Going Out & Returning: All life processes are dynamic and involve an oscillation between going out from one’s own center of being, and returning to it. Since that center is a manifestation of the Sacred or Ultimate, I call it The Center.

From The Center we are inspired or guided and lured out into the world, and the world beckons to us to explore it, engage it, become nourished and enriched by it, and offer our voice and efforts to its well being. But we must also return to The Center, to integrate what we have received from the world, renew, recharge, and prepare for another round of engaging the world. The daily round and the life cycle involves this oscillation of going out and return. This applies to the nourishment we receive from food, other people, from satisfying work, from achieving something, from exploring new things. They can all be fascinating and enjoyable, or not. In time they drain you with an energetic entropy that calls us to assimilate, integrate, and renew yourself at the energetic source, The Center.

There are risks involved in this rhythm of going forth from The Center. One is that you may become dispersed, distracted, or so caught up in the world, that you forget to return. Your energy and sense of freedom and purpose begin to flag and wane. You become part of the ordinary, and existence can become a flatland. What you have received requires that you return to The Center, to digest, integrate, and renew. When you forget or wait to long to return, you can begin to fall apart, fragment, disintegrate because of the lack of balance of the going forth and the return. The key, here, the Sufi’s say, is “to be In the world but Not of it.”

A more serious danger is when trauma happens to you in the world and you are unable to take it back into the Center and integrate it in your self-affirmation. The traumata and wounded parts remain as estranged elements outside it, or along side it, creating an unnecessary split or division within oneself. Those estranged parts live on in exile, creating intrusive dramas in the individual’s self-system because they are not taken into the uniting and integrative powers of The Center.

Those are some of the risks of moving out into the world. There is an opposite set of dangers. This happens when the individual is afraid
to engage the world, for fear of losing one’s sense of self, or fear of losing what one has gained in the life process until now. One tries to preserve oneself at the price of stagnation and living in a neurotic bubble of protection. If one only remains with The Center and does not engage the world, the price is that one fails to actualize one’s potentiality, and life is reduced in power, expression, and richness of experience. You cannot let yourself be all that you could be. Your possible human self doesn’t get the chance.

What I have said here applies to life in all dimensions in the “multidimensional unity” of life: physically, structurally, biochemically, psychologically, intellectually, socially, politically, culturally, and economically. Health or Wellness requires this rhythm of going out and return, and it entails risks, but the risks are worth the benefit. Balance is required.

Entropy and the Need for Sacred Infusions
Entropy is a law of thermodynamics that holds that order within a closed system tends to decay, and that higher forms of energy convert into lower forms of energy. I am psychologically reading Mircea Eliade, the great historian of religions who tracked the beliefs about energy in the worlds mythologies. He discovered that most ancient peoples believed it was necessary to periodically regenerate the world at intervals far briefer than the grand cosmic cycles. These old peoples of the earth (pre-modern and indigenous peoples) believed that their tribal members and the society itself needed regular infusions of the Sacred, of the Divine Force, to counteract the running down of energy.

This is a need for us modern humans as well. We have all experienced times when we could feel ourselves running out of energy, getting bored, or stale, and needing to plug back in to the energy source. Without the energetic infusion of the vital energy, we grow weary at various times of the day, the week, the year, or a stage of life. We may grow weary of our friends, or of the entertainments we’ve indulged in. It is like our psychic cosmos is running out of libido. Our home-life is bland, our work isn’t challenging, we find ourselves dealing with nagging problems. The luminosity of the world gives way to a profane flatland existence. Too much ordinariness.

Consider the process of falling in love. When we fall in love with someone we become ecstatic, energized, passionate and full of life. We are dreaming of a wonderful life together, a home, a picket fence, children running around, the pleasures of raising them, and of a long life together. Then we get married, have the children, have to make and save money, pay the taxes, repair the roof, and probably both of you have jobs, that consume considerable energy. You both start feeling tired, things start to go flat. None has time to “see” how wonderful the other is. The energy of this dream sooner or later runs down. What once was ecstatic and passionate sediments into the ordinary. While the ordinary and the daily round has its place in any life, the signs of boredom and fatigue tell us that the charge of the primal source energy is running down.

