A Language of Symbols
“It baffles many people at first to hear that the imagination is an organ of coherent communication, that it employs a highly refined, complex language of symbols to express the contents of the unconscious.” "Inner Work" --R.A. Johnson
"The unconscious manifests itself through a language of symbols."
R. A. Johnson, Inner Work
About Archetypes
"We are aided on our journey by inner guides, or archetypes, each of which exemplifies a way of bing on the journey."
"The archetypes help us connect with the eternal; they make the great mysteries more accessible by providing multiple images for our minds to ponder."
Carol S. Pearson, Awakening the Heroes Within
Archetypes are everywhere energies existing as part of our collective intuitive abilities. Everyone is able to access the "mythopoetic language" of archetypes; everyone does experience archetypal images and energies. When we are able to recognize the symbols and metaphors that repeatedly appear throughout our collective and personal life stories, we can begin to identify archetypes.
Archetypes can be great teachers and healers. We study archetypes because they wield a lot of unconscious energy. Archetypes are generally unperceived, yet, they are active energies within us. We commonly find direction through our stories, our parables, and symbols. We discover the personifications and scripts that repeat throughout the collective and personal psyche, largely unconsciously. Archetypes, having a most assured nature, can be identified and recognized for their content, while they are wrapped in mystery and clothed in symbolism.
Archetypes are personified and projected, and/or seen through patterned life and social scenarios. We might often think of gods and goddesses, kings and queens as archetypes. Such symbols as ballerinas and mermaids are archetypes too. They are archetypal in the way we "collectively" intuit and imagine them, draw them, write about them, and tell their stories. In archetypal, unconscious fashion, we live their stories and not always to our benefit.
We find archetypes appearing as symbols in our dreams, such as bad guys, ghosts, heroes and lovers. Importantly, archetypes become apparent in the roles we assume, and the scripts we follow. We find that life scenarios expose what is archetypal in our experience.
Uniquely individual, each journey offers sets of collective energies that are individually experienced.
Mythopoetic Language
"Consciousness is mythopoetic and is best described in those terms."
Eugene Pascal, Ph.L.
Carl Jung & Archetypes
INTEGRATION OF THE PARTS, the Jungian Healing Modality.
It is a legitimized belief that archetypes are a well-entrenched, organic and natural part of the human psyche.
Carl Jung identified archetypes as pre-existing energies within the collective and personal unconscious. He imagined the brain to have pre-scripted patterns appearing as images within the collective human psyche. These patterns become our energy for life; we live within the boundaries and adopt the memes of our cookie-cutter scripts, repeating and re-repeating the same dramas, comedies, tragedies, like unaware actors in Shakespearean plays.
Archetypes appear as vehicles for awareness, while often remaining unconscious, yet energetically affecting behaviors and beliefs. Archetypes manifest through dreams and fantasy, people or places, experienced first, and if identified, teach something about ourselves that could not be experienced or assimilated any other way.
For Jung, the way archetypes manifest was paramount; they emerge into consciousness by making what is unconscious "visible" and known to us, relevant to us, and valuable. It is in this way that archetypes can be understood as a metaphorical and parabolic language, speaking unconscious content into consciousness. Archetypes were, to Jung, emissaries, guides, and awakeners by their nature. Archetypes exist to make what is unknown, conscious.
Archetypes are messengers from the unconscious, from where they originate.
Freud and Jung had major differences when coming to terms with the practice of psychology, a study of human behaviors. Carl Jung would keep God, Spirit, Intuition, and Divine Guidance "alive" as part of healthy psychology.