The Work
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” Joseph Campbell,
ARCHETYPAL THERAPY – THE WORK
Talk about your date with destiny! Get ready to talk to your soul. When you meet the archetypes, you are meeting Spirit immersed in matter: soul. And when Spirit, The One, descends into matter, it crystallizes like a diamond. The One now has form. And that form has polarities . . . opposing sides of energy.
Mythology meets Psychology
The Work
You’re the diamond. You, as Spirit, materialized. Your materialization was a unique experience in that you are the product of Spirit penetrating matter at a particular point in time at a particular point in space in a particular dimension for a particular purpose of expressing Spirit’s nature in a particular form. Without you, the Whole of material existence would not be complete.
Your soul, the aspect of God that is you, is not the same as any other soul. There is no truth in measuring yourself against any other being as you are unique. Your being, your journey, your experiences, will have many similarities to others’, but God’s particular expression as you, requires that you express it. You’re it. And however you do it is perfect because it is your nature to express God as you do. What you may perceive as a flaw or a negative is all part of the journey you are supposed to express in your particular role in The All.
Happiness is expressing God in the way that is true to who you are. You already are who you are, and so, happiness is the release of judgment. Judgment was born out of the belief that you are supposed to be like another soul and do it another way. Of course, that’s ridiculous.
Dr. Carl G. Jung coined the term archetype to define our souls as composed of the Divine … the purest energy of nature … our instincts … and that which we have inherited from our childhoods, consciously and unconsciously; from our personal ancestry; our cultural ancestry; and our environmental ancestry.
Environmental ancestry can take many forms. For instance, the individual who grew up in a home with a housekeeper of a different nationality will also inherit that ancestry. Environmental ancestry can also be the ancestry you adopt when you migrate or convert to a different religion.
Our psyches are comprised of 44 essential archetypes and an untold number of synthesized archetypes. Each archetype holds a quality of being and expresses itself as molded by our innate nature, ancestry and environment. The archetypes are structured, yet ever-changing, forms of energy.
Archetypes can assume many forms in your mind’s eye. They can come to you as a basic element of nature, such as water or soil. They can appear as an animal. They can appear as a god or goddess of ancient times. They can be fairy tale figures or Disney characters. Teenagers’ archetypes often appear as Animae characters or representations from Magic Cards.
Accept whatever form the archetype comes as, unless it is a person you know from your outer world. That is who the archetype projects upon … that is not the form that the energy holds as it lives within you.
The archetypal characters will have very human behaviors, gestures, and life-styles. They have work and pleasure activities, romance, marriage, children, and adventures. The difference is that beyond those expressions we perceive as human-like, the archetypes express themselves in magical, mythical, fantastic, primal ways. Being the primal energies of life, nature and the world, they are unbridled by the mores of modern society.
When this kind of uninhibited archetypal expression becomes activated in any one of us, it can be a force of creative transformation and enlightenment, or, if judged and repressed, it becomes distorted and appears pathological.
The word archetype is used interchangeably with an aspect of the psyche, just as psyche is used interchangeably with the word soul. Carl Jung wrote that the psyche is all that is real and enduring in humanity. More real than the spirit and the body. And since our psyches include both the conscious and the unconscious, the light and the dark, in reality there is no judgment. All experience is simply experience. In reality, there is no good or bad; it is only ego that labels it as such.
Jung wrote for humanity and humanity perceives through ego. It is the ego that enables each of us to be individuals in its labeling of ‘this is me, this isn’t me.’ The ‘me’ stuff becomes our identity, our ego. The ‘not me’ stuff becomes our alter ego, our disowned identity. The alter ego, which Jung labeled The Shadow self-constructs right along with our ego from birth to about age seven, to prevent the individual from dissolving back into The All. Both ego and shadow continue to age simultaneously. More simply, if you are forty years old, so is your shadow.