Whenever we feel too bored, too low in life-affirmation, too weary and that the world is all too with us, its time for an infusion of primordial energy from the sacred realm of the deep psyche, a return to The Center. This is one of the functions of sacred ceremony in which we let go of the old worn out order, burn it up on the altar, and let ourselves to re-constituted at the sacred source. To get out the prison of our ordinary state, we must enter the non-ordinary reality. I am talking about the need for altered states of consciousness for entering into the realms of the sacred/divine. We live in an overly secularized and one-dimensional society, and the hunger for the sacred is becoming ravenous from all the spiritual starvation. The symptoms are in our addictions, distractions, depressions, physical symptoms, and in the rise of yearning for a true spirituality in many.

Sacred ceremony, at regular intervals can renew a life, a marriage, a community, a society. The old peoples of the earth knew that it was normal for things to run down, and that is why they needed their ceremonies and supporting mythology. They live in a sacred canopy, within a supporting mythology, having a cosmic egg that wasn’t/isn’t crack. Today we modern peoples are no longer embraced by a sacred canopy. We are surrounded by a rational and materialistic assumptive world that leaves little room for the holy, the numinous, the Spirit. According to Eliade, the old peoples of the earth knew that the world comes to birth from a center, and spreads out in four quadrants or directions. They employ the mythic imagination to support life and the need for right order and renewal in life. While we have a surge of Eastern and Shamanic mysticisms on the rise, and it does help many of us in our need and yearning for the sacred, but we need more than expanded awareness or consciousness. We need active practice, and solidly ritualized actions. We need altars, prayers, communal worship, healing ceremonies that employ the sacred, and we need surrender and commitment to The Center, into to integrate what we become aware of, into life.

One of the reasons that so many are drawn to the life and work of C.G. Jung is that he spoke to this need to exit an ordinary flatland existence and live in a sacred cosmos, having a direction relationship with The Center within our own hearts, which he called the archetypal Self. Jung’s life and work gave us a psychology organized around the sacred center, The Center, as our inner Axis Mundi. Not only that, Jung gave us an analogue of ancient mythology, of the pre-modern mythic-meaning structure and ritual process, translated into modern terms, building a bridge for us back to the Center, and then from there into the World, and the old ongoing rhythm of moving our from The Center and the return to integrate and renew. He saw the importance of the four-fold and the mandalas, like the sacred circle or medicine wheel with its Four Powers, Four Directions, or the Four Winds, Four Animals arrayed around The Center, thus aiming at a vital and centered wholeness of life. Jung beckons us still to live the wisdom of our ancestors in our own way, in our modern times, and to creatively add our own flashes of insight and gleaned wisdom to it.

I am thankful for Jung’s life and work. He has been a shaman for his time, and pointed the way in ours. He knew that the sacred had been repressed, that people have forgotten The Center and Source of life energy, and that we must develop solid ritualized ways of finding and re-plugging into it. Jung is not the only Western luminary here. We have the profoundly helpful work of such visionary leaders as Michael Harner, of Stanislav Grof, as well as the burgeoning interest in sacred plant medicines, often facilitated by the curanderos and shamans of the Americas, -all helping so many find their way back to The Center of renewal. But Jung showed us a profound and useful way, not the only way, to retrieve the sacred in our time. He was respectful and sensitive to the power of other mythic-symbolic systems, including Taoism, Buddhism, Alchemy, Shamanism, Gnosticism, Vedanta, and many others. He contributed hugely to the interest we have in these traditions today. He knew this reconnection with the sacred Center must be done with ritual care and respect, so that we do not get inflated, or become dogmatic. He showed us that each individual can find their own path in life and their own ways of practice, inspired and guided by The Center. He offered a life-affirming way, and showed us we are as close to it as our own instincts, intuition, feeling, predilections and dreams. Jung insisted that we not merely think about it and be conscious of it, but that we do the necessary inner work integrate and implement it in life. Whatever vision we get on the Mountain Top must be grown down into the world, in the body, into our relationships and work, and into society. For him, The Center was not only a right ordering for the world, but for each individual, because each is called to live their particular patterned essence, that Daimon or Essence or Mission that is there’s alone to live and to express, in each time and place.
(c) 2018 C. Michael Smith, Ph.D (aka Mikkal)

