Full Circle
Symbols
We’re all many people, spun together in a bundle of threads we call the self, a constantly changing manifold that gains and loses components like a branching river with tributaries and deltas.
We don’t think about how much we change throughout our life as these pieces of ourselves get swapped and replaced. We never analyze their mix, which we unconsciously accept as our self.
Every morning we wake up different people
We’re not the people we were the day before and we don’t even realize it, because the instinct to accept change at soul level is deeply embedded within our survival mechanism.
We can feel those changes, though, which are too subtle for our reason, and turn to our emotions to transcribe them into the myths, metaphors, patterns and models, the denizens of the realm of archetypes.
Those are the threads we weave into the ever changing fabric of our lives: the age of innocence, the stages of womanhood, the golden years, the prime of life.
We exist as shifting clusters of archetypes, and we can’t even see it, for the same reason we can’t see our own eyes: they are the windows we look through in order to see the world.
Where do they come from? I don’t know.
Psychology says archetypes are common patterns of behavior, so old we feel like they’ve always been there, in the collective unconscious, fashioned from our basic drives and ideals; in real life they’re highly interconnected structures, which, like complex organic compounds, are often too intricate to sort out.
A small but steady stream of these personality components carries us through our life changes; we call those our core personality.
They are the reason we remain recognizable to our friends and loved ones as we churn through being different people, like mail sorters dispatch envelopes to destinations.
Archetypal complexes are living evolving things.
Just like biological entities, their thriving depends on a world of unconscious, simultaneous processes too fast and convoluted for our rational control.
They are not abstract, inanimate objects by any stretch of the imagination, their number and structure changes all the time and, like all living things, they naturally mutate and crossbreed. The sum of their individual instances makes up its own species: the species of non-embodied drives.
New members of this species are born all the time, and they get more sophisticated as time goes by, progressively harder to understand and virtually impossible to control.
They visit your mind, they stay, they leave, they inspire, they destroy. They are loud, quiet, high-minded, and dumb.
They cover the gamut of human experience.
Their many threads shift like the weft of a loom, through the warp of your core personality, and weave the fabric of self, a beautiful tapestry of experiences and emotions you can only see looking back.
They are your best friends and your worst enemies, your trusted allies, your muses, your teachers and your tormentors, and you can’t live without them anymore than you can live without breathing.
You can’t chase them away, they are you, they are as much you as you’re ever going to experience as your self, that great mystery of life.
We rely on this society of archetypal complexes to develop our thought processes, and pick up on subtle, silent cues, like body language, or facial expressions.
They drive our affinities and dislikes and they are more powerful than we think because we have so little control over them.
Your knotted and incomprehensible bundle of archetypes decides which you shows up for social functions and intimate experiences, which movie makes you cry and which words wound you, and the more you try to turn them away the more insistent they get, because they feel perfectly entitled to live inside your head, and they’ll leave when they feel like it, and not a moment sooner.
It is an enchanting experience, watching the many sources of your self come together into a more or less harmonious and hopefully integrated whole, although you have to appreciate the irony your detached observer self can’t be as objective as you think, given it too is part of the set of archetypes and, as such, biased towards its kin.
What is a self to do, lost in this imaginary meta-society that runs circles around the rational mind?
Don’t worry about it.
It will silently run your mind for you and make you who you are, and if you’re really good, it will let you watch.
In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?
- We are complex bundles of selves which constantly join and leave our consciousness in a continuous smooth flow.
- These bundles are living entities, developing so many individual instances inside a set of common characteristics we can think of them as a species.
- Their complex patterns of thought and emotion run the same on all human brains and that allows them to bind to people and to each other and facilitate deeper levels of understanding.
- We become different people with each passing day, based on what components are currently in the bundle.
- Who we are depends more on our affinity for specific threads than on our circumstances. It’s all in the chemistry.
- Stable and long-lasting components make up our core, that which keeps us unique and recognizable through all the changes.
- Just as there is no such thing as music, only a collection of harmonic frequencies assembled in a specific configuration, there is no you, only a uniquely assembled and wonderfully complex bundle of personality threads.
- You can’t grow beyond their reach because there is no you outside of it. All the components of the set are inside the set.
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