The Wisdom of Hypatia: Ancient Spiritual Practices for a More Meaningful Life (40 page)

196 the microcosm and the archetypes

Seeing your Shadow
: It is important to recognize your Shadow, and this exercise will teach you to do it. Like all complexes, your Shadow resides in the unconscious

mind, and so you cannot experience it directly, but you can probe it indirectly

by investigating what sorts of people can wake it up. Do not make the assump-

tion that your Shadow corresponds to behaviors you
consciously
consider bad

(murder, rape, cruelty, lying, etc.); we are after something deeper. Sit quietly

and think of the people—both specific people and kinds of people—who re-

ally rub you the wrong way. They may not be evil in any significant way; they

might be merely, for example, lazy, pushy, casually dishonest, greedy, selfish,

whiny, aggressive, cowardly, ignorant, pretentious, hyperrational, cold, or irri-

tating to you in some other way. Spend some time going through all the people

in your life who really bug you. In each case, try to identify the characteristics

that annoy you. When you have finished you will have a (probably incomplete)

list of the personal characteristics you have unconsciously rejected. If you try

to picture a person with all these characteristics, you will have a good picture

of your personal Shadow. Yuck! But keep in mind that these are rejected attri-

butes and that some of them may be useful to you in some circumstances and

worth reclaiming.

The Evolution of the Archetypes

I have skimmed over a few details in order to present the parallels between the Neoplatonic and Jungian perspectives as clearly as possible. Now it is time to return to them, for I think they are actually quite important. On the other hand, they relate to a scientific understanding of the archetypes, so if your main interest is spiritual practice, feel free to skip to the next section.

I hope I have convinced you that the collective unconscious with its archetypes corresponds to the World Mind with its Ideas. There is, however, an important difference in the way they are usually understood, for according to Neoplatonists the World Mind is the changeless realm of Being, whereas the collective unconscious, as a function of the human genome, evolves in time as the human species evolves. This is a critical difference from the perspective of Platonic metaphysics, but not so important to practical spiritual practice, for the microcosm and the archetypes 197

in human terms the genome evolves very slowly. In fact it probably takes a thousand years or more for evolution to produce a noticeable change in human nature, and then it would be noticeable only to a careful observer. Furthermore, the change would be statistical, that is, in the relative frequency of genes leading to a difference in the instinct-archetypes. For the human genome is a mathematical abstraction, a sort of average, reflecting the population of genotypes of humans living at any given time. As people, with their individual genotypes, are born and die, the human genome slowly changes, and this change is human evolution. Therefore the archetypes are not perfectly changeless, though may be practical-ly so, unless we are looking over thousands of years of human history. (Behind the archetypes are the physical laws of the universe, to which the human mind is subject; these laws do not change and are literally Forms, but I will leave them aside for now.)

Individuals have their own genotypes, which contribute to the pattern of the human

genome. Therefore, just as we all have somewhat different faces, but we all have
human
faces, and just as we all have slightly different brains, but we all have
human
brains, so we all have slightly different versions of the collective unconscious, but they are all images of the
human
collective unconscious. Hence, we each have slightly different perspectives on the archetypes, but they are fundamentally the same archetypes, innate to all humans.

Unlike the genome, which is a sort of slowly moving average, your individual genotype is a timeless mathematical Form. Since you have two complete genetic sequences (from your mother and father), it is 1.6 gigabytes of data, and in fact it corresponds to a nearly four-billion-digit-long number.229 Each person has his or her own number (except that identical twins share the same number). Nowadays, for a modest price, you can find out your personal number (i.e., have your genotype sequenced).

So in this sense the Form in the World Mind corresponding to
you
is more real and more literally eternal than the human genome, which is a changing abstraction. Of course, the physical body generated from your genotype will last for only a relatively short time, but the genotype itself is as eternal as the number 2 or the Equilateral Triangle.

Furthermore, as you know, through cloning it is in principle possible to create another body genetically identical to yours. Such a person would have an identical perspective on the archetypes as you do, but be a different embodied person with their own complexes (or personal daimons) acquired through their own life.

The preceding observations lead to an interesting and, I think, important conclusion: the incarnation of humans is necessary for the evolution of the gods. Or, to put it anthropomorphically, gods create living humans in order that the gods themselves can evolve.

198 the microcosm and the archetypes

This is because our individual genotypes define our individual images of the archetypes.

The combined images of these individual perspectives determine the transpersonal archetypes, that is, the archetypes (gods) common to humankind as it exists at any given time.