FINDING THE ARCHETYPE OF YOU
The other day, after viewing my presentation on the SOUNDS TRUE POWER OF SHAMANISM SUMMIT someone on Facebook asked me if I could say more about “The Archetype of You” which was one of several archetypes I discussed in the Jung and Shamanism in Synthesis discussion. Here is what I wrote:
“The Archetype of you not a “typical” or “universal archetype” applying to everybody. Each person comes with only one of these. The Greek word for it used by Plato was paradeigma, which is an essential patterned essence to be embodied or reduplicated and expressed in an individual’s life. While each person has one, like what Sandra Ingerman called “your spirit-signature.” It is a kind of unique spirit signature that each person brings here (to life) and leaves with.

To find, recognize, and honor it requires attention to your inherent manner of being and self-expression, your style of play, creativity, loving, and work. Each of these will have your highly unique “fingerprint on it, to use another image. While it is not visibly observable, it is intuitively felt and noticed. As a unique soul pattern, look at your childhood, and your past choices, and notice when those choices were coming from your heart, and not from social convention. The Archetype of You is implied in Jung’s rather large concept of the Self Archetype, your center and totality, your entelechy Self, and much more. I coined the term “Archetype of You” or alternately, “Your Archetype,” Her Archetype” and so on to specify the essential patterned essence, which is like a ground plan or blue-print for you to embody and express in life, in every time and place. I am simply further decoding what Jung meant when he said: “The main thing is that you embody the essential. If you do not embody that, life is wasted.”

Expanded Discussion
The psychoshamanic heart-path is foundational concerned finding or discovering Your Archetype, and expressing it through numerous channels in your living. I teach the heart wisdom and practices for finding Your Archetype. It is fundamental to my own consulting and mentoring practice. The Archetype of You is your uniquely patterned foundation of being, your ground plan for this life. It includes a calling to a sense of self-transcending and meaning giving purpose or service, getting the feel of your unique and irreplaceable pattern of living, and gifting the world with it. When you are connected to it through the heart, you feel yourself really coming alive. When you want to find it and clarify your understanding of it, you need to use the Heart Compass, your inner navigational system for living.

Finding and and making it more conscious requires that move gently but with attention into the dark and unknown but central area of your being, because it lives in the heart, and because it is not lying on the surface details. You have to “see through,” the surface appearances and feel into this uniquely patterned essence. Once you do, you will be able also to sense it or track it in others. The visual photo image I offer here, is a metaphor for “seeing” or “feeling” this unique essence in others. The best way to track it is to clear some space and time and use your Heart Compass to track down the pattern, through “memories, dreams and reflections” on, what are the major clues to how Your Archetype has expressed itself already in your life. What I say about the heart path in this book, has been seeded in my own experiential-autobiographical story. A heart path, one way or another is a tracking your essential nature and irreplaceable individuality. It spontaneously shows itself in those moments in living when you feel really alive, inspired, excited, passionate. It shows itself in the felt experience of delight or joy, fulfillment or depth of satisfaction in your living, and in those moments when you avoided a path that would have dulled or flattened your joy and fulfillment. It also points a right way forward in difficult and challenging times. Even if we can’t recall any recent experiences of its shinning through in our life recently, we have recourse to early childhood, to moments when we lived and acted spontaneously with delight and satisfaction, with awe and joy. The Archetype of You also communicates to you, through feeling, what is organismically wrong for you, or out of integrity with your essential nature.

Embodying your Archetype is also highly creative process. Yet, Your Archetype does not change. You do! You are the one who is living with it, whether you are aware of it or not. It is a dynamic force that invites you to really become You, and this does means to change or transform your self-system so that you can live creatively, intentionally, and spontaneously. Your Archetype issues Invitations that delight and bring depth of satisfaction. But if you repress Your Archetype a lot, sooner or later it will bring you conflict and eventually sickness in body or mind, emotions, relationships, or spirit. It then becomes a Symptom Maker. So you can’t simply do anything you want either, nor can you do what others want you to do. You can only do what it is your true nature to do. Otherwise you will suffer and not be happy or fulfilled. Fulfillment comes from living your specific ground-plan for this life. All these are signs or intimations that you are experiencing Your Archetype in one form or another.

