In today’s talk, Doug Qapel Duncan continues to dive deeper into the topic of archetypes, which he introduced in the talk we heard in Episode 11. He explores how archetypes operate at the personal & psychological level, and why we are drawn to them in contexts like storytelling. Qapel also explains the difference between what happens when these archetypes are operating consciously vs. unconsciously.
Spiritual archetypes, which we will hear more about in an upcoming episode are a vehicle for accessing higher states of consciousness. Arising yoga, also known as tantric deity practice, is one such manifestation of how to use spiritual archetypes as an awakening tool. If you are interested in doing a deep dive into arising yoga or learning how to get the most out of your work with Sadhanas, the texts that describe these practices, Planet Dharma is running a weekend-long retreat called Practices for Power for both in-person and virtual participants. Check out planetdharma.com/sadhana for more information.
Podcast Transcription:
Introduction
Welcome to Dharma if You Dare. I’m Christopher Lawley, planet Dharma team member and producer of the podcast. In today’s talk Doug Qapel Duncan continues to dive deeper into the topic of archetypes, which he introduced in the talk we heard in episode 11. He explores how archetypes operate at the personal and psychological levels and why we are drawn to them in context like storytelling. Qapel also explains the difference between what happens when these archetypes are operating consciously versus unconsciously. Spiritual archetypes, which we will hear more about in an upcoming episode, are a vehicle for accessing higher states of consciousness. Arising yoga, also known as tantric deity practice is one such manifestation of how to use spiritual archetypes as an awakening tool. If you are interested in doing a deep dive into arising yoga or learning how to get the most out of your work with sadhanas, the texts that describe these practices, Planet Dharma is running a weekend-long retreat called Practices for Power for both in-person and virtual participants. Check out PlanetDharma.com/sadhana for more information.
And now here’s today’s recording:
So anyway, we’ll see they apply at every level of our being: There are personal archetypes, psychological archetypes, and spiritual archetypes. And first, we’ll talk about the personal archetypes and we’re not going to talk about them long. The reason we’re not going to talk about the personal archetypes long is you spend your whole life there and I’m not gonna spend a lot of time on stuff that is holding you in place. But, I will point them out a little bit for you to see whether or not you can move past the personal to the psychological and the spiritual, you’re still gonna have to function from the personal, you understand, you still have to function in the world, so let your personal manifestation also represent an archetype and we’ll go through a few of them.
In literature an archetype is a typical character and of course, literature is about life. Most stories are about love or death or relationships or struggle or good and evil or what else… journeys, adventures, they’re all about our personal stories. Our personal stories are contained in literature as personal archetypes,right? Anyway a character in action or a situation that seems to represent universal patterns of human nature, fair enough? the love story. An archetype is also known as a universal symbol; maybe a character, a theme or even a setting, like nature. Many literary critics are of the opinion that archetypes have a common recurring representation of a particular culture or an entire human race and shape the structure and function of the literary work and the literary work shape us .The movies shape us. The stories on the T. V. shape us, were shaped all the time by what’s going on around us now.
Carl Jung, a Swiss psychologist, argued that the root of the archetype is in the collective unconscious of humankind. The collective unconscious of humankind doesn’t mean that it’s not accessible. It just means you can’t access it because you’re too busy with the… with the personal. You’re too busy with the personal to access the unconscious, but the unconscious one is there.
And if you look at your daily behavior, it would be very interesting for you to come up with what archetype am I doing. What archetype am I playing out here? What archetype am I playing out here right now? Teacher, know it all, smartass, humorist; there are a few archetypes that I’m pulling on to make it interesting for you, hopefully. Now, the phrase collective unconscious refers to experience shared by race or culture. So there’s an Asian archetype, there’s a caucasian archetype, a black archetype and these archetypes include things like giving birth and struggle and life and loss and gain and praise and blame and fame and shame and pleasure and pain.
These experiences exist in the subconscious of every individual and are created in literary works or other forms of art, like music or art and then acted out by the population. I remember years ago I went to a movie with that 90 lb weakling who became a 200 lb muscle guy. Sylvester Stallone, Sylvester Stallone when he was a kid, was that weakling on the beach where all the big guys kicked sand on. So, he went to the gym and he got buffed up and he got really strong and then he spent the rest of his life being the tough guy. Talk about getting caught in an archetype struggle, always trying to win the game, not seeing that you’re being played by playing it. Now, these are unconscious and called collective because they’re true to everybody, and they’re unconscious because we don’t know them. So, like women are playing out unconscious archetypes about what it is to be a woman. Or what that looks like and it’s not like just one, but there, you know, there are a variety, and the same thing with men. They’re playing out archetypes, which one are you playing out? But more on this later.
