In today’s talk, Doug Qapel Duncan introduces the topic of archetypes. He gives an overview of what archetypes are, how they operate in our lives and explains how to harness their power by making them conscious. In the talk, Qapel touches on the topic of refuge and its connection to how we relate to archetypes. He also briefly talks about samadhi, states of absorption, which you can hear more about in last week’s bonus episode.
This recording was made during the first course that had to switch to online only during the early days of the pandemic. Catherine Sensei was in a writing retreat at the time and so Qapel led this course on his own.
Interestingly, Sensei was finishing her book about the Gion Festival. If you would like to learn more about this fascinating and beautiful 1150-year-old month-long purification ritual focused on warding off epidemics, check out Catherine Sensei’s book, The Gion Festival: Exploring Its Mysteries. Sensei is the world’s foremost English language expert on the festival, and has used this position to help reintegrate people’s understanding of the festival as a massive spiritual ritual. You can find it, and some videos on the topic at gionfestival.org/book.
Podcast Transcription:
Welcome to Dharma if you Dare. In today’s talk Doug Qapel Duncan introduces the topic of archetypes. He gives an overview of what archetypes are, how they operate in our lives and explains how to harness their power by making them conscious. This recording was made during the first course that had to switch to online only, during the early days of the pandemic. Catherine Sensei was in a writing retreat at the time, interestingly, finishing her book about the Gion festival, which is a massive ritual to ward off plagues and so Qapel led this course on his own. In the talk Qapel touches on the topic of refuge and its connection to how we relate to archetypes. He also briefly talks about Samadhi, states of absorption, which you can hear more about in last week’s bonus episode. We are only a week away from the annual Planet Dharma winter retreat: this year Qapel and Sensei will lead a two-week retreat on Zen from Clear Sky retreat center in the British Columbian Rocky mountains.
This retreat will be blended with a group participating in person and other participants joining in from various parts of the world. Next year’s winter retreat will only be available for in-person participants, but there will be other events that will be blended or wholly online, including a weekend on the Paramis and another on how to work with Vajrayana deity texts called Sadhanas. You can see the full variety of offerings for the year on our 2022 Dharma Teachings page. And now here’s today’s recording.
Qapel: In Japan during this Gion Festival thing that’s 1200 years old, fighting plagues, which might have seemed out of date until about a month ago. They have what they call chimakis. So chimakis are basically little straw fans that hang upside down and you nail them to your wallet to keep the plague away from the house. So it’s interesting, this weekend is about archetypes and I think in Shinto, somebody can correct me on the numbers, but I think in Shinto they say there’s something like 2000 deities and in Buddhism, they talk about 100 major deities. Deity is another word for archetype. You might want to think about archetypes and such rituals and… the ritual part of it in an archetypal meditation, like in Vajrayana Buddhism or Tarot in Kabbalah, is to instill in you the strength and the focus to use that archetype to produce certain qualities or produce certain states or to protect against other ones, to guard yourself against negativity. So the archetypes are really important. So by way of where we are in the first part of 2020, you want to think about refuge, because basically archetypes talk about where your refuge is. So refuge is a huge word when it comes to archetypes and it’s a huge word when it comes to how you live your life and the word in Pali is Gaccami.