Your Archetype seeks to break your ties to the Persona-based in feeling tones of acceptance or rejection (wanting to be acceptable, fearing rejection from the social field). Your Shadow is the rejected parts of You, and many of those parts are your truth, and the capacities that the Archetype of You needs activated and brought back on line. Recovering your ability to dance, give voice, embrace your sexuality, get creative, hold your ground and fight for what you want and believe in are crucial to living from your heart so you can embody Your Archetype, and live your true life. When Picasso said, “I don’t develop, I am,” that was His Archetype speaking through his mouth. He himself, the person and self-system in relationship to His Archetype did develop in his capacity to embody his patterned essence through his art and an aesthetic and carefree way of living in the world. Stunning individual creativity and development artistically are evident. It is also evident, from those close to him, that Picasso had other areas of his soul and life that needed more attention, sensitivity, and development of His Archetype there.

Once you begin to use the heart compass to track and notice the feeling tones surrounding Your Archetype, keep a hold of it as you enter the daily round with all its demands at work, with family, and dealing with the obligations of life. Keep alert to the signs of its appearance in your feelings, instincts, dreams, fantasies, synchronicities and other outer events, lucky developments and so on. These are clues for your NGS to continue to hunt down. Keep in mind that it is less what you do, what your job or career is, and more about the way you go about doing these things. It isn’t just about your gifts or talents either, but how you go about using them, what you serve with them.

Heart Compass Clues and Folktales
We see the problem of ignoring small but crucial sources of guidance mirrored in folktales the world over. There will be three brothers or three sisters in search of something they really want or need. They set off on a difficult journey that has several challenges. Usually the first two brothers (or sisters) pass by some dwarf or small creature, a gnome, a hag, … and this creature is scorned, mocked or laughed at. Its advice is not heeded. Yet it turns out that this despised or rejected creature will hold the very key or secret to success in the Quest. The hero or heroine in the story is the third brother or sister and this one stops, shows respect, listens to the advice or instructions, and in this way honors the advice or instruction and puts it into practice. Now this motif that occurs across cultures is trying to show us all one of the big sources of heart centered wisdom.

We are more aware of what we have been taught in school, than the subtle feeling tones in our bodies. But the lesser can be more. The smaller can be larger in significance. Attention on the heart path must be given not just to the foreground things, but the tiny felt things happening background, however easy to not notice, or pass by quickly. We have been socially programmed ignore, disrespect and not heed the counsel of these tiny bodily felt messengers, and yet if we reverse this habit and begin to show respect by slowing down, listening to what they have to say, and trusting in their wise guiding power, our lives will take on greater depth of satisfaction and joy. This will happen because we will begin to follow our true nature and become more alive and authentic. We will acquire new sureness in our steps and more confidence in our choices and actions because we will know the source of them is natural and solid.

How Can You Find and Clarify The Archetype of You?
You do it by taking some time to recall and reflect on past moments in your life where it emerged spontanesouly, when you were unselfconsciously just being yourself, without interference, fear, or judgment. You can notice it anytime you actualize a new potential and anytime have had a dream come true, when you worked hard to make that happen, and finally you succeeded. You can find it in memories that stand out and shine for you. You can also find it in any recent moments that were deeply fulfilling or satisfying. Fulfilling moments may not be pleasant, but you are called forth to be your best self, to lend a hand with compassion even when dealing with the unpleasant, to speak out against the crowd with your truth, even in the face of criticism and opposition because you feel it is right to do so. A fulfilling moment calls forth your potentiality, activates it, and gives you an opportunity to express it in a way that is aligned with and in integrity with Your Archetype.
You use your Heart Compass to pick up on the felt traces of Your Archetype, the way a hunting dog picks up on the scent of its prey. The sense of smell provides a good analogy for using your instincts and intuition, and bodily feeling to hunt down something, by picking up a whiff of it scattered in the winds of time and memory.
The experiential practice, Finding Your Archetype, is a journaling method for slowing down, activating your Heart Compass to sniff out instances in your life, when Your Archetype was shinning through in some small way. Tracking Your Archetype helps you embody it and brings a lot of pleasure, joy, delight, and centeredness to your life. It can especially helpful in times of turbulence helping you stand in your center and keep in integrity with yourself. It can creatively guide you out of difficult situations. Your Heart Compass always points to the True Magnetic North of Your Archetype. Here are the steps I have used and taught many people to use to find and clarify the Archetype of You. Clear some space and plenty of time on this practice until you have achieved clarity about Your Archetype.