Now there are many, many, many archetypes and as I said earlier, I think Shinto has 2000 and Buddhism has more than, but fundamentally you should understand there are as many archetypes in the world as there are atoms or molecules or quarks. An archetype is a… is a way to bring what is unconscious and conscious, that’s the key figure. Okay, now you have archetypes and situations, the journey, you know, the literature, the story might be about the journey -the main character takes the journey which challenges him emotionally and psychologically and the nature and he develops his personality and that unfolds in the world. So there’s that kind of story; there’s the initiation, where the main character undergoes experiences that wakes them up or leads them to greater maturity, could be in love or it could be in work or could be in career, there’s good versus evil, right
Which represents goodness and what represents evil? So, what, from our point of view, what is good? Samadhi. What is bad? The absence of samadhi, the lack of jhana, which is a form of ignorance. Why are you not in Samadhi? Because you’re clinging to your unconscious archetype. And then there’s the fall, the main character falls from grace because of his actions or her behavior and she learns through her evil ways, or she learns through the fall what higher truth is. So that’s about it. That’s all we’re gonna do really on the personal archetype, you can flesh this out on your own. There are endless amounts of literature on it all. You can go on forever. But the key point here is to recognize if you’re not conscious of the architect you’re manifesting, you’re manifesting one. And if you aren’t conscious of it, you’re drifting to old age sickness, decay, and death.
And when you go, the whole thing goes with you and what we’re interested in from a spiritual point of view is using archetypes to wake it up. First to the personal, then to the psychological which we’ll talk about. And then to the spiritual, which is the whole point of this talk.
Question: What if one identifies with wholesome archetypes, how can one sidestep this pitfall?
Answer: You can identify with wholesome archetypes, but in order to carry them sustainably you got to find out all the ways they’re not there. You can’t just take all wholesome archetypes and paste them on top of yourself. In order to do the journey you gotta, you gotta meet the demon, you got to meet the devil, you gotta meet the greed, you gotta meet the anger, you got to see how that is manifesting in your life and how it is unconscious. And when you see how this is manifest in your life and unconscious, then you can call that the devil archetype. But the devil’s job is to transform you. The devil’s job is to show you ‘re in false clothing. It’s not a bad guy. Devil is not a bad person, woman. The devil is an archetype of misunderstanding, not understanding the archetype you’re in, where it’s leading you, or where it’s not leading you more to the point. And so the wholesome archetypes are for good states and the wrathful archetypes are to cut through the ignorance. So, it’s not about just being good, it’s about understanding your fear of the bad, not because you’re gonna go act on it, but once you see it, you don’t do it. The only person who’s not capable of killing another person is the person who is fully cognizant of the fact that they’re quite capable of killing another person.
Now they can’t be trapped, they can’t be fooled into that archetype because they’ve already seen it and made it conscious. The person who thinks- oh, I’d never hurt a fly- is the most dangerous because once they get triggered, they lose it. So you need to bring the whole thing into consciousness.
Question: So archetypes are a means to make the conduct conscious, but they are still an illusion. So is it even possible to get to emptiness with archetypes?
Answer: Yeah, If the archetype is an illusion, so is the person thinking that the archetype is an illusion. It’s the illusions all the way down Thinking that she’s got an archetype, that’s an illusion. She is the illusion that’s working with the illusion of the archetype, to see the illusion of herself in the mirror of the archetype. You follow that? Now, if she sees herself as an illusion, then what should she be manifesting?
Well, from my point of view, she should be manifesting the Bodhisattva vow, she should be helping everybody wake up to the illusion. And if her big illusion is say.. I don’t know …getting love, then she should be demonstrating every chance she can that there’s no such thing to get .That everybody she comes in contact with, who loves her, is loving, an illusion and she’s not helping by letting them love her. Not showing them it’s an illusion.
Why are we interested in archetypes? Well, fundamentally the use of archetypical characters in situations like literary etcetera, help us relate to the characters and the situations and the social and cultural context in which they apply. Helps us understand our culture, helps us understand who we are. A good novel will inform you about some insight or understanding about how the culture works. We read novels, for this reason, anybody still reading?- by the way -rather than… But even if you’re watching movies, it’s the same thing, your characters and movies are showing you architectural behaviors that help us see who we are, used by the writers and situations to draw from the experience of the world to try to get a common understanding or to get an understanding of what wasn’t there before, you know?
So, until say, for instance in America black literature or black movies or more characters, you know, the white person’s view of the black person, is very stereotypical and narrow. They’re like one-dimensional cardboard cutouts. Well now is finally we’re moving past that. Hopefully, I’m not sure. People of color in the U. S. still feel their cardboard cutouts from the white point of view. It’s like we help to understand other people, help to understand other cultures, and others conditioning what’s going on. So this is what literature does. Archetype molds our values and our behaviors. We live by them. Think of, I don’t know, this goes back away, but think of Farrah Fawcett’s haircut. Remember? Are any of you women old enough for Farrah Fawcett? Everybody had a Farrah’s or Lady Di everybody had to have a Lady Di haircut, anybody has a Lady di haircut out there? Long hair hippies, right?
You know that you know. Hippies were so archetypically constrained or same, like hippies were supposed to be free and they all… you have to look exactly like all the other hippies. Your pants had to be the right length, your hair had to be the right length, you had to talk the right way, you had to be equally dirty, had to be equally stoned and equally carefree. And if you weren’t, you were excluded or the hipster or the punk, right? It’s like club membership. Even Jesus and Buddha are archetypes, archetypes from the spiritual point. Typically, we are influenced by them unconsciously, but if we don’t know what we’re influenced by consciously, then we are being influenced by mom and dad. And mom and dad by their grandparents, and so on. And as we get older, we may decide that these are not the best examples of archetypes for ourselves.