Buddham Saranam Gacchâmi
Dhammam Saranam Gacchâmi
Sangham Saranam Gacchâmi
I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the dharma, I take refuge in the community of awakening beings. But one of the main definitions of Gacchami is to be able to accept the truth. And the truth of the matter is ( no pun intended or maybe pun intended). The truth of the matter is, the truth we accept is the one we’re handed. And the truth we’re handed is an archetype. We are handed the Western myth archetype. We’re handed the Asian myth archetype. We’re handed the Brad Pitt archetype or the – who’s a famous actress of the day? Emily Blunt archetype. We’re handed the archetypes. And unless you consciously put it to work, the truth you’re accepting is what you’re handed, and don’t be fooled, you cannot function without an archetype. An archetype is what frames you and positions you in your culture. So if you don’t relate very much to the idea of an archetype, either from the literature point of view, like the Hero and the Villain, or from the psychological point of view, like the Jung archetypes that we’ll talk about, then you’re accepting your parent’s archetype. And your parents accepted the archetype of their parents, and their parents accepted the archetype of their parents. So in any generation, you/us were probably functioning from the point of view of what we’re handed in archetypes that are 2-300 years old. And that makes it really difficult to adopt a modern life if your archetypes are from the 18 hundreds or the 17 hundreds and you’re trying to live your life in the 21st century. Does this make sense? So then, even if you rebel, even if you rebel against your archetypes that you were handed, unless you have different archetypes, you’re just in the archetype of the rebellion of the archetype, that’s 200 years old! That’s the rebel without the cause. Rebel Without a Cause, if you’ve seen that movie. So the truth is, I mean when we talk about accepting truth, the truth is – there is no refuge in the body. Because the body is… impermanent, subject to change and out of your control. You know, like the virus – out of your control. You may get it, you may not. There’s no refuge in relationships: they come and they go. There’s no refuge in careers: They come and they go. There’s no refuge in entertainment: Can you remember the movie you watched last week? Or even the one you watched last night? They come and they go. So refuge is about buy in. What have you actually bought into?
Now in the old days you bought into the gods. You bought into Thor or you bought into Venus or you bought into the Buddha or you bought into Rama or Krishna or whoever. You bought into somebody, the Buffalo woman or the Great Spirit or the Sun God if you’re Mongolian. What are you brought into? Well, let’s start looking at the big picture. There are two aspects to your life. One is the state of being that you’re in. What state are you in moment to moment? That’s your refuge. You think about what you’re thinking about or what you’re feeling or what you’re going on about at any particular moment. That speaks to your refuge, in terms of your state. It’s also true in terms of your actions, physical actions, emotional actions, and mental actions. What you are engaged in tells you what your refuge is – it tells you what you’ve bought into. Now, archetypes are the raft. Archetypes are the raft for you to get out of unconscious archetypal manifestation, bringing into awareness what you’re actually taking refuge in and shifting that archetype to take you where you would actually like to be. So what state would you like to be in? I mean, fundamentally, you know… bliss, clarity, non-clinging all that stuff. But the abbreviated term for this is Samadhi, jhana, absorption. So, in terms of your walking-around state, day in and day out, moment to moment, it would be good, you’d probably like it, you’d probably be happy if you were in a state of absorption. Jhana. That’s pretty easy to do. Except it isn’t. And why isn’t it easy to do? Because the old, unconscious archetypes are dragging you back into their story. You don’t have the energy or you don’t have the power to see through the archetype that’s going on in the moment, like ‘my girlfriend’ or something or ‘my career’. And so you get dragged back into that story and then you have good days and bad days and you’re up and you’re down and you’re all over the place, but you’re not in Samadhi.
So in terms of being in Samadhi, that’s your state. But what about your actions? Well, for actions you need models. We are a social group. We are a social culture. We interact with each other. So we need models to understand how we’re going to do that. How are we going to meet on the football field? How are we going to meet in the office? How do we meet in the bedroom? How do we meet different genders, different gender orientations, or people from a different culture or a different race? It’s a planetary place. The one thing this virus shows us is we are one planet. And we are really connected because, I don’t know, when did this thing start, COVID-19? It started in late December in China and within a few months, it’s everywhere. So what the archetypes do is they inform how you act, how you engage in the world.