An Experiential Practice for Finding Your Archetype
Part I
a. Use your Heart Compass to track, recall and write down three specific times/actual events in your life which occurred. Your memories are your archive, waiting for you to explore and track down little signs and epiphanies of you living Your Archetype in some small way.

– First, recall a time when you were, without interference just very naturally yourself, effortlessly.

– Second, recall a time which shines (is brilliant) for you.

– Third, recall a time that was deeply satisfying, as recent as possible.

b. Form a felt sense of the crucial point (crux) for each of these times. You can feel it, energetically, where the energy or live point is.

– Stay with the feel of the first time … and notice the crux of the “natural right”
– Bodily sense the second time …… the crux of its brilliance
– Bodily-felt meaning of the third time … and the crux of this state of satisfaction

c. a characteristic/quirky thing you do

Notice one thing you’ve always done since you were a child … something that was so often there, something that every person who knows you well recognizes as your quirky, unique pattern of being yourself.

d. How this thing characteristic/quirky thing has affected 1,2,3 times?

Go back to your bodily sense of each specific time and ask each internally “How has this quirky –characteristic thing I always did helped me to make this time so ‘…’ ”
– In the first situation …

– And in the second…

– And in the third…
e. What opens your heart
What opens your heart most deeply when it happens?
Write generously in your journal on this question.

f. Your highest potential

– In the last moments of your life, what would you see, when you contemplate your past life up until this last moment; what will you really remember, or spend energy recalling?

– Remember one time, probably very early in your life, when you had a deep sense of connection to Who you really are, within the meaning of your life, your destiny, your highest potential ….

– Note what strikes you the most about that time now.
-Reflect for a moment:
Can you begin to see, or feel the patterned-meaning of your life and who you really are (Your Archetype)?
g. A felt sense of “you”

Allow yourself to form a large holistic feel of you … sit for a minute with that sense of yourself before you let the words come … then write what comes with words …

h. What currently gets in the way or prevents you from living from Your Archetype?

Usually there are several things. Write them down. Identify the crux of each.

Part II
There are many kinds of questions to help you track down moments of experiencing and feeling Your Archetype. Some other good core questions for recognizing the Archetype of You are

What really brings me alive?
What shuts me down?
What must I be, do, have, to fulfill life?
How can I get my life aligned with My Archetype?
What kind of life do I really want?

Identify and write down the crux of each of your answers. Take the time to write down all the details, complete with life style and things you must have. Many other questions are possible, feel free to create your own.

Another fruitful line of inquiry is to ask: “When did I use my Heart Compass?” To answer this question is to show yourself when you were living from your heart

C. Michael Smith, Ph.D.

 

 

© Crows Nest 2018

 

 

“I saw that here the goal had been revealed. One could not go beyond the center. The center is the goal, and everything is directed toward that center.   ”                                  -C.G. Jung

“A universe comes to birth from its center; it spreads out from a central point that is, as it were, its navel.’     –Mircea Eliade

The following is a discussion of the Sacred Center of creation, the axis mundi. We will be discussing the archaic roots of its effects upon human life socially and personally or individually. The ideas expressed here are indebted to my mentors, Mircea Eliade of the University of Chicago, and Robert L. Moore of the Chicago Theological Seminary and the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago. It was Eliade who first taught me these ideas, and Robert Moore, my
doctoral chair, who helped me see how they applied to Jungian and depth psychology and the four foundational powers of full selfhood. You can find much detailed discussion and elaboration of all this in part two and three of my book, JUNG AND SHAMANISM IN DIALOGUE.

