Noticing archetypal patterns
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
I noticed just yesterday that I for a long time have had a knightly archetype stuck in my brain, in that I wanted to slay dragons and monsters, rescue damsels in distress, conquer castles and win jousting tournaments. It’s a holdover from medieval stories that I read in my childhood, things like Mary Stewart’s series on Arthur and Merlin, the movie version of Ivanhoe, etc. In a way it is very primitive, about battle and prestige and status and marriage, and part of the dreams of my youth that I spent in libraries.
I noticed it especially because there was a conflict with another more significant archetype of my childhood, that of the sadhu or holy man, which I have been examining of late. This came to me with many stories, of Buddha under the bodhi tree, of Poonjaji meeting disciples by the side of the Ganges, of Marpa and Milarepa… in my later years I have found the Eastern spiritual path to be closer to the meaning of human life than the medieval European ways of thinking. I have been finding more inner peace, and as my mind has quieted I have found these key archetypes.
The knight I have found is associated with battle and romance and romantic love, also the thinking of the romantics. The holy man is associated with the quest for the divine, for sat-chit-anand or truth-consciousness-bliss. In a way the knight represents conflict and the culture of dominance, while the holy man typifies letting go of the worldly life on the way to the divine.
It’s good to recognise these patterns in yourself because as you realise they dominated your thinking, you also let them go, in a way you realise you are finished with the old patterns, actually were finished with them a long time ago but that they hung around.
Comments
I've found its kind of like you start to let go of a pattern, then you really see it, then you're able to really let it go (or maybe you fight with it some more) and move on as you start to bring more conscious attention to it.
I’ve only been able to see it once I started tracing its influence through my life, and found its roots. In a way these patterns originate from ideals, from dream-images associated with a certain desire. For me, when I read those early books about knighthood there was this “I want that too” kind of desire occurring, and that ended up being the root of this pattern, shaping me into the knight-adventurer in subtle ways.
Later on that would be a major motivating force that attracted me to gaming, I now realise. The knight trying to slay a dragon becomes a D&D Paladin leading a party into a monsters lair.
Are there things in your life now that you're trying to defeat in order to be the "hero"?
I’m in a few chat groups with the women who were abused as children in the Osho communes, so that is one area where the knightly impulse comes into play, trying to rescue the damsels. But this is just another case where the old, childish way of thinking no longer suits the situation.
I think in my experience there are sort of two ways that I'll see patterns, one is more logical and one more intuitive. For example I'll notice patterns of behavior, compare it to certain models, put two and two together and see how I replicate them. The other is more like looking at those seemingly chaotic pictures where if you look at it right an image will appear, you kind of see the whole thing all at once.
I’m terrible at seeing those image-within-a-pattern things, I always just see the noise… I’ve kind of built up this model of the mind as operating in layers, on top there is the consciousness, then successive layers down goes into the subconscious where these independent agents operate which are representative of some archetypal pattern.