretend to “justify” what we think we “know?” What is “proof”? The world just goes on and on. Everything comes into and out of some kind of mysterious and largely inexpressible Deep State. Every set of assumptions is a sieve, through which the universe pours.

So, with this personal foray into some ontological and epistemological ramifications of the very phrase “Deep State,” what is this Deep State being referred to now?

Here’s the Nation, its attempt to explain.

What Is the Deep State?

Keep in mind that there’s a debate currently between whether or not Trump is a part of the Deep State, which itself has, some argue, diverged into two main streams, one the neo/lib con of globalism that Hillary was beholden to, and the other while still corporate, and centralized in orientation, focuses on nation-states as independent entities.

Here’s the first part of a two-part series on Trump’s relationship to how Peter Dale Scott contextualizes the Deep State.

Donald J. Trump and the Deep State, Part I.