Until his death in 1986, Mircea Eliade, of the University of Chicago, was the world’s foremost historian of religions. He was a student of Jungian psychology, for Jung had noticed a prevalent pattern in world religions and culture, in myth and iconography, in sacred art and architecture. Jung was always scanning for patterns in the myth, art, and religions of the world. He noticed a particular recurring pattern everywhere he looked, which he called the “Quaternio,” illustrated symbolically four-sided temple, a royal palace, four sided image of the cosmos, the four sided mandala. and the four directions of the medicine wheel, each arrayed around a symbol of the sacred Center, be it a a Bindu point, a Sacred Tree, the capstone of a ziggurat, the apex of pyramid, the sacred symbol of crucifix.

Eliade noticed this pattern in the comparative study and history of world religions as well. For Eliade, if you understand the structure of mythology, archaic human beings had a constant and real sense of how fragile “right order” in the world is, continually being threatened by chaos. I greatly expand this understanding in my book PSYCHOTHERAPY AND THE SACRED. They had a sense that while a habitable space can be created, it always has some level of threat from the forces of chaos.

Human beings can’t live in a disoriented and disordered space. Today we see the forces of chaos gathering and threatening our lives: drive-by shootings, corporate greed, pollution and global warming, threat of thermonuclear war, fascism and xenophobia, and terrorist attacks, an overload of information through social media and the plethora of real and fake news feeds. We are moving away from the right order of the sacred center, towards that chaos which our ancient human forebears dreaded.

Today, while we are not happy about it, we are getting accustomed to the horrors of increasing chaos, and we are unable to shake off the anxiety of a world fragmenting and falling apart.. We are daily terrified by the disintegrative and regressive changes I just mentioned, that we are seeing in our world. But our archaic human ancestors did not assume that you could or should live in a chaos, When things have run down like this, the world  needed a death and rebirth, a return to the origins, so that a right order had to be found. In those days of old it was usually the role of the shaman, or ritual elder to facilitate the process.

There are a lot of different forms that mythology takes, many myth-themes. For Eliade one kind of myth-theme is foundational to the others, it is one related to creativity, for he believed the cosmogonic myth of the creation of the world was at the root. The cosmogonic myth of origins reveals a theme of a time, in the beginning, when things were created right, coming fresh from the creator’s hands, and formed in an exemplary or archetypal way—forms to be on-goingly repeated, like replication of the DNA pattern. Things were not chaotic or fragmented in the beginning, because of this “right order.”  All things, not only humans, but the elements, the plants, animals, waters, fishes of the sea, the birds, insects, and the medicinal herbs were created in a right ordering. At the center-point of creativity, creation happened, the archaic human version of the Big Bang, and it happened here, at the navel of the world, the “axis mundi” (center of the world). In every archaic society you can find a location of the center of the world, that axis mundi from which the world comes into being and proceeds, spreading out across the landscape and the psyche of archaic humans. This is the world as it should be, before humans pollute it and demonic-destructive forces mess it up.

The art and iconography of the symbolism of the center has been identified as a symmetrical scheme, a kind of geometric structure. If we pay attention to sacred geometries today we may see that it reflects the archetypal right order and exemplary structure of things. In sacred art and mythology around the world, ancient peoples saw the sacred order geometrically, which appropriately balances the opposites and organizes things around a numinous center-point. The Mandalas of Tibet and Nepal, the Four Cardinal Directions, reflected in the Amerindian Medicine Wheel is an example of balancing energy and focusing human attention on all four quadrants (or directions, or elements)  are arrayed around a sacred center. The good news is that the closer you are to the Center personally and socially, the more likely you are to living in the right way, and are in reasonably good balance and health.

