Archetypes are nature’s prompts to action. In the animal world archetypes are the counterpoint to inertia. When the archetype is activated the target image, goal, and energy for action appear: the sleeping cat suddenly pounces!
– Photo by Jan Ketchel
Although the human animal shares with all of nature its pre-programmed reactions to life, these archetypal calls to action are often muddled by consciousness, which allows for freedom of choice. As the #MeToo perspective has charged, sexual arousal needn’t result in automatic behavior. Consciousness can restrain, reflect, and negotiate versus simply act out an archetypal impulse.
The archetypes in nature can be opposed and transformed by human consciousness. This evolutionary power of choice is facilitated by the prefrontal lobe hegemony of the human brain, particularly the left brain that organizes what it perceives and experiences into a logical space-time order. This thinking function has the ability to override nature.
The power to act upon its own decisions is associated with the ego, the center of human consciousness. As powerful and advantageous as it may be to oppose nature, it comes at quite a cost. At the level of the brain, the ego tends to dismiss the wisdom and fuller interconnected knowledge of the right brain, the seat of our vaster spirit selves, that perceives and lives outside the confines of space-time in infinity. This greater center of knowing could be and often is a valuable contributor to the ego’s decision making processes.
However, as is quite evident in the time we live, the world ego seems to have reverted to a more primitive #MeOnly perspective that completely dismisses our interconnected reality and chooses to act on its personal survival and needs alone. For many, this is a most satisfying respite from the altruism born of a higher interconnected concern for world survival. For others this is nothing less than a total disintegration of civilization, our collective effort to function cohesively as one world.
Ironically, the world ego is now actually being controlled by deeper archetypal forces that are colluding with the ego in a major world ego inflation. World leaders are emboldened and possessed by their primitive instincts to care only about themselves and their own national interests. What is emerging is a rapid takedown of the morals and principles that have held the world together.
Perhaps this is the result of nature, having been opposed for too long, exacting an exaggerated compensatory reaction to a spirit driven world. Even Obama questions if he came too soon.
The archetypes have destructive sides. Life in space-time begins and ends. Archetypes usher life both in and out. One only need consider nature’s storms that destroy communities and nations in a heartbeat. This destructive side of archetypal nature is ruling the behavior and decisions of many world leaders at present. Nature is exacting some kind of correction upon the human race under the guise of supporting individualism.
The ego inflation of humankind will likely be leveled by nature’s actual storms and the emotional storms of egos possessed by destructive archetypes. The silver lining to this correction is an evolutionary push to more fully explore and inhabit spirit centered right brain interconnectedness. It’s time for left brain to consider, support, and serve its fuller energetic self, the hard drive of which is centered in the right brain. This is the conjunctio that is necessary as we move forward: left and right brain in complementary communion.
We are the progeny of nature. Nature had long ago decided that it was time to broaden from natural selection and the natural domination of archetypes to allow for more efficient guiding decisions from consciousness. Nature is now correcting for its creation, an inflated ego far too dissociated and negating of its all-knowing inheritance. Destruction will lead to evolved life.
As we move into the future now, we will more deeply inhabit our right brain, with all its interconnected knowing, with our left brain, providing time-space orientation and making decisions based on our true interconnectedness. Now that’s progress: ego and archetype, consciousness and interconnected all-knowing on the same team.
Integrating,
Chuck