Jung popularized and differentiated the idea of archetypes. They didn’t originate with him, but come from Plato’s ideals. Jung and Freud believed in sub-personalities that can be thought of as transcendent entities, like gods. Jung never clearly defined archetypes. It’s a complicated idea that can be thought of as biological, sociological, and something the individual partakes in. Sometimes he says they are few, sometimes infinite. It depends on how wide your lens is. You have a hero archetype, but you can have an infinite number of particular heroes in stories that fit the archetype.
Stories or narratives incorporate underlying archetypal themes because they matter to us, hook us, and motivate us.
What kind of therapy works best? Well any kind of ordered structure is better than chaos, so potentially all of them. You can’t just challenge religious dogma and leave people in chaos, you have to provide some kind order, which comes from ritual, routine, etc.
No matter what you do for a living, your soul longs for deeper meaning. Your identity is contextualized in something bigger. Philosophy is nested in archetypes which give order and meaning. To be left in chaos is to be left in anxiety, pain, and lacking motivation. We need deeper meaning to order and make sense of our lives.
Political narratives can become ideologies because of their one-sided nature. They capitalize on one side of the narrative, but don’t tell the whole story. All stories must contain the positive and negative. Life is complex. For instance, society is both tyrannical and liberating. Capitalism produces both good and bad results. Male aggressiveness can be both positive and negative. Various political and economic philosophies contain both good and bad.
Reality consists of you, your interpretive structure, and the world of phenomena. Every story has these elements.
How do you know that the stories and archetypes you tell aren’t just imposed post hoc stories? Because you can map archetypical structures to brain biology and neuroprocessing in the brain. They arise in us across culture. They are deeper than post hoc frames. They come before information and frame it, not after.
We tell stories with deeper meanings than we can know. How? Because we act out and live out meaning by imitating, even if we don’t know what we’re doing. We live bottom up. We don’t think and articulate first, we act first, then wonder and reflect on why we want what we want and do what we do. You have an epiphany after years of behaving a certain way and not knowing why you do so. Animals are the same. They do, but don’t philosophize and articulate. Acting is deeper than thinking.
When you watch a play, you partake in it through imitation or live vicariously through the characters, then you get coffee, talk about it, and try to articulate it. You find themes that matter. An archetype is what’s common across stories, so we can watch one hundred movies and find what they have in common.
Freud talked about the id, ego, and superego. The id is the natural force within you, the ego is you as an individual, and the superego controls, oppresses, and civilizes you, and can also be a complete tyrant.
What you confront in life is not the material word, but potential. We are not determined by a material substrate. Though it’s never a good idea to base an argument on quantum mechanics, the quantum realm suggests that being is a field of potential from which forms emerge. Consciousness plays a key determining role in that, though we don’t know exactly how.
Your name is a category, but you are a paradoxical category. A person can lack homogeny enough that you can’t plot a way forward with him. There are too many things pulling both you and him apart. Complex categories like people are both A and B at the same time.
A dictionary of symbols won’t do. They change according to context. When the context is sky and earth, sky is masculine and earth is feminine. When the context is earth and water, earth is masculine and water is feminine. The unknown/great mother is chaos, and nature. The known/great father is order and society.
How do you learn? You know nothing, you build a center, and you explore the unknown from there. When the caregiver is changed, what is familiar (family) is gone and the child becomes disoriented, anxious, and unsafe. He smiles at a stranger, then hides, then repeats and plays a game, then loosens up and explores if he feels safe enough, then retreats to mom for a hug of reassurance. When life is too much, he runs back for comfort. A child explores then comes back and attaches to a mother’s leg. At some point, he moves on providing his own security and no longer needs his parents for that. He becomes an adult.
Sacrifice is painful because you learn something new and have to give up previous frames and data you got all wrong and no longer need. You abandon all you know and have to remap and retool yourself, other people, and the world around you. When you explore something new, a part of you is demolished. This is why some people don’t enjoy talking to people who have ideas different to theirs. They become challenged, which is uncomfortable, and might even lead to disillusionment, where you have to retreat to the underworld. Continual small updates make you stronger because you practice the process of letting go and transforming. Be a master of that, not of guarding your territory. You want to keep tearing down your walls, expanding, and rebuilding. What we don’t know benefits us, so don’t be afraid of it. Welcome it, grow, and develop.