Eliade also had some bad news, but a profoundly useful insight that applies to us socially as well as in terms of our individual psychology. It is this: The farther you move away from that creative and renewing Center of origins, the more danger to the social and personal worlds, things run down and anxiety arises. Consider the present xenophobia, terrorism, projection of evil, scapegoating, war, murder, or a languishing loss of energy, an entropy, a declining of life energy, increasing depression. We see the world moving towards the wasteland, and chaos. The sense is that the center, not just any center, but The Center with the creative energy and right ordering of things is now remote, and many of us are getting very nostalgic for a return to origins, to The Center. As we get more distant from the Center, things begin to run down, we get into regions at the edges of our map, “Here There Be Dragons,” as the Renaissance explores wrote on the outermost edges their maps. Beyond the known and ordered world those mythic monsters symbolized the destructive powers of Chaos that humans have often dreaded—a psychotic realm, if you will. When you get too far from the Center, the laws of the right order do not apply anymore. For individual persons, if you are too far from this sacred Center of life, the anxiety that arises, comes to you for a good reason, because the Forces of Chaos are powerful demonic forces, “little devils” can possess you. Humans can secumb to despair, depression, aimlessness, anxiety, fragmentation, and the fierce Dragons of regression and psychosis.

Technicians of the Sacred & Reconstituting the Axis Mundi
We’ve discussed what the Sacred Center is, and how important the right order it provides is to human communities and individuals. We’ve discussed the Forces of Chaos that threaten the human world socially and personally. Now we must ask, what do we do to reconstitute the sacred orienting Center?

Eliade’s most profound insight into archaic humanity is their belief that periodic return to the source for renewal was ontologically necessary. They knew the initial jolt of energy would run down and they’d need to return to the Center for another vitality engendering jolt. You don’t repair a worn out world, you re-create it. You return to the Center for this Re-creation and renewal of vital creative energy. This is the basis of the New Years festivals, in which the old world dies, and the New Year is rung in with great ceremony. For archaic human being it wasn’t simply adding another new year onto the past year. it was Renovatio—a complete re-creation from the Origins, the navel of the universe, the axis mundi. If you lost it, or forgot where it is, you have to find it again.

The shamans, technicians of the sacred, could do this, could find the true Center again. After you find it, you have to get connected to it properly, plugging into 200,000 volts so you can start running things again. These technicians of the sacred could perform a ritual and take the people safely through a renewal by death and rebirth. By properly locating, accessing, activating and developing your archetypal Shaman Within, you will develop the capacity to locate and safely connect with the sacred Center, for yourself and your clients.
If you are a psychotherapist or life coach, listen up. This mythology is has much to teach us about the creative formation of the self in individuals, from the “right order” of the transpersonal Archetype of You, to your local human self expression of it. And it is about the restoration of the right order in the afflicted. In traditional shamanic healing, Eliade observed that shamans often called on their tribe’s cosmogonic myth to support, ground and in-form the their healing ceremonies with their patients. The healing rite itself is considered creative and every form of creation repeats the patterns of the Cosmogonic myth of origins, or of the first shaman, the first medicines, and so on. This repetition of the archetypal-mythological forms.

There is much about our archaic ancestors that we can and should learn from, because they were closer to the sacred Center in their lives, than we in the modern world today are, and they had ritual wisdom and knew how to properly access, regulate, and express the archetypal energies of the psyche. What we can do and ought to do today is activate the Shaman Within each of us, and return with open heart through the “technology of the sacred,” to the spiritual arts of ritual, of prayer, or worship and song, of questing for vision, of repentance, atonement, and the vessel of renewal, of symbolic ritual death and rebirth, and once again appropriately connect and align with the sacred Center of life and renewal. Once a strong connection and alignment with the sacred Center is made, we are ready to begin appropriately accessing and activating and developing the Four Foundational Archetypes of selfhood towards optimal expression.

Addendum

Locating the creative sacred Center that founds the right order, is the key to developing the other foundational archetypes into fullness. Living close to your Center creates a right order and balance in your life, and keeps you plugged into the source power to be able to succeed and fulfill your reason for being here, in this life. Distance from the Center drains you of energy and progressively distracts you from the right order for your life, You slide in anxiety toward the chaos dragons that possess and may destroy you, unless you renew yourself at the Center, or locate the Center if you have lost it. This is why sacred transformative ceremonies of renewal and death/rebirth initiation are so important, because they renew the world, renew a life. The process of personal “altaring” can help you relocate the sacred center each day, and the NGS helps you track the right order of Your Archetype. This Archetype of You is surrounded by the four foundational archetypes, which it empowers.
The Shaman Within, called on by the sacred Center, locates and properly accesses and regulates the Sacred Center. On the public scale this is the creative sacred Center of the world for a community, but on a personal level, it is the creative sacred Center of the individual psyche, and once active it calls for the development of King, Warrior, and Lover, as well. The highly uniquely patterned essence that  I call the Archetype of You, is the Right Order, for you to embody. in your life, as you move away from chaos by developing each quadrant into its fullness.

