Archetypes are older than any human. In human terms, the archetypes are universal symbols such as the Great Mother, the Wise Old Man, the Shadow, the Tower, Water, the Tree of Life, the Anima or Animus, and so on. These directly structure our lives and give us default ways of acting in every situation we find ourselves in. We don’t get stuck in loops like machines. Jung wrote, “[The animus and anima, the male principle within the woman and the female principle within the man] evidently live and function in the deeper layers of the unconscious, especially in that phylogenetic [racial;
Archetypes are older than any human. In human terms, the archetypes are universal symbols such as the Great Mother, the Wise Old Man, the Shadow, the Tower, Water, the Tree of Life, the Anima or Animus, and so on. These directly structure our lives and give us default ways of acting in every situation we find ourselves in. We don’t get stuck in loops like machines. Jung wrote, “[The animus and anima, the male principle within the woman and the female principle within the man] evidently live and function in the deeper layers of the unconscious, especially in that phylogenetic [racial; ancestral] substratum which I have called the collective unconscious. This localization explains a good deal of their strangeness: they bring into our ephemeral consciousness an unknown psychic life belonging to a remote past. It is the mind of our unknown ancestors, their way of thinking and feeling, their way of experiencing life and the world, gods and men. The existence of these archaic strata is presumably the source of man’s belief in reincarnations and in memories of ‘previous experiences’. Just as the human body is a museum, so to speak, of its phylogenetic history, so too is the psyche.” Via our instincts and their corresponding archetypes, we all live, in a sense, with our ancestors, and with even the most primitive humans from the dawn of our species. They are in our DNA. They are in our psyche. They are in our subconscious, supplying us with primordial thoughts and attitudes. Jung ...
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