Your relationship is going well, then something comes up. From where? Up from inside of you. It will manifest. Trouble is always brewing in relationships, which is what keeps them alive. Having nothing but positive interactions with your partner is a dead relationship. You don’t want bliss from your partner, but periods of peace punctuated by a good fight. A real relationship is a wrestling match that causes you to grow. A narcissistic person wants a partner who delivers only what they want from them, and they will mistreat them beyond belief. A person with no spine who is ever-compatible and agreeable is not real, so can’t be engaged, encountered, and respected. Tension in relationships is healthy.
Jonah doesn’t want to deliver a negative message to
There is an image of Venus in the sky, the goddess of love, emanating rays of light down upon the kneeling knights beholding her. Men use the image of female perfection to motivate themselves. In Tom Sawyer, he’s 12 years old and is struck by Becky, the new girl across the street, and hops on the fence and performs for her. He is kneeling before the image of the feminine, which motivates him. It’s the chivalry story—trying to make himself worthy. You should encourage this in your partner.
The feminine represents novelty—both promise and threat. Women don’t understand how paralyzing they are for men. Men are terrified of women because they don’t want to be rejected. They don’t see the individual woman, but the judgmental ideal, feeling rejected by all women. They have to sacrifice their relationship with the ideal woman for the real woman. Get over your fear of rejection by encountering it continually. Go out and ask women for phone numbers and realize that rejection from women isn’t as catastrophic as you imagined.
If you turn out the lights and sit in the dark, your imagination immediately conjures predatory creatures and monsters coming from all sides. In new environments, cats pause, slink in a crouch, sniff, then with trepidation explore. They run to safety when they smell danger. They might not know exactly what’s out there, but they know it will hurt them. This is the monster—the conglomerate of all predatory animals imagined together that can hurt you. It’s a useful category that has functional utility.
Kali is the Hindu goddess of destruction. She is immersed in fire and skulls—she is the fire that consumes. She has insect-like arms. She’s given birth to a person whose intestines she’s eating. This is Mother Nature. It gives birth to you and consumes you. If you make sacrifices to her, she benefits you. In the face of horror and death, you make sacrifices so you transform the terrible destructive element of nature into that thing that continually offers you what you need.
Dianna is multi-breasted. She nurtures and protects—the source of fertility and sustenance and all things good. She is the positive feminine in nature, Kali is the negative.
You can’t negotiate with God or Mother Nature to rid your life of evil and suffering, but you can get your life together as best you can and reduce unbearable suffering.
The MGTOW movement—Men Going Their
[Leaders of the Red Pill men’s community on YouTube often say they agree with Jordan Peterson on everything but his relationship advice. They advise that men should never be in a relationship with a woman they have to contend with; she should always submit and trust a man’s leadership. And men should never be chivalrous, perform, impress, or “simp.” Bowing down to a woman because she’s beautiful and pedestalizing her is making her of greater value than you, and this turns women off. Men should be confident and the prize. Women should be trying to win him because he is a high quality alpha male. The man who puts the woman above him is a beta simp. She will look down on him.]
There is an image of Mary holding her baby and crushing the reptile under her feet. She’s coming out of a portal that transcends time and space. It’s the place from which all forms emerge. Layers of harmonious patterns make up being, so there are musical instruments in the painting, a symphony of potential.
Images of
In Peteron’s experience working with women—mainly conscientious, conservative, hard working, intelligent, dutiful, and agreeable women—they want to please, do what they’re told, and be obedient. This means they outperform men in grades at school. Men are rebellious and not as agreeable, which might hold them back. Women succeed in high school and college and are great at moving up their high stress, high pressure jobs, making over $250,000 a year and working 70 hours a week with no time for anything else. These women marry men who make as much as they do or more, so end up leaving their careers to work 9-5 jobs to manage their lives and families. Why aren’t there more women in positions of power? People in positions of power and responsibility never stop, never rest, and handle endless stress. They are obsessed with work and are disagreeable, so want to lead people and don’t care if they hurt feelings. They are incredibly competitive, and their personal relationships suffer because of this. Some women are built for this, but most realize they aren’t. They want families, so drop out of their careers for a more balanced life in their 30s. Women are never more miserable than when they realize they want kids but didn’t have them for the sake of their career.