So in Buddhism, there’s an expression ”Descend with the view and ascend with the conduct.” Now, the thing is from society’s point of view, they don’t have a view they’re descending from. Or maybe like if you’re a Christian or a Buddhist or something, just ‘I believe in Buddha’ or ‘I believe in Christ’, right? And that’s it. That’s not a view, that’s just kind of a platitude. And so then you’re left with your conduct and your conduct is, how do you act in the world? Well, without an archetype, who are you gonna act like? Your culture, you’re gonna act like your culture, you’re going to act like your parents, you’re going to act like your grandparents. And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, the reason we’re in the situation we’re in globally is because of all of these people. This isn’t just a problem of rich, wealthy people or a problem of malfeasance and corporations – everybody is buying into this package. You’ve got to work for them. If you’re working for them you’re supporting the view, right? So there is no view, there really, except what? What would you say the view is on the planet? Greed? More stuff, more entertainment, more toys, more holidays, more vacations in Hawaii that you’re bored of after two days, you don’t know what you’re doing there?
So you need models, you need ways of ascending with the conduct. So the view is simple right? Everything is impermanent. Everything is a struggle in form and there’s no place to put your hat anywhere. Everything is constantly changing. And because of that there really isn’t a fixed permanent you, there isn’t one, there’s just an archetype we hold as us, which is undefined. So the point of the archetypes is to ascend with the conduct: how am I gonna act? How am I going to interact?
And this is what archetypes are about. And we’ll talk about archetypes in the world – relative archetypes. We’ll talk about psychological archetypes and we’ll talk about spiritual archetypes. Now, from my point of view, we start with the spiritual archetypes and work down. But from the world’s point of view, you’d start with the world archetypes and you may never work up. It depends on whether or not you can be satisfied with the limitations of that realm of archetype. Does that make sense? So if the conduct is off, the view can’t be on. Or to put it another way. If the view is off, the conduct can’t be on. If my view is that, I don’t know, that white people are inferior, then my conduct with white people can’t be right, can’t be clear, it can’t be compassionate, it can’t be loving. It can’t be blissful because white people have this problem. You just substitute genders. Women, you know, when was agriculture? 10,000 years ago? 15? I mean, women have been in post-traumatic stress disorder for 15,000 years. So you know, be prepared that they’re gonna be angry for a while. You get the idea. So the archetype that you hold, it depends on your culture. And so what we do now is make the archetypes conscious and use them for conscious purpose, but you need the view to do that. So the view must come first, that’s the horse, descends with the view: there is no refuge in form, there is no refuge in feeling, there is no refuge in sensation. There is no refuge in identity. There is no refuge in career, there is no refuge in property, there’s no refuge in anything because it is fundamentally empty of inherent identity.
Now, if you can do that, you’re in samadhi. If you can hold that view, you are in samadhi, but that still doesn’t tell you how to behave in the world. For that we need the archetypes. So how do we avoid the error of our conduct leading back into our day-to-day world, that is inevitably going to end up in suffering because it’s impermanent, out of our control and we’re gonna die anyway and it’s all gonna go? You’ve got to have the right view, right and for this, we use the archetypes. The archetypes are your bridge, they’re your raft. Now, when you cross the river from this shore to that shore, you don’t take the raft with you when you cross over. But if you don’t have this raft going through the turbulence of life, you get swept downstream.
My grandparents got swept downstream, my parents got swept downstream, my siblings got swept downstream. They’re all dead. They came and they went and left basically me, well and their kids, and I’ll be gone soon. But the consciousness doesn’t go downstream if it’s got inner and secret refuge, it goes upstream. It goes into the deathless. Now their kids are also just going downstream because which archetypes are they following? The downstream archetypes. So the purpose of archetypes is to get your boat going upstream. So the archetypes are our connection between the correct view, if you honor the total or complete view, and our personal actions, how we engage in the world. And archetypes allow us to step over our highly personalized agendas and access higher truths that are awakening or liberating. Archetypes allow us to act in community, do karma yoga, live in relationships, live with each other, have careers all the same stuff, in a way, that’s not any different it seems in appearance than the downstream people, but you’re not buying into it, your boat isn’t being pushed down the stream, you’re staying in Samadhi and a clear understanding of what archetype you’re either manifesting or you’re going to manifest in this situation. So if Richard gets pissed off at me, I just don’t go into downstream knee jerk reaction, I go into, ‘Oh what’s hurting Richard, why is Richard in pain, why is he lashing out?’ And then I go ‘Oh, this is the deity that shows up, the archetype’ and so now I will play that archetype with him in order to help him see whatever it is that pisses him off, even if it’s valid, is still not Samadhi. And if there is an error on my part of some kind, then we just correct it, right, it’s not a big deal. And if he remains in Samadhi and he goes ‘Oh yeah, okay, well you did. All right.’ I go, ‘right. Did that. No problem. Move on’. But in order to do that you need a strong sense of archetypes. Otherwise, you’re going to fall into what? Conflicting emotions and primitive views. Richard is a jerk and he’s an angry man, downstream. So I need the archetypes to pull me out of that dialogue.