We have way more universal archetypes. What should a man be like? What should the female be like? So, as the culture moves forward, the black understanding moves forward, and the understanding of women moves forward. The understanding of men moves forward, right? Gradually. The unfolding of being more conscious brings us more conscious of the different ways that we treat people; than the idea that women aren’t as smart as men, which- I don’t know- that was around until yesterday. I’m not sure men even believe today that women are as smart as women, I mean in their heart of Hearts. And ladies, No, your ideas about men aren’t right simply because of you’re ladies? Oh, well, I must be right because I’m female.
Anyway, this is why we don’t recognize ourselves and who we are, because we’re not recognizing the archetype that we’re doing even as we’re doing it, we’re kind of just thinking, well, I’m being myself No, you’re not. You’re being a product of a culture and conditioning and a set of archetypes. And so making it conscious is a long way to getting freedom. So why do we take on archetypes? So they connect us, they give us form, they connect us to this world, they make us feel we belong and make us feel loved. It hides those four deep fears, abandonment, annihilation, being evil, or being crazy. If I can’t put on an archetype that fits in with you guys, I’m gonna feel insane. If I can’t put on an archetype that makes me connect with you, I’m gonna feel abandoned.
These are what you meet at the college level with the inner refuge. You recognize these archetypes are covering fears, they’re not bad. They’re covering fears. So then you get to the psychological archetypes. Holy sh**, there’s this stuff and you’re- okay, that’s it for me,- or you go post-grad and you go, oh, archetypes are empty as well, hmm.
Question: How do we live in a relationship if we are both gone or one of us is gone?
Answer: Well, you don’t, I mean you do, obviously you do it, but you’re just bounced around by the forces. If the job goes, you’re like panicked or stressed or you’re -I mean- all these things like worry and panic and stress and insecurity and are all because the archetypes are unconscious, you haven’t made the fact that you’re trying to live up the good life as written by father knows best in 1950 or you’re trying to live out the good life is written by Cheers in 1970 or you’re trying to live out the good life as typified by Friends in 1980 or for your millennials, you’re trying to live out the good life as depicted by Sex in the City.
It’s like I watched Sex in the City for the first time, not so long ago, a few episodes and I go-oh now I understand millennials, now I understand what the young women are doing, they are, they’re manifesting this new freedom- which is an archetype. I’m not saying it’s bad, I’m just saying, be conscious of it. So if you’re not conscious of it, then you’re gonna bounce back and forth all over the map. Like your parents did, but you’re gonna do it in a 2000 version. So you have to make it conscious.
Question: Yeah, she’s saying, is a relationship only possible between the illusions of two or more identities? I think, like gone, like, as in shinyata, if we’re both in shinyata.
Answer: That will be the relationship that you understand to be the true relationship, which I’m sorry, but that relationship is no relationship at all.
That’s the emptiness. But that’s the highest truth. The psychological truth is that I am in a relationship with somebody else in order to function and work in this world in a way that supports my vision and my dream and my understanding and they’re there to do that for themselves and together we’re gonna support each other to try to do that vision. That we’re going to understand that all the things that upset us and get us angry and get us worried and they’re all based on unconscious views and assumptions, hurts, held hurts, held views and the relationship is going to make those conscious hopefully, or we’re gonna learn not to talk You know, the place where the no-fly zone, the place where you don’t talk about because you’re gonna fight so that will be in shadow and then functioning in the world well, you got to show up at work somehow.
So if you’re going into the office dress as a woman of power, if you’re going to the mountain dressed as the mountain climber of Everest, if you’re going to the dance hall, Adora Duncan lives or whoever, then you put on the costume.
Question: It sounds like archetypes can be worn like hats?
Answer: Yep,or underwear or bathing suits or.. yep, exactly. And they should be. Namgyal Rinpoche gave his student heck, in a class once. She was a new student and another student who had been around for a very long time, came up to him after class and said but you know, Rinpoche, she’s brand new, she doesn’t know anything and he said, I’m not responsible for what archetype shows up. Now, the only way you can separate that from a psychotic is the motivation. The psychotic doesn’t care how she feels. The bodhisattva cares exactly how she feels. So that’s the difference between those two things. Like the bodhisattva cares that your archetype is unconscious and you need to make it conscious and the psychotic has no idea about archetypes and doesn’t give a sh* about it.
Yes. Any hat you like dear, can be anybody you want, male, female, or in between. So there are those archetypes found in the literature that inform our lives, the movies, art, and music. There are the archetypes found in psychology that tell us who we are inside ourselves and in our world and then there are the archetypes that are found in spirituality and that show us where the deathless lies where freedom lies, the only freedom you’re ever gonna really find is in the archetypes or through the archetypes of the spiritual, you won’t find them in the psychology because it’s still probably rooted in personal identity- clinging. You won’t find them in literature because they’re rooted in the culture, but they can help you there, they’re bridges, building blocks.
Conclusion
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