Most people don’t have careers, they have jobs, and a job is getting paid to do something you wouldn’t do otherwise. A career isn’t an idealized enjoyable life, it’s high stress and hard work. Why are telling women to idealize a fulfilling career and to see motherhood as an unfulfilling jail? It’s appalling.
The positive mother gives birth to the hero. Hercules is wearing a lion skin and has a bow and arrow and a club covered with eyes. He is armed, accurate, and able to pay attention. He is protected, given encouragement, and can take on the world head on.
The great mother and father are born from chaos. Male and female are fundamentally differentiated into two sexes that interact creatively to bring new life into being.
There is an image of God the Father with the sun behind him. He is sitting behind a walled city. The sun fights its battle with darkness at night and rises victorious in the morning. It provides life and light and sends the darkness away. This is why we have solar gods, victorious in the sky. The city is a confined space, and inside is a dominance hierarchy. It represents order.
If you are socialized well, you become God the Father, embodying the central spirit of that culture. You are the embodiment of civilization and the force that transforms it and moves it forward. That’s what university is supposed to be for, but now it creates politically obsessed idiots.
What kind of relationship do you have with your real father? Without him, it’s demoralizing and hard to be confident in the world. If your father rejects you, it’s as if the spirit of civilization rejects you and leaves you outside the city walls. It’s very difficult to recover from this. The father can also be a tyrannical and crushing force instead of an encouraging one. If you’re my son, I should always be imposing the highest standards of behavior on you and judge you with the intent of improving you. But the father might have his own pathologies—being jealous of your achievements or competing with you for your mom’s attention.
The image of father as wise king has been lost to a massive degree in modern universities because he represents the patriarchy to be torn down. Rather than being grateful to all of the structure he builds despite his imperfections, he is completely torn down and made obsolete.
The overprotective mother holds the child and says she won’t let anything happen to him, when instead of coddling and smothering him, she should be sending him out into the world and saying she’s there for him if he needs her. The father also wants to get you into the world and light a fire under your ass to do better in the world and succeed.
We have more rights and privileges and protections than ever in history. How about we focus on responsibility? That’s where life has meaning. The more responsibility you agree to bear voluntarily there more meaning and fulfillment enters your life. It’s tough, but you’re doing something difficult and heroic. It’s a good and necessary message. We have to be more than we are or we aren’t going to survive.
Captain Hook is a pirate. He’s captain of the high seas, willing to break the rules, a romantic figure of adventure. The dragon of chaos is after him. It already took his hand. Peter Pan stays Pan—pan means everything—and refuses to grow up and become someone, because why be an adult when you become jaded, scared, tyrannical, and chased by the dragon like Captain Hook? That’s the negative father.
The father supports the son who voluntarily takes responsibility and embraces sacrifice, foraging into the chaotic world. This is noble and to be looked up to. This is the top of the dominance hierarchy. We admire courageous and strong people who act appropriately in a helpful, compassionate, wise, tough manner despite being beset with all the problems of mortality that beset everyone else.
Images of Hitler’s propaganda are shown. He’s the knight of nationalism. He is God the Father, but represents the state, or hyper-nationalism, which is tyranny. He has an eagle above him, which eats flesh, not a dove. He has a boot stomping on snakes. He can now round up the enemies he deems to be snakes. Everything outside of Arian purity was disgusting and meant to be burned. These images have archetypal power. Presented is uniformity of the state, all in lockstep, rigid, homogenous, and without diversity or individualism, which you need in case you’re on the wrong path and on your way to marching off a cliff. Stalin used similar propaganda to present himself as a God archetype.
Communism was a fully articulated philosophy that could be attacked philosophically, but fascism wasn’t, so depended on ritual, symbolism, light, fire, highly charged emotional rallies, pageantry, organized and orderly displays, lights shining miles into the sky as Hitler spoke, long before rock music used them, and personal charisma that allowed him to play the mob like an orchestra, leading to millions of deaths.
What does it mean to be a good person? It’s bravely going into the world, creating order from chaos, sharing what you’ve found, being a good husband and father, and keeping order. This is winning at all of the dominance hierarchies.
No comments:
Post a Comment