I like to begin my teaching by directing my students first to the archetype of the Shaman Within, for it is as technician of the sacred that it is able to locate your deep psychic Center which functions as your Daimon, or Guardian Spirit, conveying the deep ground plan, the right order your life is called to embody and expression. You need full expression of each of the foundational archetypes of Selfhood to full accomplish the life you are called to live in the world, throughout the life-cycle. We need to know how and when to summon each foundational archetype, and the Shaman Within has this potentiality as part of its basic configuration of possibilities. Like the King’s of Israel who summoned its generals, prophets and wisemen, and artists, you need to know which foundational archetype you need whenever you need it on line and helping out. Von Franz, offering classic Jungian perspective on the Shaman, says that it is the archetype of the Self that stands behind the life and work of the shaman. (von Franz. Jung: His Myth in Our Time).

 

 

Mentoring is a long term and progressively deep relationship between mentor and a client who feels having an experienced resource person to help them navigate a a life path, including numerous creative projects that may arise. Coaching tends to be more limited to a specific problem, or a specific capacity or skill set to do something. Mentors do coach their clients on specific issues and projects, but it is their own ongoing inspiration and creative life that is the foundational project.

The word Mentor suggests someone who is older and more seasoned with life experience, at least in a given field. I train psychoshamanic life-coaches, and they do important work. A coach may have technical knowledge and useful skill sets, but work short terms with clients. In my own psychoshamanic mentoring it is the life path, the path of heart or individuation that is fundamental, focusing on the calling and vision of a life, navigating life from the heart, and allowing the creative inspiration and projects to grow out of that organically.

Dante Aligheri, who wrote the Commedia describes himself at midlife in a dark wood and lost. He had turned aside from his true calling and path, the “verace via,” and just then , by a synchronicity, a human mentor, Virgil, the Latin poet appears as a guide. Virgil has been through much of the psychospiritual geography and the forces that Dante must face, if he is to recover his true path. Virgil acts as his guide and soul friend, until Dante is ready to rely on inner guidance or inner mentoring, which comes to him in the figure of Beatrice, who acts like Dante’s inspiring muse and guiding spirit.

C.G. Jung spent the early part of his career as a medical psychologist and did lots of psychotherapy. But after the resolution of his famous midlife crisis, he came increasing to mentor individuals in his second half of life, people who were seeking their own calling and path. imagesJung schooled them in navigating through dreams and synchronicities, withdrawing projections and dissolving limiting attitudes, but increasingly taught them “active imagination,” a psychospiritual practice very much akin to the shamanic journey, and similar to Dante’s relationship with Beatrice as inner guide. Once Jung saw that his clients could work well on their own through active imagination, he knew his role was less necessary, or no longer necessary at all.

My own psychoshamanic mentoring tends to last several years and my clients work with me on site at my wilderness retreat center, Crows Nest, in the Southwest Michigan woodlands. CN circlelargeThis wild and natural environment allows people to drop our of busy city life and social consensus, unplug from the “matrix,” if you will, a drop down into their true self, where we can go to work on the life-calling and see what kind of life redesign may be in order. I also offer workshops which facilitate and expedite this work, and in Europe, South American, and S. Africa, I offer workshops, and trainings, as well as individual consultations in beautifully wild retreat centers. However, some choose to work with me via tele or Skype, and some like to work with me in intensive one on one retreats at Crows Nest in SW Michigan. We tend to tailor make the right kind of relationship frequency and depth of work, as suits the situation, location, and pocket book of the client.

For more information on my workshops in the USA, FRANCE, and other countries, check out the schedule on my Crows Nest website: www.crowsnestshamanism.com