So, in order to do that, we’d have to know that our refuge is clear. If our refuge is clear, our actions can be clear. If our refuge is unclear, our actions will be unclear. So you can look at it from another perspective and you might ask the question, well, what do I want my legacy to be? What do I want this life to have demonstrated to the planet? It could be really simple. It could be really quite simple. Just a nonangry, nondisturbed, nonattached life growing tomatoes. I don’t know, that’s okay. Or it might be huge. It might be being Prime Minister of Canada or President of the EU or something, whatever. But if the ambition is tied to the ego, even if you get to be Prime minister of the EU or whatever they call it, the chairperson of the EU downstream, or even the President of the United States downstream. The little farmer just growing tomatoes might be in a much better place than the President of the United States.
I just leave that one alone. Without that question firmly in place, it’s really, really difficult not to drift downstream. And when you’re 60 and 70 you’ll wonder, what did I miss? Well, you missed the upstream. And anyway, sooner or later you’re gonna wonder about what you’re doing. Like, ‘Oh, I got $1 million, I guess I need three or 5 or 10. Now I need a billion. Now I need five billion. Now I need 10 billion. I need to control the whole world. I’m..why do my kids hate me? Why do kids not want to talk to me?’ Which is very common and super-rich people that their families are.. What’s the word? Estranged – (thank you) – because the dad was too, or mum was too busy with this archetype of the God of Will to see their families as important.
Now in the awakened viiew, you don’t do that because there is no archetype that owns you. You are not possessed by the archetype. You use the archetypes that arise and you create the archetypes as required. You’re not owned by the archetype. The archetype of family security and comfort and, and a permanent career and retirement. Okay, so archetypes are a raft, a path, a vehicle, a way, a Tao, a practice. The experience of the archetype takes you into Samadhi, it’s a door into Samadhi. The archetypes are like rafts. So experience of the archetype is samatha, jhana, bliss, absorption, union, epiphany, whatever you want to call it. But understanding the archetype is insight. So you want these two shoes to be working these two legs, these two feet, you want these two feet to be working: samatha for the experience, bliss, emptiness and insight for the understanding how to apply it, how to use it. And that’s a lifelong exploration. And curiously enough, the symbols used for this are over my shoulder here, if you can see them: the bell, which is the experience and the dorje, which is the insight. How to work these two together. This is, in Tibetan Buddhism, this is the bell and the dorje. Samatha, the ringing of the truth of the experience and the practical application of the archetype. Cool! So archetypes are a bridge from old age sickness, decay, and death (which is inevitable for all of us) to the deathless state of the awakened ones. The deathless state does not belong to the awakened being. The awakened being belongs to the deathless state.
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You heard a reference in today’s recording to the Gion festival in Kyoto Japan. If you would like to learn more about this fascinating and beautiful 1150-year-old, month long purification ritual focused on warding off epidemics, check out Catherine sensei’s book: The Gion Festival: Exploring its Mysteries. Sensei is the world’s foremost English language expert on the festival and has used this position to help reintegrate people’s understanding of the festival as a massive spiritual ritual. You can find it and some videos on the topic at the Gionfestival.org/book. See you next time and may all our efforts benefit all beings.