As we individuals prove ourselves to be better or worse adapted to our environments, we are more or less likely to contribute our genes to the gene pool that constitutes the human genome. To anthropomorphize again, it is the nature of the gods, who are otherwise impassive, give slightly different versions of themselves to us (via each person’s nous), and in this way they try out how they should change.

This picture may seem to be an odd mixture of evolutionary biology, Jungian psycholo-gy, and Neoplatonic spirituality, but it provides an answer to why the souls should descend into bodies at all: it is the way that the gods ensure their own evolution and development.

It is also a source of dignity and meaning for us as individuals, for through our individual lives, and our individual efforts to live well, we each contribute in our small way to divine evolution, to the evolution of the Cosmos.

There is another interesting conclusion that we can draw from an evolutionary under-

standing of the archetypes. There is a mechanism that evolutionary biologists have known and understood for over a century by which learned behaviors can become encoded in

the genome.230 Roughly, the process is as follows. Suppose there is some learned behavior that helps a population adapt to its environment. For example, it could be a tendency to cooperate or a means of communication. As new individuals are born into this population, some will be able to learn this skill more easily, some less; this is a result of genetic diversity. Other things being equal, those who can learn it more easily will have an advantage, and the genes that contribute to learning the skill will spread in the population. Over the generations natural selection will favor those traits that accelerate learning the skill, and therefore the skill itself, or at least its precursors, will become encoded to some extent in the genome. Thus there is a tendency for advantageous
learned
traits to become
innate
traits; for, if you like, nurture to become nature.

Now let us see what this process implies about complexes and archetypes. Complexes

of associations nucleate around archetypes, and some of these complexes will be advantageous; they will facilitate adapting the archetypes to a population’s environment. Some persons’ genotypes may facilitate the formation of a particular adaptive complex, while others’ will not. Therefore, we will expect the genes that facilitate this advantageous complex to spread in the population. In effect some of the complex, or at least a predisposition toward the complex, is becoming part of the archetype (the innate structure). In the more the microcosm and the archetypes 199

anthropomorphic terms of Neoplatonic spirituality, an advantageous personal or group daimon will tend to be incorporated into its progenitor god. Thus a god ensures its own evolution by engendering daimons that are active in the material world, and in effect trying variations on the god’s own nature, with a result that the god acquires traits from the successful daimons in its lineage: divine parents learning from their mortal children. But this is a process that takes millennia.

The Self and The Inexpressible One

What of The One, the highest point of the Neoplatonic Macrocosm and the inmost light of the Neoplatonic microcosm? The key is that it is the unity that causes all the archetypal Ideas. In terms of neuropsychology, the archetypes are only different aspects of the unified mind-brain. Although the archetypes are identifiable motivational-perceptual-behavioral
syndromes
(literally, things that run together), they are ultimately ideas that we use to organize and to comprehend the totality of the human psyche. Therefore there is a unity behind the pantheon of archetypes, embodied in the integrated brain, which is an integral component of an organism, which functions by means of the universal laws of nature.

As Jung said, the roots of the collective unconscious reach through our physiology and terminate in pure physicality.

Jung called the totality of the archetypes the “Self ” (with a capital “S”); others call it the “highest self,” “true self,” and “inner guide,” but it is also the central core of the unconscious mind. It is the image of The One in the individual psyche, and therefore it is also called “the God image” by Jung and his followers.

Jung stressed that the Self is paradoxical and even contradictory, because it is a totality and must embrace all the opposites. Therefore, like the Neoplatonic One, it is inexpressible (incapable of being described in words, or captured in concepts), it is beyond Being (what
is
and
is not
). The Self can never be known completely, as a totality, because a totality is necessarily contradictory. Therefore we can only know it from one aspect at a time, that is, from the perspective of one archetype or another. In this and many other respects the Jungian Self is like the Neoplatonic One. In the following chapters you will learn the spiritual practices that will bring you into contact with the divine archetypes and lead to direct understanding of The One in the only way possible: divine union.

200 the microcosm and the archetypes

Individuation

The Jungian understanding of the psyche, and the correlative Neoplatonic philosophy, has important implications for how we live our lives. Our instincts are part of our human nature, and (short of germ-line genetic engineering) can be changed only over many generations. Therefore the archetypes are also effectively invariable, which means that, in their essence (though not their cultural trappings) the ancient gods are still with us. These archetype-gods, which served us well through two hundred thousand years or so of
Homo
sapiens
’ hunter-gatherer past, before we discovered agriculture ten thousand years ago, are still active forces in our lives, although they are sometimes at odds with contemporary civilization and social conditions (such as population density). Further, they are
good
only in a biological sense: they have promoted the survival of our species up to the present day.